Sophie de Grouchy in her Letters on sympathy analyses the notion of sympathy, as a starting point using a critique of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. She also points out that sympathising with other people’s joys brings us pleasure, other people’s good experiences make us happy (especially if we are the ones who contribute to their well-being) and we want to see other people happy and not suffering. As she assumes, we naturally seek other people’s well-being and not their harm. De Grouchy underlines the role of imagination and reason, discerning coincidental good deeds and those that are an effect of intended actions. The paper aims to reconstruct a way in which de Grouchy seeks the grounds for morality in sympathy that is based on feeling and observation of physical pain and pleasure. This presentation of her theory that Polish readers are not closely accustomed with is a good starting point to inquire whether the argumentation presented by the author of the Letters on sympathy is coherent within her theory and whether it has proper justification.

The author argues that the philosophical position of Karl Marx was primarily shaped by three determinants. The first was the traditional Jewish culture, with its high esteem for intellectual effort, for the genius reflected in intellectual discoveries, and for the ambition that influenced interesting life plans and culminated in some visions of an ultimate end in life. The second was neo- -Hegelianism, which Marx himself recognized as a dominant factor in his thought. Thirdly, Marx was affected by Martin Luther, and this influence is in the focus of this paper. The author clams that both Luther and Marx believed that the essential trait of specifically human existence arises from hard work of any kind except the dullest. Both were bewildered by ideological gullibility and blindness of the masses. Both were convinced that this boundless credulity was sustained by fear of eternal damnation spread by the official church and by slave mentality. Finally both claimed that this noxious influence could only be overcome by a revolution in life conditions and by new social ideas. Each, however, entertained a different conception of that desirable revolution.

In the paper the parallel compensator considered in [1] is applied to control of the plants with delay and compared with Smith predictor. It is noted that Smith predictor removes only the delay, while the parallel compensator also changes the dynamics of the replacement plant; the latter may be in some degree of freedom shaped by the designer. Owing to this the transients of the system with parallel compensator are significantly faster. Accounting implementability, the control saturations are introduced in control algorithms. Additionally it is shown that using parallel compensator we may apply a relay control to the plants with delay and nonminimum phase zeros, which is impossible by using Smith predictor. Several results of simulations are described which confirm these observations.

This paper proposes a generalized fractional controller for integer order systems with time delay. The fractional controller structure is so adopted to have a combined effect of fractional filter and Smith predictor. Interestingly, the resulting novel controller can be decomposed into fractional filter cascaded with an integer order PID controller. The method is applied to two practical examples i.e. liquid level system and Shell control fractionator system. The closed- loop responses resulting from the proposed method are compared with that of the available methods in the literature. For quantitative evaluations of the proposed method, Integral Absolute Error (IAE) and Integral Square Control Input (ISCI) performance criteria are employed. The proposed method effectively enhances the closed-loop response by improving the IAE values, reducing the control effort inputs to achieve the desired output. The disturbance rejection and robustness tests are also carried out. The robustness test reveals a significant improvement in the maximum absolute sensitivity measure. That is displayed in numerical simulations of the paper.