The essay presents Patočka’s intellectual relationship to Karl Jaspers on the basis of his texts from the 1960s and 1970s, with a starting point in the 1969 study What is Existence?. After introducing some general connections and differences, based in particular on the forms of heresy in both philosophers, the basic contours of the notion of existence are examined more closely. Patočka understands existence as the performance of a threefold movement that is in many respects problematic. The virtue of Jaspers’ (...) position, on the other hand, lies in its focused clarity. While both thinkers emphasize the concept of authentic performance, the key issue becomes its one-sidedness, which can be described as surrender without acceptance. (shrink)

Book review on Ondřej Sikora – Jakub Sirovátka (vyd.) Lévinas v konfrontaci. Praha (Oikúmené) 2019, 279 str.

When do things change? When do things have some characteristics? I try to answer these questions by looking at different solutions Plato and Aristotle presented in their works. The famous analysis of change from the second half of Plato’s Parmenides claims that change happens outside of time, at an “instant”. On the contrary, Aristotle in the Physics explicitly argues that all change occurs only in time. However, both Plato and Aristotle also provide other analyses of change. How to deal with (...) this variety of explanations and tensions between them? In this paper, I argue that if we differentiate between several kinds of change, most of Plato’s and Aristotle’s analyses provide a thorough insight into the nature of change. For processes such as locomotion, change occurs exclusively within time. For changes where both the initial and final states occur only in time, such as a transition from motion to rest, change takes place in the ‘now’. However, for changes where both the initial and final states occur in both time and in the ‘now’ – for example, a qualitative change from being white to not being white – change does not occur in time nor in the ‘now’, but instead happens instantaneously. (shrink)

Problém svobodné vůle je tradičně považován za ryze metafyzický, a tedy neempirický. Díky současnému rozvoji kognitivních věd však narůstá množství argumentů založených na empirických poznatcích. Tento článek podává stručný přehled několika takových poznatků. Na jedné straně jde o výzkumy zabývající se otázkou kauzální potence vědomí a uvědomění si příčin svých akcí. Nejslavnější, avšak patrně nikoli nejvýznamnější, jsou zde bezpochyby experimenty Benjamina Libeta. Na druhé straně jde o zkoumání samotného prožitku svobodné agence. Zda danou akci vnímám jako svoji vlastní, závisí pravděpodobně (...) na prediktivních i postdiktivních faktorech, o čemž svědčí situace, kdy podkladové kognitivní mechanismy selžou a vedou k omylům. Závěrem příspěvku je zamyšlení nad důsledky vědeckých poznatků pro různá pojetí svobodné vůle: libertariánské a kompatibilistické. Argumentuji ve prospěch smysluplnosti kompatibilistické koncepce svobodné vůle, proti které lze vést námitky spíše z pozice psychologie než neurověd. (shrink)

Nicht viele Philosophen haben eine solch große Resonanz in der Öffentlichkeit erfahren wie Hans Jonas. Das lag nicht ausschließlich an seinem Bestseller "Das Prinzip Verantwortung", der 1979/80 zu einem Medienereignis wurde. Jonas' Verdienst war es, eine ethische Debatte über die Zukunft des Menschen befeuert zu haben, die den Zeitgeist traf. Doch sind die Ideen von Hans Jonas heute noch zeitgemäß? Wie haben sich einzelne Themen weiterentwickelt? Der vorliegende Band diskutiert die Denkwege von Hans Jonas und versammelt einige Antworten von ausgewiesenen (...) Jonas-Experten. (shrink)

[A basic universal income – blindness to context].

By the Galvin–Mycielski–Solovay theorem, a subset X of the line has Borel’s strong measure zero if and only if $M+X\neq \mathbb {R}$ for each meager set M.A set $X\subseteq \mathbb {R}$ is meager-additive if $M+X$ is meager for each meager set M. Recently a theorem on meager-additive sets that perfectly parallels the Galvin–Mycielski–Solovay theorem was proven: A set $X\subseteq \mathbb {R}$ is meager-additive if and only if it has sharp measure zero, a notion akin to strong measure zero.We investigate the (...) validity of this result in Polish groups. We prove, e.g., that a set in a locally compact Polish group admitting an invariant metric is meager-additive if and only if it has sharp measure zero. We derive some consequences and calculate some cardinal invariants. (shrink)

The article discusses the case of Microsoft's Twitter chatbot Tay that “turned into a Nazi” after less than 24 hours from its release on the Internet. The first section presents a brief recapitulation of Alan Turing's proposal for a test for artificial intelligence and the way it influenced subsequent discussions in the philosophy of mind. In the second section, I offer a few arguments appealing for caution regarding the identification of an accomplished chatbot as a thinking being. These are motivated (...) principally by Ludwig Wittgenstein's discussions of mind and soul and by some Wittgensteinian philosophers' criticisms of AI endeavours. I will try to show that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of AIs such as chatbots as thinking beings, rather independently of their technical perfection and accomplishment. In the third section, the case of the “Nazi chatbot” Tay will offer me material for some light to be shed on the peculiar character of our interconnected concepts of thinking, soul and person and on the importance of their further ramified connections. (shrink)

Many legal theorists and linguists have addressed the notion of legal language from different perspectives. Despite that, the definitions of legal language vary. Almost all of the approaches conclude that legal language entails several types of communication. Nevertheless, not all of these categories are sufficiently researched. Some types of legal communication seem to be neglected. This lack of interest might be rooted in the uncertainty of whether these texts or utterances even fall under the scope of the concept of legal (...) language. In order to avoid this superficiality in subsequent research, it is first necessary to come to a clear determination of which communicative acts can be considered a part of legal language and which cannot. Accordingly, in this search for the definition of legal language, we should not neglect the fact that language is executed in concrete communicative acts, and the only means to grasp the language is through communication. The aim of this article is therefore to clearly delineate the boundaries of this concept. Based on analysis of how the given term is currently defined, I draw out the common features and trace the characteristics in which they differ. Taking into account these findings, I propose a novel comprehensive demarcation of legal language. This concept argues that the ‘legal’ nature of language should be determined by the context and function of the particular statement or exchange, in connection with the role of participants in the communication. This means that a particular act may be considered a part of legal language not in accordance with a certain form or lexicon used, but mainly by extralinguistic circumstances in the context of which it is being performed. (shrink)

Text usiluje o krátký kritický přehled některých prací sociálního psychologa Jonathana Haidta, s ohledem na to, jaké důsledky z Haidtových tvrzení vyplývají pro pojem morálky a možnosti filosofické diskuse o morálních problémech. Budu tvrdit, že jakkoli jsou Haidtova zjištění a jejich interpretace v mnohém pozoruhodná a přínosná, některé aspekty lidské morálky a morálního života zkreslují a spíše znesnadňují, než usnadňují jejich porozumění. V první části se dotknu Haidtova pojmu morální intuice a nejasností spojených s tím, jak mu rozumět. Vodítkem bude (...) způsob, jakým Haidt zavádí tento pojem a pracuje s ním ve svém příkladu sourozenců Marka a Julie. Ve druhé části naznačím, jaký dopad mají tyto nejasnosti pro Haidtovy politicko-psychologické analýzy. V poslední části poukážu na význam Haidtem přehlížené rozmanitosti filosofických teorií toho, co je to morálka. Společným jmenovatelem více mých kritických poznámek je to, že i když Haidt označuje svá zkoumání za čistě deskriptivní a pluralistická, fakticky implicitně předpokládá zhruba konsekvencialistické pojetí morálky, včetně jeho normativních aspektů. (shrink)

Awareness of intention je fenomenální zkušenost prožitku motorické intence, charakterizovaná jako vědomé uchopení akce, kterou se agent chystá provést. Typicky bývá ztotožňována s okamžikem, kdy si participant vzpomíná, že se rozhodl provést svou akci, reportovaným prostřednictvím pozice ručičky na ciferníku Libetových hodin. Intenzivní výzkum prožitku jednání (sense of agency) v posledních letech přinesl velké množství poznatků, ale také kritiku metodologických slabin, mezi které patří závislost výsledků na metodě reportování a závislost na arbitrárních vlastnostech reportovacích nástrojů. Filozofové si zase všímají intervenujících (...) klamů vědomí či chyby Karteziánského divadla. Význačnou otázkou je také značná heterogenita experimentálních výsledků. Východiskem textu je argument, že mnohé z problémů tohoto výzkumného program souvisí se sadou implicitně zastávaných postojů, které vnímají awareness of intention jako integrovaný, unitární proces charakterizovaný graduálním nárůstem premotorické mozkové aktivity a náhlým nástupem uvědomění. Tato konceptuální východiska jsou převážně nereflektovaná, kontingentní a představují významné omezení pro explanaci současných empirických pozorování. Těžištěm článku je nástin nového teoretického rámce, který jde za implicitní předporozumění integrované perspektivy a umožňuje integrovat rozporné behaviorální výsledky. Tato rekonceptualice staví na Schoolerově teorii meta-uvědomění a teorii access a phenomenal consciousness Neda Blocka a nachází také oporu v neurovědných studiích. Představená rekonceptualizace přichází s dichotomií fenomenálního awareness of intention, souvisejícího s přípravou motorické intence v prefrontální oblasti a reflexivního meta-awareness of intention, které patrně souvisí s procesy v parietálním kortexu. (shrink)

With reference to the previous empirical works on applause, we explore the roles it plays during the first birthday celebration using multimodal analysis. Particularly, we focus on modes of its initiation and collaborative enactment. The empirical material includes 25 videos from different Polish families. The analysis demonstrates that applause works in interaction as a ritual anchor that allows the participants to move to either the end or the next sequence of the ritual, as an appreciative assessment of the previous action, (...) as a device for focusing joint attention, which coordinates the interaction of participants and focuses the attention on the most important actor/recipient of the ritual. (shrink)

John Searle attempts to show through a consideration of promising that at least some ‘ought’ statements can be derived from ‘is’ statements. He thinks that you can determine on purely factual grounds that a person has made a promise, and that it follows logically from the statement that a person has made a promise that he has at least a prima facie obligation to do the thing he promised to do. I agree with but not with.

The aim of this article is to problematize the concept of school culture both as a concept and as a subject of investigation. It deals with the historical roots of this concept and the fact that it is shrinking—a consequence of the managerial imperatives of effectiveness and accountability in education. School culture, in relation to the quality of schools and the quality of education, has become the subject of audits, arrived at through a developed network of standardisation in education, testing (...) and evaluation. The methodology of evaluation currently lending particular substance to school culture, however, generates different methodological perspectives on investigating school culture and thus research is becoming an instrument of political power. In the research it is then necessary to either abandon the concept of school culture or to free it from spinning round the cycle of evaluation/self-evaluation—a change in school culture—improving the “quality of the school”—a new evaluation/self-evaluation. One way to do this is to employ ethnographic approaches in research into schools and to understand school culture as a system of texts. (shrink)

Surrogacy has long been discussed in reproductive medicine. In the Czech Republic, surrogacy is not legally regulated. Because of this legal vacuum, there are no official procedures or organizations that openly deal with surrogacy. Potential surrogate mothers and applicants do not have many options for obtaining or sharing information. The only source is the Internet. Online forums are a popular tool for gaining information and contacts regarding surrogacy. The goal of this research was to use qualitative research methods to survey (...) the most searched and discussed topics on Czech online discussion forum websites. We used discussions that we found on www.emimino.cz between 2009 and 2019. This article analyses the comments of the Internet forum discussants/participants, their involvement, knowledge of surrogacy, the information sought and their opinions. In particular, the participants discussed where to find a surrogate mother or how to become one. This article attempts to outline the discussions ordinary people have about surrogacy outside official expert forums. (shrink)

Fine (J Philos Log 43:549–577, 2014) developed a truthmaker semantics for intuitionistic logic, which is also called exact semantics, since it is based on a relation of exact verification between states and formulas. A natural question arises as to what are the limits of Fine’s approach and whether an exact semantics of similar kind can be constructed for other important non-classical logics. In our paper, we will generalize Fine’s approach and develop an exact semantics for some substructural logics. In particular, (...) we will provide a truthmaker semantics for the Non-associative Lambek calculus and some of its extensions. This generalization will reveal some interesting connections between Fine’s recent work on truthmaker semantics and his early work on relevant logic. (shrink)

The role of artificial intelligence in the Turing test is to imitate human beings to such an extent that people will not realize it is a machine. With the rise of deep learning (a subcategory of AI), the situation is changing rapidly as the new systems do not focus on imitating human intelligence but emphasize thorough solutions to specific issues. The main difference between predefined AI and deep learning (DL) is that these systems are self-learning and have verifiable results. Firstly, (...) we need to analyse the application of the Turing test in the Loebner Prize because, there, the primary emphasis is on aspects of human intelligence – learning, reasoning and understanding. Secondly, in the Turing test, only general intelligence is considered, and this can be questionable. If DL does not possess this form of intelligence, by this reasoning, we should consider it unintelligent. However, is such understanding correct? The third and last aspect questions whether the Turing test is beneficial for an AI designed for specific tasks because the results do not bring any new data and conclusions. (shrink)

The role of artificial intelligence in the Turing test is to imitate human beings to such an extent that people will not realize it is a machine. With the rise of deep learning (a subcategory of AI), the situation is changing rapidly as the new systems do not focus on imitating human intelligence but emphasize thorough solutions to specific issues. The main difference between predefined AI and deep learning (DL) is that these systems are self-learning and have verifiable results. Firstly, (...) we need to analyse the application of the Turing test in the Loebner Prize because, there, the primary emphasis is on aspects of human intelligence – learning, reasoning and understanding. Secondly, in the Turing test, only general intelligence is considered, and this can be questionable. If DL does not possess this form of intelligence, by this reasoning, we should consider it unintelligent. However, is such understanding correct? The third and last aspect questions whether the Turing test is beneficial for an AI designed for specific tasks because the results do not bring any new data and conclusions. (shrink)

Inferentialism is a philosophical approach premised on the claim that an item of language acquires meaning in virtue of being embedded in an intricate set of social practices normatively governed by inferential rules. Inferentialism found its paradigmatic formulation in Robert Brandom's landmark book Making it Explicit, and over the last two decades it has established itself as one of the leading research programs in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of logic. While Brandom's version of inferentialism has received wide (...) attention in the philosophical literature, thinkers friendly to inferentialism have proposed and developed new lines of inquiry that merit wider recognition and critical appraisal. From Rules to Meaning brings together new essays that systematically develop, compare, assess and critically react to some of the most pertinent recent trends in inferentialism. The book's four thematic sections seek to apply inferentialism to a number of core issues, including the nature of meaning and content, reconstructing semantics, rule-oriented models and explanations of social practices and inferentialism's historical influence and dialogue with other philosophical traditions. With contributions from a number of distinguished philosophers--including Robert Brandom and Jaroslav Peregrin--this volume is a major contribution to the philosophical literature on the foundations of logic and language. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to reformulate the Husserlian problem of phenomena from a more pragmatic perspective, inspired by Jan Patočka. Instead of searching for a correlation between transcendent being and its subjective modes of givenness, the pragmatically oriented phenomenology should ask: How does the appearance of things unfold through our different modes of engaging with the world? In order to answer such a question, I propose to interpret the three movements of human existence differentiated by Patočka as three (...) forms of praxis and to demonstrate that each of them is deploying its own way of making things intelligible. In the end, Patočka’s account of existence in terms of movement provides a much more fruitful grounds than Heidegger’s fundamental ontology for incorporating the basic tenets of pragmatism, such as a shift to practices, an anti-intellectualist account of sense-making, and the fundamental dependency of the subject upon the public space of shared concerns. (shrink)

lnek je zamen na vybran implikace mezi sociologickou hermeneutikou (pstup) a analzou metafor (analytick koncept). Konkrtn je een vztah lingvistickho kontextu textu (jako empirickho korpusu) a vyplvajcch (skrytch) implikac, kter jsou odhaliteln dky kontextu metaforickho vznamu. Uren vztah me pomoci k zpesnn role sociologick hermeneutiky v socilnch vdch, konkrtn k monosti volby v kvalitativnch metodch skrze kritickou metodologii. Vstupem lnku je konstatovn siln vazby mezi tvorbou kontextulnch metafor a postavenm polysmickho slova ve vt, kter dky tomu tvo zkladnm referenn objekt (...) empirickho korpusu pro samotnou analzu. (shrink)

My paper aims to elucidate the emergence of subjectivity from the interplay between living beings and their environment. This attempt to give account of becoming-subject within the life itself leads to a confrontation between the phenomenology of life pursued since at least two decades by Renaud Barbaras with Canguilhem´s philosophy of biology. It starts with a criticism of Merleau-Ponty’s and Patočka´s respective failures to overcome the contrast between the level of bare life and the level of human existence. In order (...) to answer such a prejudicial separation between unexamined life and self-reflected existence, I adopt in the second part a bio-centric perspective on human existence, inspired by Canguilhem and Guillaume Le Blanc, in order to re-evaluate the notion of life in terms of normative, expansive movement that both shapes the living being itself and individuates the elements on which it acts. The final part of the paper seeks to understand the emergence of subjectivity from ordinary life-challenges such as illness and experiences of vulnerability or fragility, thus bypassing the need for stipulating a self-referencing consciousness as a primary mode of self-disclosure. (shrink)

The pragmatist account of action in Brandom’s Making it Explicit offers a compelling defense of social embeddedness of acting. Its virtue consists of redefining the agent’s reasons for action in terms of her public commitments and entitlements. However, this account remains too intellectualist insofar as it neglects the embodied sense allowing the agent to respond to various situational demands and social constraints. In my article, I provide a less disembodied account of action that draws on Dreyfus’s emphasis on bodily skills (...) as constitutive aspects of intentional acting. Dreyfus’ notion of absorbed coping certainly highlights the role of body and affectivity in guiding the performance of action, but it ends up in underestimating the role of discursive and conceptual capacities in human agency. Against Dreyfus, I will demonstrate that involved and embodied coping not only answers to the demands of a given situation, but also involves responsiveness to reasons. My ambition is to defend a continuity between practical reasoning, i.e. our capacity to justify our performances through reasons, and our embodied coping skills, a continuity that has been overlooked by Brandom’s intellectualist and denied by Dreyfus’ anti-rationalist accounts. (shrink)

This study refers to the discursive transformation in perceptions of preschool age children generated by central European Union policy on early childhood education and care. This policy is representative of the pervasion of contemporary entrepreneurial culture and curricula within preschool education. At the same time, the field is also starting to become subordinated to the neoliberal trend of economising the social. This study highlights the fact that, within discourses on the child, these trends are encouraging a particular conception of childhood (...) and of developmental theories. This conception is also enabling entrepreneurial logic to be applied to the preschool education sector via the use of theoretical tools. Consequently, children are being shaped into so-called knowledge-workers, or gold-collar workers, as they are referred to in current employment discourse. Even authorised preschool education documents are responding to this transformation by introducing a new type of normality into this sphere, as can be seen in the Slovak state education programme for preschool education. (shrink)

This paper summarizes the problematic aspects of a globalized neoliberal culture in education. Linking to the particular studies of this monothematic volume it discusses the consequences of the globalization of a testing culture in schools, the issues of developing civic literacy in the context of current education practice and the issues of forming a historic consciousness in present schools relating to the existing social discourse. Language teaching, currently dominated by the concept of language literacy or the concept of language education (...) resulting from English language teaching seems to be significant. This paper reveals various ways in which the educational section is being contaminated by neoliberal transformations to point out their culturally devastating consequences in a critical way. The goal of this paper is to articulate the mechanism by which neoliberalism is infiltrating education in the form of discursive and physical “colonizing”. (shrink)

This paper, based on ethnographically obtained data, discusses German language acquisition at an early age: the discovery of the interconnection between language and corporeality is the key component of the analysis based on videostudies. The body—conceived as an intermediary and content element of education, becomes an essential base for foreign language acquisition. This will be documented by tangible data and subsequent theoretical analysis with respect to relevant terminology of cultural anthropology. The principle of corporeality is further used as a means (...) of perceiving German language education in the sense of the so called language propaedeutic concept and as a means of the legitimisation of particular qualification and the role of foreign language teachers in preschool institutions. (shrink)

Slovak education policy is an example of the kind of transformations occurring in the education spheres of postcommunist countries. While at the end of the 1990s, it seemed that education policy was still attempting to ensure that Slovakia caught up with education levels in western countries, the period that followed brought with it a shift towards neoliberalization of the education sector and towards the economization of education. Slovakia’s entry into the EU was accompanied by the total assimilation of the neoliberal (...) agenda within education and since then it can be said that Slovak education policy has followed a path towards so-called perpetual neoliberalism. The aim of this article is to show how education policy has developed within Slovak politics, in terms of how it is gradually adapting to neoliberal ideas. The article analyzes government documents from 1998 onwards, particularly Slovak government programs, which document the process of neoliberalization in education. (shrink)