In democratic countries, opposition is defined in various ways, depending on the binding party system, the legal status of parties in the Parliament and the practice developed. But undoubtedly, without opposition, control over the government would be usually only formal. The article presents a selection of the most important tools that the lower chamber of the Polish Parliament (Sejm) has at its disposal to control the Council of Ministers and the government administration, which are mainly used by opposing parliamentary groupings and circles. The author also attempts to assess how the opposition in the previous Parliament fulfilled this task.
The Latin treatise De amore (s. XII/XIII) by Andreas Capellanus has repeatedly presented a challenge to research because of the heterogeneity of its form and contents. The numerous interpretations of this elusive work base themselves on the single edition by Emil Trojel from 1892 which does not convey a representative account of the rich and complex transmission of the text. An important part of this contribution is, thus, to elucidate both the transmission history of De amore and relevant questions for research. The main focus will be an analysis of the textual version of De amore in the aforementioned Prague manuscript (1471-1481) and its formal-structural transformation, its codicological surroundings as well as its cultural context. This late-medieval textual witness suggests, on every level of the text, significant emendations to the textual form as presented by Trojel. By means of radical truncations and a prominent restructuring, new intratextual connections are created: a reinforced edifying function, an ambition for a general validity, and tendencies concerning structuring and systematizing clearly appear to be the new principles for the shaping of the text. In the Prague manuscript, De amore is copied between contemporary Humanist treatises whose contextualisation will be presented as the source of further thoughts on literary history. The contribution will be rounded off by means of an up-to-date comprehensive list of the manuscript transmission of De amore, a comparative table of the different structurings of the text, and a new description of the Prague manuscript.
Contemporary philosophers generally conceive of consequence as necessary truth-preservation. They generally construe this necessity as logical, and operationalize it in substitutional, formal or model-theoretic terms as the absence of a counter-example. A minority tradition allows for grounding truth-preservation also on non-logical necessities, especially on the semantics of extra-logical constants. The present article reviews and updates the author's previous proposals to modify the received conception of consequence so as to require truth-preservation to be non-trivial (i.e. not a mere consequence of a necessarily true implicatum or a necessarily untrue implicans) and to allow variants of the substitutional, formal and model-theoretic realizations of the received conception where the condition underwriting truth-preservation is not purely formal. Indeed, the condition may be contingent rather than necessary. Allowing contingent non-trivial truth-preservation as a consequence relation fits our inferential practices, but turns out to be subject to counter-examples. We are left with an unhappy choice between an overly strict requirement that non-trivial truth-preservation be underwritten by a necessary truth and an overly loose recognition of non-trivial truth-preservation wherever some truth underwrites it. We need to look for a principled intermediate position between these alternatives.
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