People construe reality by using words as basic units of meaningful categorization. The present theory-driven study applied the method of a free association task to explore how people express the concepts of the world and the self in words. The respondents were asked to recall any five words relating with the word world. Afterwards they were asked to recall any five words relating with the word self. The method of free association provided the respondents with absolute freedom to choose any (...) words they wanted. Such free recall task is suggested as being a relatively direct approach to the respondents’ self- and world-related conceptual categories, without enormous rational processing. The results provide us, first, with associative ranges for constructs of the world and the self, where some associative dimensions are defined by semantic polarities in the meanings of peripheral categories (e.g., Nature vs. Culture). Second, our analysis showed that some groups of verbal categories that were associated with the words world and self are central, while others are peripheral with respect to the central position. Third, the analysis of category networks revealed that some categories play the role of a transmitter, mediating the pathway between other categories in the network. (shrink)

Existentialism became one of the most fashionable philosophical currents in postwar Czechoslovakia. Whereas the orthodox Marxism of the 1950s, following Lukács’s Marxism or existentialism?, hastily condemned existentialism as an offshoot of bourgeois idealism, Marxists of the 1960s viewed existentialism as a philosophical current that deserved, at the least, serious examination. During the subsequent era of Czechoslovak “real” socialism of the 1970s and 1980s, existentialism was, as a result, interpreted as one of the sources of the 1968 “counterrevolution.” This article maps (...) and analyzes the official Marxist reception of existentialism in the course of the Stalinist, post-Stalinist and so-called real socialist periods of Czechoslovak history. However, its main focus is on the post-Stalinist period, when Czechoslovak philosophy benefited from a lively debate between Marxism and existentialism. Some participants in this debate considered existentialism to be an important rival to Marxism, one that posed the very same questions yet offered slightly different answers. At the center of the polemics lay the existentialist categories of being, existence, and freedom. (shrink)