The paper unpacks the nuanced ethical potential in the metaphor of gardening that is depicted in Karel Čapek’s The Gardener’s Year, and the relevance of Čapek’s metaphor for understanding Voltaire’s famously ambiguous ending to Candide. Against more pessimistic or passive accounts of what Candide could have meant, the paper agrees with scholars who consider Candide’s maxim as meaning to engage in active, and communal practise of character development. By using Čapek’s much fuller account of the gardener in the practice (...) of cultivation to fill in the gaps in Voltaire’s account, the paper shows that gardening is a rich metaphor of the virtuous person engaged in lifelong character cultivation. (shrink)

This text presents an assessment of the literary work of Karel Čapek from a perspective that has not yet been discussed. It focuses on analysing Čapek’s works from the viewpoint of their possible inspiration by bioethical issues. Čapek’s philosophy and the powerful ethical charge of his texts tend to be associated with his interest in pragmatism, a subject to which he, however, took an individual and critical approach. One of the most important categories of his way of thinking is (...) life. In his prose works and plays we therefore see motifs that may be associated with the thematic definition of bioethics. These are questions concerning the value and quality of human life, issues concerning the dehumanizing impact of science and technology, as well as reflections upon the moral dimension of man’s relationship to nature and also to the relationship between people and animals. Čapek’s work may therefore provide inspiration from the perspective of the history of the gradual formation of the bioethical point of view. (shrink)

The technoscientific consequences of both the human drives for glory on the one hand and a comfortable life on the other potentially threaten human existence. R.U.R., a science fiction play by Karel Čapek, bridges ancient writers and contemporary technoscientific endeavors, encouraging us to consider these issues in light of persistent human nature.

One of the recurring themes in Čapek’s play is the existential question of whether the reductionist materialist worldview – the belief that we can fully explain the world, including ourselves, in terms of nothing but physical processes – can accommodate all that is essential to the human being. The materialist worldview triumphed with the scientific revolution, which in turn laid the foundations for the military-industrial complex. This historical shift is represented in the play by the business-minded young Rossum inheriting the (...) bio-engineering methodology from the mad scientist old Rossum. A key difference between the two is that old Rossum’s materialist stance is an ideological commitment, whereas for young Rossum working within a materialist framework is more a matter of convenience: for him it is sufficient for most practical purposes to replicate the machine-like aspects of a person. Where does this leave the soul, or what we today might prefer to call consciousness? The question of whether human nature goes beyond its physical aspects, and whether these subjective aspects can also be artificially replicated, is extremely challenging to address in scientific theory and practice –100 years ago as much as now. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the difficult task of balancing access to misinformation with respect for patient decision-making. Due to its innate antagonism, the paradigm of “physician paternalism” versus “patient autonomy” may not adequately capture the clinical relationship. The authors hypothesized that most patients would, in fact, prefer significant physician input as opposed to unopinionated information when making medical decisions. There is a lack of empirical data corroborating this in the United States. To that end, a survey was distributed to (...) 650 individuals through Amazon Mechanical Turk, of which 499 responses met pre-determined quality criteria. Most respondents believed their doctor's insight would be better than their own if injured or gravely ill. When asked to affirm preferences separately, a significantly higher proportion of respondents preferred guidance from their doctor when making medical decisions compared to being presented with unopinionated information ( p < 0.001). Encouragingly, 93.1% believed that the doctor's primary goal was their health. When asked directly to compare physician guidance to unopinionated information, 69.1% respondents stated they would prefer physician guidance. We found a consistent association between educational/economic background and affirmative responses ( p < 0.001), suggesting particular attention should be paid to patients that are disadvantaged with respect to these demographic factors. The belief in a shared goal, and a consistent preference for physician input, suggests that patients endorse a more collaborative view of the clinical dynamic than is suggested by the paternalism-autonomy paradigm. This pilot study suggests physicians should not be afraid to communicate conviction with regard to treatment decisions. (shrink)

Molecular Revolution in BrazilFélix Guattari and Suely Rolniktranslated by Karel Clapshow and Brian HolmesYes, I believe that there is a multiple people, a people of mutants, a people of potentialities that appears and disappears, that is embodied in social, literary, and musical events.... I think that we're in a period of productivity, proliferation, creation, utterly fabulous revolutions from the viewpoint of this emergence of a people. That's molecular revolution: it isn't a slogan or a program, it's something that I (...) feel, that I live....--from Molecular Revolution in BrazilFollowing Brazil's first democratic election after two decades of military dictatorship, French philosopher Félix Guattari traveled through Brazil in 1982 with Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik and discovered an exciting, new political vitality. In the infancy of its new republic, Brazil was moving against traditional hierarchies of control and totalitarian regimes and founding a revolution of ideas and politics. Molecular Revolution in Brazil documents the conversations, discussions, and debates that arose during the trip, including a dialogue between Guattari and Brazil's future President Luis Ignacia Lula da Silva, then a young gubernatorial candidate. Through these exchanges, Guattari cuts through to the shadowy practices of globalization gone awry and boldly charts a revolution in practice.Assembled and edited by Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil is organized thematically; aphoristic at times, it presents a lesser-known, more overtly political aspect of Guattari's work. Originally published in Brazil in 1986 as Micropolitica: Cartografias do desejo, the book became a crucial reference for political movements in Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s. It now provides English-speaking readers with an invaluable picture of the radical thought and optimism that lies at the root of Lula's Brazil. Félix Guattari, post-'68 French psychoanalyst and philosopher, is the author of Anti-Oedipus, The Anti-Oedipus Papers, 2006), and other books. Semiotext has published the first two volumes of his complete essays, Chaosophy and Soft Subversions, and will publish the final volume, Chaos and Complexity, in 2008. Suely Rolnik is a psychoanalyst, cultural critic, and curator who lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. She was a close collaborator of Guattari during her exile in Paris from the military dictatorship in Brazil. (shrink)

In Liberalism’s religion, Laborde defends a liberal egalitarian position and tackles, from a new perspective, some issues dealt with in his republican writings. This article examines some of these issues, paying attention to the place that the recognition of identities occupies both in her republican and in her liberal theories, as well as the type of justification advanced in both cases. The article shows that the recognition of identities has gone from having a peripheral and instrumental role in her republican (...) writings to having a central role in her liberal theory. (shrink)

This special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on selfhood. In the introduction, we first offer a brief survey of the various classic questions related to personal identity according to Locke’s initial proposal and sketch out key concepts and distinctions of the debate that came after Locke. We then characterize the types of approach represented by post-Hegelian, German and French philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that whereas the (...) Anglophone debates on personal identity were initially formed by the persistence question and the characterization question, the “Continental” tradition included remarkably intense debates on the individual or the self as being unique or “concrete,” deeply temporal and—as claimed by some philosophers, like Sartre and Foucault—unable to have any identity, if not one externally imposed. We describe the Continental line of thinking about the “self” as a reply and an adjustment to the post-Lockean “personal identity” question. These observations constitute the backdrop for our presentation of phenomenological approaches to personal identity. These approaches run along three lines: debates on the layers of the self, starting from embodiment and the minimal self and running all the way to the full-fledged concept of person; questions of temporal becoming, change and stability, as illustrated, for instance, by aging or transformative life-experiences; and the constitution of identity in the social, institutional, and normative space. The introduction thus establishes a structure for locating and connecting the different contributions in our special issue, which, as an ensemble, represent a strong and differentiated contribution to the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological perspective. (shrink)

Public debate on acceptable farm animal husbandry suffers from a confusion of tongues. To clarify positions of various stakeholder groups in their joint search for acceptable solutions, the concept of animal welfare was split up into three notions: no suffering, respect for intrinsic value, and non-appalling appearance of animals. This strategy was based on the hypothesis that multi-stakeholder solutions should be based on shared values rather than on compromises. The usefulness of such an artificial value distinction strategy was tested in (...) a small series of experiments. The results demonstrate that the chosen concept to distinguish between values is effective in a stakeholder context. Farmers’ views on doing good to animals appeared to be largely based on their value to prevent suffering and predominantly focused on the provision of regular care. Their priority for this value is clearly shared with other stakeholders, providing a basis for joint solutions. The concept of intrinsic value does not play a discernable role in farmers’ considerations. Based on the varying views on welfare, it can be inferred that there is a gradual rather than a principal difference between government legislation and farmers’ values, whereas public perception and acceptance of farm practices remains complicated. Distinction between value groups and focusing on a selected notion (such as no suffering) proved to be effective in bringing representatives of stakeholder groups together, but is unlikely to bridge the emotional gap between commercial farm practices and public ideals. (shrink)

En lisant la République et le Timée de Platon, ce livre propose une enquête sur les deux formes de temporalité irréductibles (celle de la cité armée, celle de l'âme immortelle) pour éclairer la question principale, celle de la nature et de la structure de l'âme, de la cité et du cosmos.

Dostoevsky wrote that love in action is a harsh and terrible thing compared to love in dreams. That reality is particularly evident in medicine, where there is an almost universal, involuntary participation of physicians and other healthcare workers in the suffering of their patients. This paper explores this phenomenon through the paradigm of ‘mystery’ as explained by the French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel. A mystery is different from a problem in the sense that the former requires the active immersion of (...) the person involved in order to be truly experienced. It is a ‘meta-problem’ that cannot be analyzed objectively and separately from the person that it affects, without changing the nature of the thing experienced. The authors contend that the human suffering encountered in medicine is one such phenomenon, and the paper draws on illustrations of this concept in art and literature. Awareness of the subtle but important difference between mystery and problem may help physicians better understand their personal entanglement with the suffering of patients. (shrink)

This paper provides a finer analysis of the well-known form of the Local Deduction Theorem in contraction-free logics . An infinite hierarchy of its natural strengthenings is introduced and studied. The main results are the separation of its initial four members and the subsequent collapse of the hierarchy.

The cyclical theory f time, which is better known under the name of the 'theory of eternal recurrence,' is usually associated with certain ancient thinkers--in particular, Pythagoreans and Stoics. The most famous among those who have tried to revive the theory in the modern era is unquestionably Friedrich Nietzsche. It is less well known that the theory was defended also by C.S. Peirce and, as late as 1927, by the French historian of science, Abel Rey. The contemporary discussion of the (...) problem of the direction of time has a direct bearing on the problem of eternal recurrence. The primary purpose of this paper is to evaluate critically the theory itself and then to show how this critical analysis can be applied to Peirce's own version of this theory. (shrink)

Narrative identity theory in some of its influential variants makes three fundamental assumptions. First, it focuses on personal identity primarily in terms of selfhood. Second, it argues that personal identity is to be understood as the unity of one’s life as it develops over time. And finally, it states that the unity of a life is articulated, by the very person itself, in the form of a story, be it explicit or implicit. The article focuses on different contemporary phenomenological appraisals (...) of the narrative account. The survey of this partly critical debate is followed by concluding observations concerning a possible phenomenological theory of personal identity. (shrink)

Intentionally or not, our clinical practice is informed by our philosophical premises. A subtle misunderstanding can have frequent, though insidious, implications in day-to-day clinical encounters....

Locke claims that a person’s identity over time consists in the unity of consciousness, not in the sameness of the body. Similarly, the phenomenological approach refuses to see the criteria of identity as residing in some externally observable bodily features. Nevertheless, it does not accept the idea that personal identity has to consist either in consciousness or in the body. We are self-aware as bodily beings. After providing a brief reassessment of Locke and the post-Lockean discussion, the article draws on (...) phenomenological arguments that show the body as lived, that is, lived as one’s own body, but also possibly as “other” or “strange.” Against what has been claimed in recent writing, especially in literature on Merleau-Ponty, the author argues that the “mineness” of the body and its “alterity” are not two mutually exclusive features. In the final part of the article, the author suggests that the becoming strange of one’s own body may legitimately be considered as a prominent experience of what it means to be a person. (shrink)

Hardly any other problem has been discussed more than that of the status of time in modem physics. This is only natural since there are not many other more important problems in philosophy of science and in philosophy in general. There are also few other areas where controversies as well as confusion were more frequent. This is true not only of popular and semi-popular expositions of the Minkowski concept of space-time but also of a number of its philosophical interpretations. Generally (...) we do not find anything of this kind in the writings of physicists, at least as long as they confine themselves to strictly mathematical and physical expositions; but when they sometimes venture beyond a strictly mathematical approach, they often do not escape certain unconscious or semi-conscious prejudices which are contrary not only to the spirit but sometimes even to the letter of relativity. The true significance of the relativistic fusion of space and time can be understood only when we contrast it with its classical counterpart, i.e., with what may be called the Newtonian space-time. Only on such a contrasting background will the revolutionary meaning of the new concept clearly stand out. (shrink)

Cultuurkritisch essay vanuit de optiek van de anti-psychiatrie.

Philosophical views of habit were deeply influenced by Aristotle. If we understand habit in relation to hexis, to the acquired disposition to act in a certain way, then habit becomes a key phenomenon of ethics. According to the famous quotation, "It makes no small difference, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference."1 And yet we can understand habit also as a dull and (...) rigid mechanism, as something that moves us away from humanity, as we read in Immanuel Kant: "The reason for being disgusted with someone's acquired habits lies in the fact that the animal here predominates over the man."2 Is habit more an expression of our... (shrink)

Openness of knowledge was in the Dutch Republic no more a natural state of affairs than in other parts of Europe at the time, but it became dominant there at an earlier date than elsewhere. This puzzling phenomenon is the subject of this essay. The article shows that tendencies to secrecy in crafts and trades in the Netherlands were by no means absent and that public authorities were not principled supporters of openness. Openness of knowledge did not prevail because arguments (...) in favour of a free exchange of knowledge won the day against a rhetoric in defense of secrecy or because a rapid change in methods of production and marketing rendered the maintenance of craft secrecy practically impossible. The weakness of secrecy in the early-modern Netherlands, this essay argues, can be explained by the relative tardiness of the growth of the corporate system and the typical features of the institutional structure of the Dutch Republic. Craft secrecy in the Dutch Republic, as far as it existed before the middle of the eighteenth century, was normally based on a contractual relationship between individual actors rather than on any form of enforcement by public agencies. (shrink)

Pojem řádu má své veliké dějiny od předsókratiků až k H. Kringsovi, který v roce 1941 vydává knihu Ordo. U nás se pojmu řádu a řádovosti věnoval po celý život ze­jména brněnský a olomoucký myslitel J. L. Fischer (1894–1973). Idea řádu byla také jedním z pilířů jeho skladebné filosofie, jež měla základní problémy moderní společnosti vyřešit účinněji než marxismus. Současně s „laickým“ Fischerem usilovala v kritických 30. letech dvacátého století o nastolení kýženého řádu vyhraněně katolická skupina sou­středěná kolem tehdy nově (...) založené revue Řád. Oběma pólům šlo sice o podobný cíl (skoncovat s vládou neblahého kapitalismu), ale neporozuměly si pro různost svých věr. Toto osudové neporozumění bychom měli především na univerzitách v Brně a Olomou­ci napravovat využitím odkazu W. C. Smithe, který zásadně rozlišil setrvačnou tradiční víru (belief) a otevřenou víru všech opravdu tvůrčích lidí (faith). Takovou víru měl totiž podle autora také a snad především nový řád usilovně hledající Josef Ludvík Fischer. (shrink)