Originally published in 1966, this volume reappraises the educational philosophy of Comenius. Until recently the attention given to Comenius and his work concentrated on a narrow interpretation of his pedagogy which played down his pansophic theory. In the second half of the nineteenth century Germany led the way in pedagogical study and Comenius was widely accepted as having laid the foundations of a science of education. The emergence of education as an academic subject in England and the (...) USA led to a considerable interest in the history of educational ideas and Comenius’ work. (shrink)

Comenius’s vision of the universal emendation of human affairs attracts attention both of scholars and of the general public for long decades. It is no wonder that there have been plenty of papers or monographs pointing out to Comenius’s emendation endeavour and quite often appreciating its exceptionality and topicality for a man living in the present. We can encounter the interpretations of Comenius as an anticipator of the United Nations organization or of a seer of the European (...) integration project. According to other interpretations, Comenius has just in his time predicted possible negative consequences of Baconian and Cartesian understanding of nature, and therefore he can be seen as a predecessor of the ecological philosophy of the 20th century. However, if we accept such updating, we should on the other hand admit that Comenius’s project of emendation evinces a large amount of problematic aspects. In this light, Comenius could be compared to the authors of the most famous utopian works. Furthermore, there could be also arisen a Popperian question, whether Comenius was not one of the enemies of the open society. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to reflect on the method of the historical research, primarily on the difficulties emerging from the anachronous interpretation not only of the work of John Amos Comenius, but of the intellectual history of the 17th century at all. (shrink)

In this article, I first reconsider the personal links between Comenius and Leibniz, searching for how Comenian texts and ideas may have reached Leibniz. For that reason, I outline a constellation of thinkers within Central European Protestantism, since a vast majority of the important intellectuals with some noteworthy link both to Comenius and Leibniz were based there. Second, I investigate more closely one particular intellectual link between Comenius and Leibniz, namely their common combinatorial standpoint, because the striking (...) parallels, connections and similarities between Comenius’s and Leibniz’s ideas on combinatorics, universal language and relational metaphysics have been largely overlooked thus far. (shrink)

John Amos Comenius was a revolutionary leader in both the church and the academy in 17th century Europe. Born and raised in Moravia and firmly grounded in the doctrine of the United Church of the Brethren, Comenius rose from obscurity in what is now the Czech Republic to become recognized around Europe and beyond as an innovative and transformational leader. He contributed to efforts such as advocating for universal education, authoring classroom textbooks, shepherding local churches and his entire (...) denomination, and working for unity and peace among Christians across Europe. Though for many decades after his death he seemed to be lost to time, there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in the ideas and methods of Comenius. His life and work can serve as a source of encouragement and inspiration to church and educational leaders today. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present a systematic reconstruction of the development of the pansophic idea in the work of Jan Amos Comenius. The concept of pansophia, rooted already in the ancient philosophical thinking, became a very popular topic of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century discussions, and it is one of the central topics of Comenius’s philosophy. It is assumed that Comenius elaborated the formulation of the pansophic program—i.e., the program for creating a universal science incorporating the (...) findings of both the profane and the divine—at the end of 1630s. This study therefore aims to analyse all relevant Comenius’s treatises and attempts to identify the individual development phases of Comenius’s pansophic idea until its transformation into the idea of the universal reform, panorthosia. The analysis of Comenius’s treatises is complemented with a reflection on Comenius’s correspondence, which facilitates the understanding of the author’s more private motives. (shrink)

Our aim in this study is to examine the attitude to violence expressed in the works of two leading figures in the history of Czech philosophical thought. Several scholars in the field of Comeniology have expressed the belief that not only clear parallels but also direct continuity can be traced between the views of Petr Chelčický and those of Jan Amos Comenius. To make a proper judgement as to whether Comenius and Chelčický shared identical attitudes to the question (...) of the legitimacy of violence, we focus first on Comenius’s climactic work, in which his point of view is most fully expressed. Subsequently we analyse Chelčický’s views and compare them with Comenius’s attitude. A comparison of the works of the two thinkers leads to the conclusion that on the one hand Comenius’s key opinions are much more comprehensively founded; on the other, he does not restrict himself to a critique of physical violence but also deals with the spiritual struggle. Any analogy between Chelčický and Comenius’s attitude to violence can therefore be related only to the early works of Comenius in which his concept of universal tolerance was not yet thoroughly thought through. The study therefore focuses on the issue of the development of Comenius’s concept of tolerance as well. (shrink)

The study aims to analyze the importance of analogy in the writings of the Czech theologian, philosopher and educational reformer John Amos Comenius. Analogy is clearly invaluable for Comenius as it plays a key role in the introduction of a third, particularly reliable method – syncrisis that allows us to see an image of something invisible (uncreated) on visible (created) things. For Comenius, this method became an integral supplement to analysis and synthesis, with all three forming the (...) basis of all his studies. Syncrisis is principally applied to theological matters, for instance to the study of man, the living image of God that reflects the creator. The analogy of the micro- and macrocosm that Comenius uses is integral to both his epistemology and metaphysics. If a man (the microcosm) attains self-knowledge, he is able to know other humans, the entire material world (the macrocosm), and also his very archetype – God. For Comenius though, man is not only a microcosm but also a little God (mikrotheos), a faithful imprint of God's perfection. Man, created as the culmination of the material world, becomes God's partner in maintaining and completing the entire universe. Human creativity, analogous to God's creative power, plays a decisive role in the creation of other worlds – the World of Human Artifice, the Moral World and the Spiritual World. Ultimately, the collaboration of man and God is an inherent prerequisite to the culmination of creation – the last world, the Eternal World. (shrink)

Slovak Academic Philosophy: Its Origins, Development and Current State The paper introduces the foreign reader to the main factors associated with the emergence of Slovak academic philosophy as well as to the ways in which it has developed, and also to those factors that have complicated or delayed its progress since 1921 when the Faculty of Philosophy, along with its Philosophical Seminars, began functioning at the newly-founded University of Comenius (1919), up to the present day.

This paper gives two complete and elementary proofs that if the speed of light over closed paths has a universal value c, then it is possible to synchronize clocks in such a way that the one-way speed of light is c. The first proof is an elementary version of a recent proof. The second provides high precision experimental evidence that it is possible to synchronize clocks in such a way that the one-way speed of light has a universal value. We (...) also discuss an old incomplete proof by Weyl which is important from an historical perspective. (shrink)

Model of intelligence and new methods to assess IQ. MA thesis in 1998 (Comenius University). Art exhibitions "From Animation" London 2013, "Fading Memory" Weißenohe 2015, TAIF Tokyo 2017. Conferences in Santorini, Daejon 2016, Geneva 2017.