Jan Wolenski

Abstract.The authors concentrate on the analysis of the concept of permission. After a general account of differing concepts of permission both with regard to different legal theories and to different legal ideologies, they argue in favour of a “radical” imperativism which leaves no place for permissive norms. Thus, in contrast with the logic of normative language (LNL) purported by Alchourrón and Bulygin, the authors figure out a system of deontic logic ‐ supplemented by devices of the possible world semantics ‐ according to which a normative system (N) is conceived as a set of logical consequences of a certain finite set of basic obligations and no room is left either for the concept of weak permission or for the concept of strong permission. Finally the authors raise some criticisms concerning the view maintained by Alchourron and Bulygin on strong permission.*

This paper argues that science is not dependent on philosophical assumption and does not entail philosophical consequences. The concept of dependence and entailment is understood logically, that is, are defined via consequence operation. Speaking more colloquially, the derivation of scientific theorems does not use philosophical statements as premises and one cannot derive philosophical theses from scientific assertions. This does not mean that science and philosophy are completely separated. In particular, sciences leads to some philosophical insights, but it must be preceded by a hermeneutical interpretation

Władysław Witwicki was first of all a psychologist, but he graduated in philosophy from Lvov University, being one of the earliest pupils of Kazimierz Twardowski. He was a representative of the descriptivistic branch of the Lvov-Warsaw School. In the area of phsychology he put into practice the important postulate of his teacher, who persuaded his students to write original handbooks, giving Polish scholar contributions their due: it is how the work on Witwicki's Psychology began. In the area of philosophy he was particularly interested in the foundations of (descriptive) psychology. Witwicki's ontological and epistemological views are close to realism. In ethics he defended the absolute character of moral norms against scepticism and relativism. In general, Witwicki subscribed to anti-irrationalism, the common standpoint in his School

Non-existence provides big problems for ontology and modest for logic. Logical problems of non-existence consist in licensing inferences in which sentences with empty terms are involved. The standard predicate logic solves this question by presupposing that every individual constant has an object to which it refers. This means that empty domains are excluded from semantics for the first-order logic. However, there is a temptation to consider logic without existential presuppositions.The ontological problem of non-existence leads to the question of the meaning of 'nothing'. We encounter "various conceptions of nothing" in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to our times. However, nothing (or nothingness) is always a negation of being. Since we have distributive and collective (mereological) concepts of being, we also should distinguish nothing in the distributive and mereological meaning. This difference is important because only the former leads to the paradox of nothing of all nothings, analogical to the paradox of all sets. A closer analysis of the nothing in the distributive sense shows that any meaningful talk about non-existence requires a relativisation to a fixed domain of discourse. This seems; to entail that the empty set is the formal model of nothing what means that the concept of absolute nothing in the distributive sense is simply inconsistent. To some extent, being and nothing are mutually dual. This motivates that the concept of nothing is governed by so-called dual logic connected with processes of rejection. More specifically, statements on "nothing" are not asserted but rejected.

Globalization consists in the universality of the web of international economic and cultural interactions; this means that they comprise the entire world, not only its particular regions. Globalization processes are evaluated in various manners. Whereas some consider them to be an essential danger, others maintain that globalization is a device for solving many problems worrying humanity. This second perspective assumes that globalization will contribute to a relative equilibrium of the social structure of the world. The problem of the distribution of deficit goods, e.g. food or water, is a good example of questions related to globalization. The claim that distribution should be just seems natural. This paper introduces the category of participatory justice as a conceptual device which can help in considerations about the just distribution of goods.