What is education? What options does the educator have and what is expected from those who are being educated? What do education in the sense of paideia and the Christian educatio have in common? And what is the difference between those two notions? What does it mean to succeed in the drama of life and the world? Can the insightful (theoria) seeking of wisdom (sofia, sapientia) be separated from the effective (praxis) seeking of reason (fronésis, prudentia)? What is the purpose (...) of scholé and can it be experienced in schools today? How do today's schools prepare the youngest generation for the task of enhancing civil society? Is everyone able to relate to good? What does it mean to testify to the idea of good? These and other questions are asked in a dialogue of two teachers from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, respectively, who are concerned with philosophy, theology and pedagogy. The aim of the dialogue is to enter the Living school of thought, as founded by the Czech philosopher Radim Palouš (1924–2015), and to consider anew the topics he opened in his works. The dialogue embarks on a journey of searching for wisdom, by listening to words and the Word, by perceiving and contemplating experience, through reason and intuition, dialogue and acceptance in silence. It involves taking a closer look into the world that concerns everyone who are pupils, students, educators, teachers, educators – those who seek and who are sent, those longing and facing misunderstanding. It is an invitation to reflect on human life with humility and the awareness of human responsibility, in the hope that the pursuit of good, truth and beauty is intertwined with the task of succeeding as humans. (shrink)

The study Freedom from Dialogue: The Work of Radim Palouš in Conversation with Selected Philosophers and Theologians of Education presents the main themes of the life work of Radim Palouš, a prominent Czech philosopher of education working in the tradition of Comenius and Patočka. From those key themes, the author selects the concept of education and the concept of freedom and examines these in selected philosophers of education and theologians of education from around the world who also produced (...) their works in the twentieth or even twenty-first century, as Radim Palouš did. The purpose of the study is to provide contemporary educators and teachers with inspiration to deepen and develop the meaning of their activity, which consists in education and training, in cultivating man, or in bringing man to a free and responsible life, as this study particularly wants to emphasize. Jacques Maritain, Joseph Pieper, James Vincent Schall and Stratford Caldecott have been chosen as philosophers of education and theologians of education. All of them have dealt with the theme of freedom and the liberal arts and have attempted to suggest in their writings how man today might also be brought to the goal of educational endeavour, to the free assumption of his own responsibility for education. At specific points in the writings of selected philosophers and theologians of education, it is shown that true freedom is not created by human construction but is born in dialogue. Therefore, through a kind of dialogue between the Czech thinker and selected foreign thinkers, inspiration for today is sought. This is the first book publication in Czech that deals explicitly with theology of education and philosophy of education, their interrelationship, correspondences and differences. (shrink)

This study focuses on the origin of life as presented in the thought of Anaximander of Miletus but also points to some parallel motifs found in much later conceptions of both the pre-Darwinian German romantic science and post-Darwinian biology. According to Anaximander, life originated in the moisture associated with earth (mud). This moist environment hosted the first living creatures that later populated the dry land. In these descriptions, one can trace the earliest hints of the notion of environmental adaptation. The (...) origin of humans was seen as connected in some way with fish: ancient humans were supposed to have developed inside fish-like animals. Anaximander took into account changes in the development of living creatures (adaptations) and speculated on the origins of humans. Similar ideas are found also in the writings of much later, eighteenth and nineteenth century authors who were close to the tradition of German romantic science. We do not argue that these later concepts are in any way directly linked with those of the pre-Socratics, but they show surprising parallels in, e.g., the hypothesis that life originated in a moist environment or the supposition that human developed from fish-like ancestors. These transformations are seen as a consequence of timeless logic rather than as evolution in historical terms. Despite the accent on the origin of living things, both Anaximander and the later Naturphilosophen lack in their notions the element most characteristic of Darwin’s thought, that is, the emphasis on historicity and uniqueness of all that comes into being. (shrink)

Recenzní studie vychází z kolektivní monografie editorů Charlese Bazermana, Adairy Bo- nini a Débory Figueiredo, Genre in a Changing World a věnuje se tématům souvisejícím s významem žánrů ve vědecké a akademické praxi. Identifikuje zejména dvě oblasti, na něž se ve zvýšené míře soustředí badatelské aktivity pra- cující s žánrem jako analytickým nástrojem: žánrovou pedagogiku na univerzitní úrovni a oborovou enkulturaci. Zatímco první oblast ohraničuje akademické texty vůči jiným textovým formám, druhá se zabývá jejich vnitřní rozrůzněností. Studie zdůrazňuje demonstro- vaný (...) přínos přístupů založených na žánrech pro výzkumy vědecké praxe, avšak dochází k závěru, že je zapotřebí důsledněji promýšlet jejich epistemologické implikace. (shrink)

Presented is a completeness theorem for fuzzy equational logic with truth values in a complete residuated lattice: Given a fuzzy set Σ of identities and an identity p≈q, the degree to which p≈q syntactically follows (is provable) from Σ equals the degree to which p≈q semantically follows from Σ. Pavelka style generalization of well-known Birkhoff's theorem is therefore established.

This article analyzes the lectures and texts from the last period of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, one of the last disciples of Edmund Husserl, the founding father of phenomenology. The point of departure is Patočka’s critical reception of Husserl’s concept of the crisis of European mankind. There are, however, two other elements distinctive of Patočka’s thought essential for this interpretation. First, he was a classical philosopher aiming at Socratic ‘care for the soul’. Second, he approached the theme of universal human (...) history from his own unique historic position: as a Czech philosopher, involved in the Socratic manner primarily with his own Czech national community, for whom the big question of the future of European mankind and its legacy at the end of its golden modern age is inseparably connected with a ‘small’ one: the question of Czech national existence – the question of the future of his nation in a changing world and the issue of its freedom. (shrink)

Humans have evolved various social behaviors such as interpersonal motor synchrony, play and sport or religious ritual that bolster group cohesion and facilitate cooperation. While important for small communities, the face-to-face nature of such technologies makes them infeasible in large-scale societies where risky cooperation between anonymous individuals must be enforced through moral judgment and, ultimately, altruistic punishment. However, the unbiased applicability of group norms is often jeopardized by moral hypocrisy, i.e., the application of moral norms in favor of closer subgroup (...) members such as key socioeconomic partners and kin. We investigated whether social behaviors that facilitate close ties between people also promote moral hypocrisy that may hamper large-scale group functioning. We recruited 129 student subjects that either interacted with a confederate in the high synchrony or low synchrony conditions or performed movements alone. Subsequently, participants judged a moral transgression committed by the confederate toward another anonymous student. The results showed that highly synchronized participants judged the confederate’s transgression less harshly than the participants in the other two conditions and that this effect was mediated by the perception of group unity with the confederate. We argue that for synchrony to amplify group identity in large-scale societies, it needs to be properly integrated with morally compelling group symbols that accentuate the group’s overarching identity. Without such contextualization, synchrony may create bonded subgroups that amplify local preferences rather than impartial and wide application of moral norms. (shrink)

Although the theory of memetics appeared highly promising at the beginning, it is no longer considered a scientific theory among contemporary evolutionary scholars. This study aims to compare the genealogy of memetics with the historically more successful gene-culture coevolution theory. This comparison is made in order to determine the constraints that emerged during the internal development of the memetics theory that could bias memeticists to work on the ontology of meme units as opposed to hypotheses testing, which was adopted by (...) the gene-culture scholars. I trace this problem back to the diachronic development of memetics to its origin in the gene-centered anti-group-selectionist argument of George C. Williams and Richard Dawkins. The strict adoption of this argument predisposed memeticists with the a priori idea that there is no evolution without discrete units of selection, which in turn, made them dependent on the principal separation of biological and memetic fitness. This separation thus prevented memeticists from accepting an adaptationist view of culture which, on the contrary, allowed gene-culture theorists to attract more scientists to test the hypotheses, creating the historical success of the gene-culture coevolution theory. (shrink)

In this work - both psychologists working on concepts and mathematicians working on fuzzy logic - reassess the usefulness of fuzzy logic for the psychology of concepts.

The theory of concept lattices is approached from the point of view of fuzzy logic. The notions of partial order, lattice order, and formal concept are generalized for fuzzy setting. Presented is a theorem characterizing the hierarchical structure of formal fuzzy concepts arising in a given formal fuzzy context. Also, as an application of the present approach, Dedekind–MacNeille completion of a partial fuzzy order is described. The approach and results provide foundations for formal concept analysis of vague data—the propositions “object (...) x has attribute y”, which form the input data to formal concept analysis, are now allowed to have also intermediate truth values, meeting reality better. (shrink)

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

Studie předkládá novou interpretaci zpráv o oběhu nebeských těles podle Anaximena z Mílétu. Nebeská tělesa se v jeho pojetí nemají pohybovat pod Zemí, ale naopak kolem Země. Anaximenés měl danou koncepci přiblížit motivem plstěného klobouku, který se otáčí kolem naší hlavy. Případné vysvětlení oběhů nebeských těles pomocí nakloněné Země podél její horizontální osy však patrně mylně vychází až z koncepce kulové Země a sklonu ekliptiky. Je možné, že dochované texty ve skutečnosti navazují na problém sklonu nebeské osy a popisují původní (...) situaci oběhů nebeských těles předtím, než se „nebe naklonilo“. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the disproportion the author sees in Rorty’s work. While the author appreciates highly Rorty’s antirepresentationalism, he criticizes Rorty’s social and political philosophy, which, an his opinion, is rooted in early modern philosophy. The latter, he argues, emphasizes the dichotomy between subject and object – an approach characteristic for that period. In support of his claiming a big difference between full-fledge pragmatism and purely pragmatic eclecticism, the author compares Rorty’s and Dewey’s works to show that those of (...) Dewey are considerably promising as for as the resolution of the problems of our society and politics. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the nature and moral status of manipulation. I analyse a popular account of manipulation by Robert Noggle and assess a challenge that has been posed by Moti Gorin. I argue that Noggle’s theory can fend off the challenge. The analysis is instructive in that it enables one to look more closely at the nature of manipulation. I argue, contrary to some proposed accounts, that manipulation essentially involves deception about the manipulator’s intentions. Secondly, since manipulation contains an (...) element of deception, it is, I maintain, prima facie immoral. Finally, I analyse and explain away several examples of allegedly morally non-problematic manipulation. (shrink)

We present a logic for reasoning about attribute dependencies in data involving degrees such as a degree to which an object is red or a degree to which two objects are similar. The dependencies are of the form A ⇒ B and can be interpreted in two ways: first, in data tables with entries representing degrees to which objects have attributes ; second, in database tables where each domain is equipped with a similarity relation. We assume that the degrees form (...) a scale equipped with operations representing many-valued logical connectives. If 0 and 1 are the only degrees, the algebra of degrees becomes the two-element Boolean algebra and the two interpretations become well-known dependencies in Boolean data and functional dependencies of relational databases. In a setting with general scales, we obtain a new kind of dependencies with naturally arising degrees of validity, degrees of entailment, and related logical concepts. The deduction rules of the proposed logic are inspired by Armstrong rules and make it possible to infer dependencies to degrees—the degrees of provability. We provide a soundness and completeness theorem for such a setting asserting that degrees of entailment coincide with degrees of provability, prove the independence of deduction rules, and present further observations. (shrink)

This essay examines theoretical arguments surrounding the use of post-colonial theory as a way to fill in the epistemological lacuna in the studies of post-socialism. It reviews the various streams of this theoretical development and employs Edward Said’s notion of “traveling theory” to demonstrate that theoretical claims made by proponents and opponents of this particular comparative perspective are historically, socially, and geographically situated, although not fixed. Disciplinary, national, and institutional affiliations, instead of theoretical justifications, are identified as important factors in (...) the propensity to accept or resist the introduction of post-colonial perspective on Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The essay concludes by acknowledging the potential usefulness as well as the limits of post-colonialism in the conceptualization of the post- socialist space. (shrink)

A number of aspects of the cosmology of Anaximenes of Miletus have not yet been convincingly explained, but we can assume that a starting point was the notion of a universe stretching only between a flat earth and heaven. This gave the cosmology its “meteorological” character: heavenly bodies were viewed as ignited evaporations of moisture. They were thought of as moving only above the earth’s surface, and their rising and setting were explained as an optical illusion. Similar approaches appear not (...) only in the Greek epic tradition but even in the writings of Xenophanes. It can therefore be assumed that Anaximenes’s conception is representative of contemporary Ionian explanations of cosmological events. (shrink)

Vzrůstající využívání digitálních technologií ve vědecké práci a komunikaci vyvolává otázku, jaká je epistemologická povaha takto vytvořeného vědění. V tomto eseji využívám pojmový aparát, který vyvinuli Steven Shapin a Simon Schaffer k analýze historického sporu mezi Robertem Boylem a Thomasem Hobbesem o způsob vytváření vědění v přírodní filosofii, a aplikuji jej na problematiku digitálního výzkumu. Jejich koncepty tří technologií vytvářejících vědění – materiální, literární a sociální – se ukazují jako heuristicky užitečné koncepty i pro reflexi digitálních technologií. Ty jsou v (...) eseji představeny nikoliv jako samostatné technologie vytváření faktů, nýbrž jako prvky, kolem nichž se dosavadní vědecké technologie radikálně rekonfigurují. Zvláštní pozornost esej věnuje představě kódu jako literární technologie a roli digitálních technologií v humanitních vědách. (shrink)

Studie recenzuje následující díla: Maurice HALBWACHS, Kolektivní paměť. Praha: SLON 2009, 289 s. ; Françoise MAYER, Češi a jejich komunismus: paměť a politická identita. Praha: Argo 2009, 273 s. ; Zdeněk VAŠÍČEK – Françoise MAYER, Minulost a současnost, paměť a dějiny. Brno – Praha: CDK – Triáda 2008, 199 s. Studie konstatuje, že v češtině začíná být k dispozici dostatečné množství publikací o sociální paměti, aby teoreticky zabezpečily širší pojetí výzkumů paměti. Zároveň by však tyto výzkumy neměly být podřizovány historiografii, (...) a především je v nich zapotřebí pracovat nejen s koncepty identity a sociálních svazků, ale i moci a konfliktu. (shrink)

Diogenes Laertius ascribes the first concept of spherical Earth to both Pythagoras and Parmenides. Indeed, a major shift in cosmologies—emergence of the spherical conception of the Earth and the surrounding heaven—took place between the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Given the poor state of preservation of early Pythagorean tradition, it is argued that primacy in formulating the notion of spherical Earth should be ascribed to Parmenides.

Some classical authors ascribe to Anaximander of Miletus a belief in the existence of infinite worlds. Their testimonies have provoked an extensive discussion on the question of whether Anaximander spoke of successive or coexistent worlds, or perhaps only one world that undergoes changes. Of course, this subject is related to important aspects of archaic cosmologies. First, we need to investigate whether one can even speak of a notion of coexistent worlds prior to atomist theories. Second, the issue of infinite worlds (...) is closely linked to the nature of Anaximander's scheme of the universe and Ionian cosmologies in general. Finally, this matter has a bearing on the subject of the duration or perishing of the world. (shrink)

The term "fuzzy logic," as it is understood in this book, stands for all aspects of representing and manipulating knowledge based on the rejection of the most fundamental principle of classical logic---the principle of bivalence. According to this principle, each declarative sentence is required to be either true or false. In fuzzy logic, these classical truth values are not abandoned. However, additional, intermediate truth values between true and false are allowed, which are interpreted as degrees of truth. This opens a (...) new way of thinking---thinking in terms of degrees rather than absolutes. For example, it leads to the definition of a new kind of sets, referred to as fuzzy sets, in which membership is a matter of degree. The book examines the genesis and development of fuzzy logic. It surveys the prehistory of fuzzy logic and inspects circumstances that eventually lead to the emergence of fuzzy logic. The book explores in detail the development of propositional, predicate, and other calculi that admit degrees of truth, which are known as fuzzy logic in the narrow sense. Fuzzy logic in the broad sense, whose primary aim is to utilize degrees of truth for emulating common-sense human reasoning in natural language, is scrutinized as well. The book also examines principles for developing mathematics based on fuzzy logic and provides overviews of areas in which this has been done most effectively. It also presents a detailed survey of established and prospective applications of fuzzy logic in various areas of human affairs, and provides an assessment of the significance of fuzzy logic as a new paradigm. (shrink)

The work analyzes two competing arguments in the issue of abortion and shows that each requires a different theory of personal identity. Further, I analyze those theories and show what moral premises they are compatible with and what implications there are for the abortion debate.

T. H. Macho defended the claim that politics is a system for organizing attention and for arranging relationships of visibility. One way of attracting and holding the attention of others and maintaining one’s visibility is the instrumentalization of indignation. Another way is to instigate and maintain social stress and unrest. The article explores the concepts of indignation and social stress as introduced by P. Sloterdijk. These concepts are part of a model of political dynamics that describes 1) the relationship between (...) indignation and stress in political super-units and 2) the fact that they are compensated for by means of a specific conception of individual freedom (eleuthería, J.-J. Rousseau) and a liberal social order. The article defends the claim that there is a relationship between Macho’s claim about the organization of attention, Sloterdijk’s analyses of the concept of freedom and the method whereby individuals are immunized against generated social stress, which maintains social cohesion. (shrink)

Formálním cílem předloženého textu je připomenout sté výročí narození Stanisława Lema prostřednictvím jedné z dimenzí jeho díla. Dosažení tohoto cíle má podobu reflexe dostupných důvodů, které by objasnily, proč se Lem ve své literární formě v určitém období odmlčel a poté se již nevrátil k psaní literárních textů (románů a povídek) a dále psal již pouze teoretické a filozofické úvahy o tématech, která dosud byla předmětem jeho literární tvorby. Pokusil jsem se mapovat a shromáždit důvody, které Lem explicitně uvádí, a (...) rovněž možné důvody, které jsou spojeny s jeho teoretických zázemím, přesněji s četbou filozofických děl. (shrink)

The goal of the essayistic speculation (intended also as a brief laudatio) is to illustrate on an example the way that Sloterdijk could transform literary impulses into themes that he subsequently processes philosophically and develops in his works. I will present several of such potential transformations by means of parts and themes from Bonaventura’s Nachtwachen (1804, especially vigils 9 and 14), which Sloterdijk commented on in his Vienna lectures in 1998. The aim is not to seek parallels between Bonaventura’s and (...) Sloterdijk’s works, but to illustrate the possibilities of a philosophical transformation, the exploitation of literary themes by philosophical imagination and subsequently a detailed elaboration of philosophical concepts. (shrink)

The concept of Galois connection between power sets is generalized from the point of view of fuzzy logic. Studied is the case where the structure of truth values forms a complete residuated lattice. It is proved that fuzzy Galois connections are in one-to-one correspondence with binary fuzzy relations. A representation of fuzzy Galois connections by Galois connections is provided.

The paper presents generalizations of results on so-called Horn logic, well-known in universal algebra, to the setting of fuzzy logic. The theories we consider consist of formulas which are implications between identities (equations) with premises weighted by truth degrees. We adopt Pavelka style: theories are fuzzy sets of formulas and we consider degrees of provability of formulas from theories. Our basic structure of truth degrees is a complete residuated lattice. We derive a Pavelka-style completeness theorem (degree of provability equals degree (...) of truth) from which we get some particular cases by imposing restrictions on the formulas under consideration. As a particular case, we obtain completeness of fuzzy equational logic. (shrink)

The paper studies closure properties of classes of fuzzy structures defined by fuzzy implicational theories, i.e. theories whose formulas are implications between fuzzy identities. We present generalizations of results from the bivalent case. Namely, we characterize model classes of general implicational theories, finitary implicational theories, and Horn theories by means of closedness under suitable algebraic constructions.

The paper focuses on the question of whether it is morally permissible to use reproductive technologies to select children with congenital deafness. I review the arguments that have been presented to support the claims that the lack of hearing is not overall bad, that disability is caused by social discrimination rather than impairment, that the community of deaf people gives its members plenty of opportunities to lead a happy life, and that procreative decisions need not improve the world. I argue (...) that although the claims are, to a certain extent, reasonable, they fail to establish the conclusion that selecting for deafness is morally permissible. I further argue that the decision to select a deaf child is morally wrong because it results in imposed and needless dependency, that the happiness of a deaf child is conditioned by their confinement to a relatively small community, and that the deaf parents who reject their child’s potential biculturalism are motivated by questionably self-regarding reasons. (shrink)

In this paper, I assess the analysis of vagueness of objects in terms of the theory of constitution with respect to the notion of vague identity. Some proponents of the constitution theory see it as an advantage of their account that analysing the spatial and temporal vagueness of objects in terms of the relation of vague constitution avoids commitment to vague identity, which is seen as a controversial notion. I argue that even though the constitution theory may plausibly be applied (...) to the phenomenon of vague boundaries, it fails to account fully for other cases of spatial and temporal vagueness. There are what I call ‘mid-extension’ vagueness cases, in which the tools of the constitution theory applied in the analysis of boundary vagueness are insufficient to avoid commitment to vague identity. (shrink)