The Hellenic medical ideas have found appreciation among people over centuries. Though the initial concept remained the same, methods or ways to achievedesired aims have changed. Since Hippocrates, new generations of physicians have worked hard to find more powerful types of therapies to relieve their patients and make treatment less burdensome. The struggle of medicine is very specific and requires, apart from practical skills, a clear personal commitment to help people wisely. From the Early Antiquity, both medicine and medical ethics go together. Wherever Hippocratic medicine is practiced, an appropriate moral pattern accompanies it because the Hellenic doctor offered purely clinical data and his art should not be separated from anthropology, ethics and religion.

In this paper, I take three snapshots of Wittgenstein's philosophical work in order to jot a few notes on the issue of the continuity in his philosophy. I useWittgenstein's distinction between what can be 'said' and what can only be 'shown' in order to highlight Wittgenstein's continual insistence that our basic relation with reality is seamless. I propose that Wittgenstein holds, throughout his philosophical career, that our thinking does not stop short of the world. In brief, I suggest that Wittgenstein would note that our natural history is largely what the mediaevals would call second nature.

Theologians of the 14th C. agreed that theology is scientific knowledge based upon the truths of revelation. But the very introduction of Aristotle's and aristotelian philosophy into theology turned out to be problematic. Above all, it was questionable to integrate theology - as a science based on revelation - within the aristotelian framework of sciences. This problem is difficult for Scotus in two ways. On the one hand, he uses the concepts elaborated in greek philosophy, but, onthe other hand, his franciscan spirituality compels him towards the opposite solution. Scotus only has the Aristotle's division of theoretical and practical sciences at his disposal to determine the character of theology, and he chooses to classify theology as practical science. Scotus is pouring „new wine" of Christian revelation into „old wineskins" of greek philosophy, the fact causing noticeable problems when interpreting many Scotus' ideas and views.

The problem of evil is a metaphysical problem bound up with the conditions of human existence. The radical evil of fascism and communism, according to Jozef Tischner, opens up the possibility that we live in the time of a modem Manicliaeism, understood as having two faces: nihilism and pessimism. The possibility of thinking of such a modem form of Manichaeism necessarily calls for a new inquiry into the question of evil. For Tischner, evil, like good, is not anobject, but something in which man participates, and for this reason it cannot be objectified and defined. One can only ask how it appears.

Proponents of the argument from regress maintain that the existence of Instrumental Value is sufficient to establish the existence of Intrinsic Value. It isargued that the chain of instrumentally valuable things has to end somewhere. Namely with intrinsic value. In this paper, I shall argue something a little more modest than this. I do not want to argue that the regress argument proves that there is intrinsic value but rather that it proves that the idea of intrinsic value is a necessary part of our thinking about moral value.

I reconsider the monism/pluralism debate about natural kinds. Monism claims that there is a privileged division of reality into natural kinds, while pluralismstates that there are many ways of classifying objects according to different purposes. I compare three different monistic accounts of natural kinds with the pluralism advocated by promiscuous realism. The analysis of some examples of the classification of celestial objects suggest that there are indeed different legitimate ways of classifying things according to different purposes; contrary to monism, the boundaries between kinds are not fixed. These results show that promiscuous realism is a better account of natural kind.

In the philosophy of the Jesuits of this period one can distinguish philosophy connected with teaching, i.e. taught at schools led by the Jesuits, and Civicphilosophy, not connected directly with teaching. This was mainly social, economic, and political philosophy, especially philosophy of the state, law and the like.

Maximus the Confessor in his „Ambigua" opposes himself in a decisive way to the Origenist vision of man and of his relation to God, a vision extremelywide-spread in his time. He creates his own anthropology which in its turn serves as a foundation of his theology. Man becomes a complete and integrated being and obtains his full realisation only provided that he is united with God and is a corporeal being related to the world in which he lives. Man, World and God are the terms of a dynamic relation, in which each of the first terms finds its unity. Man's unity, as well as that of the world, is realised in God, towards Whom both tend and move. The article is an attempt to retrace this movement of man, together with the world, to God, the movement crowned in unity with Him, a kind of unity that does not take away man's identity.

There are many arguments that so-called pluralistic theologies of religions face difficulties in being sufficiently pluralistic. In order to meet such an objection, a pluralist offers different solutions. I argue that the range of plausible possibilities for a pluralist is strongly constrained by philosophical arguments which one can develop out of the philosophy of Hilary Putnam. In the first part of this paper, I sketch out three important strands of the Putnamian thought I consider worth defending. Given such presuppositions, I formulate two constraints on pluralistic theology of religions. In the last section of my paper, I briefly point out which ofthe particular standpoints, often labelled as „pluralistic theology of religions", have problems with meeting formulated constraints, and which of the „pluralists" seem to be in accordance with them.

The paper begins by asking, in the context of McDowell's Mind and World, what guides empirical judgement. It then critically examines David Bell's accountof the role of aesthetic judgement, or experience, in Kant and Wittgenstein, in shedding light on empirical judgement. Bell's suggestion that a Wittgensteinian account of aesthetic experience can guide the application of empirical concepts is criticised: neither the discussion of aesthetic judgement nor aesthetic experience helps underpin empirical judgement. But attention to the parallel between Wittgenstein's discussion of understanding rules and the question of how empirical concepts can be applied to particulars suggests how to dissolve the felt need for an answer. This in turn helps shed light on McDowell's conceptualist account of experience.

In this paper, a rights-based argument for the impermissibility of abortion, infanticide and neglect of some pre-natal organisms and infants/children is advanced. I argue, in opposition to most rights-ethicists, that the potentiality for autonomous agency gives individuals negative rights. I also examine the conjecture that potential autonomous agents have positive rights in virtue of their vulnerability. According to this suggestion, once an individual obtains actual autonomous agency, he or she has merely negative rights. Possible solutions to conflicts of rights between parents and their offspring are investigated. Finally, I discuss a lexical order between positive and negative rights, which may solve conflicts between the rights of potential autonomous agents and actual autonomous agents.

In the domain of astronomy the object oriented paradigm of informatics needs to constmct an ontology to be able to reason about concepts and to constructqueries in a computerized knowledge system. The article presents approaches to ontology in philosophy, the natural sciences and informatics and shows their limits and reciprocity.

I analyze the relations of constituency or „being in" that connect different ontological items in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. A state of affairs is constituted by atoms, atoms are in a state of affairs. Atoms are also in an atomic fact. Moreover, the world is the totality of facts, thus it is in some sense made of facts. Many other kinds of Tractarian notions - such as molecular facts, logical space, reality - seem to be involved in constituency relations. How should these relations be conceived? And how is it possible to formalize them in a convincing way? I draw a comparison between two ways of conceiving and formalizing these relations: through sets and through mereological sums. The comparison shows that the conceptual machinery of set theory is apter to conceive and formalize Tractarian constituency notions than the mereological one.

Thomas geht davon aus, dass die Weisheit, gemäß der aristotehschen Definition, in der Erkenntnis der ersten Ursachen besteht. Nach Thomas ist die Theologie diese Weisheit, weil sie die Erkenntnis (Wissenschaft) über Gott als erste Ursache des ganzen Universums ist und zugleich die Erkenntnis über allesin Bezug auf Gott als ihren Urspmng und Ziel. Angenommen, dass für Thomas die Theologie die Weisheit ist, kann die logische Struktur seines Hauptwerkes Summa theologica anders wie gewöhnlich interpretiert werden und zwar, nicht nach dem neoplatonischen Schema: exitus - reditus, sondern als Realisation des Programms der Theologie als Weisheit.

This paper asks whether Brandom has provided a sufficiently clear account of the basic normative concepts of commitment and entitlement, on whichhis normative inferentialism seems to rest, and of how they contribute to explain the inferential articulation of conceptual contents. I show that Brandom's claim that these concepts are analogous to the concepts of obligation and permission cannot be right, and argue that the normative character of the concept of commitment is dubious. This leads me to replace Brandom's conception of inferential relations as relations between deontic statuses with one according to which they are to be seen as relations between entitlements and acknowledgements of commitments.

In his Insight, Lonergan presents a general form of the argument for the existence of God: „reality is completely intelligible, therefore, God exists." Its framework may be characterized as a Leibnizian version of the cosmological argument from the contingency of empirical reality to the unrestricted act of understanding.The acceptance of Lonergan's argument presupposes familiarity with his theory of being and objectivity. In my analysis, since Lonergan uses heuristic(second order) definitions and dialectical method in his justification of the complete intelligibility of reality, the argument invites continuous examination of theproposed alternative metaphysical theories.

This short paper provides a tentative formalization of Czezowski's ideas about axiological concepts: Good and Evil are conceived of as modalities ratherthan as predicates. A natural account of the resulting „ethical logic" appears to be very close to standard deontic logic. If one does not resolve to become an anti-realist regarding moral values, a possible way out is to become a revisionist about deontology: convert to intuitionism or some other kind of revisionism in deontic logic, and remain classical in ethical logic.

The natural sciences reveal the existence of a constant process of cosmic evolution, in which new forms of matter emerge. The continuity of the non-Organic and biological evolutionary processes, their assignment to the laws of nature, as well as the fact that the appearance of a human being constitutes theirculmination, all this shows that a human being is an element of the material structure of the world. From the evolutionary point of view, it could be argued thatI human being is „the ultimate form of life," a very interesting but, in many respects, still very mysterious idea.