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The Irish-born philosopher Philip Pettit (*1945) is L. S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University and Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Canberra. He has published multiple books, chapters and articles on the topic of republican political theory. Today, he is considered the most influential republican political theorist. This interview was recorded during the Republicanism in the History of Political Philosophy and Today conference, where Phillip Pettit delivered the keynote address entitled “Neo-liberalism and Neo-republicanism”.2 The conference was organised in November 2017 by the Institute of Political Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in cooperation with the School of International Relations and Diplomacy, Anglo-American University in Prague and the Centre for Political Philosophy, Ethics and Religion at Charles University.
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Rousseau has been criticized by modern republicanism proponents for failing to live up to the standard of republicanism that involves criticizing unjust laws. Rousseau’s version of republicanism regards a different issue as more urgent. Rousseau regards abusive administration of laws, or usurpation of sovereignty by the government, as a more urgent problem. As a result, he addresses issues of dissent, activism and resistance to government rather than protest about laws.
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Benjamin Constant is considered as a classical liberal thinker due to his conviction that men establish political authority in order to protect their pre-existing rights, his theory of limited sovereignty and the modern concept of liberty described as a possibility to enjoy our private pleasures. Throughout his life Constant defended his liberal views; at the same time, while persuaded of the progress of mankind and therefore of the impossibility to revive the ancient conception of liberty, he was clearly aware of the dangers of modern society made up of solitary individuals and of the need of a social bond so that the liberal constitution could be maintained. The aim of this paper is to show that through his effort to overcome the atomisation of modern society, Constant comes in some respects close to the ideas of civic republicanism as developed for example by Pettit or Spitz; in the republican tradition, he stresses the need to overcome our selfish passions and to create a legal framework so that we may enjoy our freedom. In his famous speech distinguishing two forms of liberty, Constant emphasizes the importance of combining both kinds of liberty as well as the necessity of political participation. Nonetheless, the preservation of liberty may require more than that. Constant refuses modern moral theories based on the notion of self-interest and utility and demonstrates that the selfishness and passivity they promote may lead to despotism. Liberty is so precious because it enables the full development of human dignity of individual human beings as well as mankind as a whole. Morality that buttresses liberty, according to Constant, must be individual and based on our passions. The virtuous and disinterested deeds that make human greatness possible are based on “religious sentiment”—a moral sentiment that can be expressed in the public sphere as “patriotism”. Thanks to this sentiment, we are capable of overcoming the selfishness of modern sensibility dominated by calculation as well as of offering sacrifices that liberty sometimes demands. Moreover, thanks to this sentiment, we can accomplish our destiny as moral beings.
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Margaret Fuller is chiefly known as the author of the first American feminist manifesto, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1845. This article undertakes to read Fuller’s work through a republican lens by viewing her discussion on women’s rights as a part of the antebellum debate on American democracy. It also aims to put together two approaches, republicanism and feminism, whose relationship some scholars consider to be antithetical, i.e. Phillips (2000), Friedman (2008) and Hirschmann (2003) but which, in general, has been scarcely analysed. Although republicanism called for freedom and equality among men, it never seriously considered, especially in ancient and early-modern times, the status of women and the recognition of their civil and political rights. However, recent studies, such as Vega (2002), Coffee (2012), Costa (2013) and Halldenius (2015), have tried to reinterpret the possible dialectical connections between women and republicanism, opening up new lines of research on this topic. The purpose of this paper is therefore to provide new food for thought to this contemporary academic debate by adopting a historical approach. This paper argues that Fuller’s use of the concept of ‘liberty’ in her defence of women’s civil and political rights corresponds to Philip Pettit’s (1997) definition of liberty as ‘nondomination’. Taking freedom to mean independence from arbitrary power, Fuller demonstrated that due to their submission to the arbitrary power of men, women totally lacked any measure of independence, and could thus be defined as ‘slaves’. In addition, Fuller bolstered these affirmations by considering a further form of interference resulting from what Alan Coffee (2012) has called ‘social domination’, which was based on cultural values and traditions that condoned women’s exclusion from social, political and working life on the basis of their supposed physical and intellectual inferiority. This did not allow them to exercise their right to freedom as independent agents. The paper demonstrates that thanks to the use of republican paradigms to develop her feminist critique, Margaret Fuller took republicanism a step further and developed a more inclusive and egalitarian model of republican liberty that embraced women. Indeed, her feminist internal critique of republicanism can offer new food for thought to the contemporary academic debate on the compatibility between republicanism and feminism. The research brings to light how Fuller criticized women’s legal status and the institution of marriage, how she compared the condition of women to that of slaves, and how she supported higher levels of education for women as a right and an emancipatory instrument in a free republic.
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In the present article, we argue that there can indeed be a dialogue between the political and philosophical theory of republicanism and between the philosophy of science. We argue that although there exists an apparent conceptual and historical gap between the philosophy of science and theories of republicanism, that gap can be breached, we argue through an attention to conceptions of elitism in republicanism, focusing on the work of Madison and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We also contend, though in a preliminary, often provocative way, that the issue of elitism in republican theory can benefit from a dialogue with the philosophy of science—especially the “negative epistemology” of Karl Popper and his students, Ian Jarvie and Joseph Agassi. Such a dialogue is possible because Popper’s philosophy proposes a solution to the problem of elitism in epistemology and in politics.
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In the article the author analyses Dostoyevsky´s story “Bobok”, which concerns the idea of relationship between life and death. The text describes living of people who don´t die, or rather who are already dead in their lifetime. The story follows up the topic used in the prior prose “Notes from the Dead House”. Particularity of the story “Bobok” is based on the impossibility of a dialogue between “a body and a soul” in a sense of the medieval tradition – here souls are rotting together with bodies, their corporeal life continues after the death. It is a specific image of immortality (life after life) and one of the most dreadfull metaphor of the life in Russia. The author percieves his work also as a dialogue between Dostoyevsky and Plato.
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„The novel-gnostic myth“, M. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1928-1940), a sequel to the novel Petersburg (1912-16, 1922) by A. Bely was the expression of the ethical- -aesthetic anagenesis of Russian literature of the first half of the 20th century. It was born in the riverbed of ‘romantic gnosticism’, synthesizing symbolism, the magic of ‘onirism’, Hoffmannesque ‘capriccio’, the phenomenon of ‘initiation’ and ‘fantastic realism’ of F. M. Dostoevsky with his search for the ‘truth of ages’ and the meaning of human existence. By reflecting the terminal events in human life Bulgakov’s ‘book of life’ turns into a ‘myth of life after death’ (a myth of spiritual ‘rebirth’); its prophetic imagery originates in the sphere of ‘theologia mythica’, a mythical-mystical vision of the world permeated by the sophianity of Christian spirituality. It is a novel with a ‘secret’; its cathartic, respectively, autocathartic substance is ‘metanoia’ (repentance), a mythical-poetic metaphor for the concealed, guilty being of the author himself, which becomes a ‘confession’ of a painful, almost astral desire for salvation, ‘otherness’, and spiritual resurrection in ‘eternity’. The narrative, open to ‘infinity’, is permeated by ‘nostalgia’ for the transcendent. Flowing through it is a ‘dreaming’ of the ‘divine imagination’ and a revolt of the awakened mind against the weight of the moral failings of the time, which negated the soul.
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This special issue on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s aesthetics marks the beginning of a new era for Estetika. Starting with this issue, Estetika will be published by Helsinki University Press in collaboration with the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague. Also the name of the journal has been slightly modified and from now on it will be Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics. We are pleased to continue to develop Estetika as an open access journal of the highest academic standard in collaboration with Helsinki University Press, a university press that is committed to the ideals of open science and making publically funded research available to all. The journal will continue to use triple blind peer review, which Estetika adopted already in 2012.
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A book review of Beth Savickey. Wittgenstein’s Investigations: Awakening the Imagination. Cham: Springer, 2017, 137 pp. ISBN 978-3-319-45308-8
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The study analyzes the philosophical and religious dimensions of the novel Život bez konca (A Life without End, 1956) by the Slovak writer František Švantner (1912–1950). It argues that they are derived from Taoism (as an original source also of its later European adaptations). The study compares Švantner’s imagination with Taoism and further analyzes its intertextuality with A. Schopenhauer, H. Bergson and F. Nietzsche. These philosophical projections are recognized in philosophical metaphors that are the key supporting elements of the cognitive architecture of the novel and support the Taoist perspective. One of the novel’s Taoist principles are invocations of examples of earthly life, which Švantner executes by realistically representing life on the river Hron in early 20th century. In this way his writing paradoxically conforms with the ideological prescriptions of (socialist) realism, even though his inspiration was not marxism, but irrationalist philosophy. This philosophical conflict complicated aesthetic and stylistic assessments of the novel. Their contradictions can be explained by a philosophical (especially the novel’s Taoist dimension) rather than a literary interpretation.
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In times of social upheaval, both social structures and behaviour strategies of individuals change. After the Russian Revolution, Russian intellectuals in exile had to find an individual tactic and strategy of social behaviour to survive professionally and financially. Fedor Stepun’s life shows the successful behavioural strategy of a Russian intellectual during the Russian Revolution and in German exile. Stepun made the theatrical self-staging and self-portrayal part of his cultural identity to establish himself successfully and to reach a broad audience as an artist and scientist. His theoretical anthropology of the actor and practical theatrical self-staging in professional life and in autobiographical works form the approaches for the analysis of his survival strategy in social crises and exile. The article presents all these components as a concept of his philosophy of life.
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The question ‘What is a novel?’ has received scant attention in the philosophical literature. Meanwhile, this question is important. In the light of this, in this paper, I would like to address it, suggesting a potential answer. I begin by defining what I call ‘novel in the restricted sense’ – the concept that covers all novels except the so-called nonfiction novels, graphic novels, and novels in verse. Then, drawing upon Jerrold Levinson’s approach to defining ‘art’, I provide a definition of the concept that covers nonfiction novels, graphic novels, and novels in verse. Finally, with the help of this definition and the definition of ‘novel in the restricted sense’, I formulate a definition of ‘novel’ simpliciter and defend it against potential objections.
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This paper is devoted to the brilliant Czech logician and philosopher of language Pavel Tichý (1936–1994) who, after emigrating to New Zealand in 1970 and spending half his life there as a political refugee, committed suicide shortly before returning to his alma mater, Charles University in Prague, as Chair of the Department of Logic in the Faculty of Arts. After tracing a biographical profile of the Czech logician, the paper explains some of the central ideas of Tichý’s highly original theory, called Transparent Intensional Logic, while locating it in the wider context of the analytic philosophy of language. The paper concludes by highlighting the role played by Tichý’s intensional theory in advancing various disciplines, including artificial intelligence, with the aim of shedding light on the significant contributions of the Czech logician, who has yet to gain due recognition.
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