_Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology_ offers a complex analysis of the pragmatic theses that are present in the works of leading phenomenological authors, including not only Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as it is often the case within Hubert Dreyfus’ tradition, but also Husserl, Levinas, Scheler, and Patocka. Starting from a critical reassessment of existing pragmatic readings which draw especially on Heidegger’s account of Being-in-the-world, the volume’s chapters explore the following themes as possible justifications for speaking about the pragmatic turn in phenomenology: the (...) primacy of the practical over theoretical understanding, criticism of the representationalist account of perception and consciousness, and the analysis of language and truth within the context of social and cultural practices. Having thus analyzed the pragmatic readings of key phenomenological concepts, the book situates these readings in a larger historical and thematic context and introduces themes that until now have been overlooked in debates, including freedom, alterity, transcendence, normativity, distance, and self-knowledge. This volume seeks to refresh the debate about the phenomenological legacy and its relevance for contemporary thought by enlarging the thematic scope of pragmatic motives in phenomenology in new and revealing ways. It will be of interest to advanced students and scholars of phenomenology who are interested in moving beyond the analytic-continental divide to explore the relationship between practice and theory. (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)

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)

Článek postupně analyzuje tři nesnáze, s nimiž se potýká filosofie při oslovování veřejnosti: hermetismus, bagatelizaci a vizionářství. Na základě kritiky těchto forem jsou postupně vymezovány podmínky, za nichž je dnes možné považovat filosofii za smysluplnou činnost.

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)

A Riposte to Stanislav Sousedík’s View of Historical Facts.

At the time of his sudden death in 1977, the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka left a large philosophical legacy with no will and testament. For the last 43 years, the editors of his Collected Works have been reconstructing a unified and thematically articulated oeuvre from the more than 10,000 pages found in his drawers and boxes. It should in the end include not only the texts published during Patočka’s lifetime but also his many unpublished manuscripts, fragments, variations, drafts of unfinished (...) philosophical projects, notebooks and letters. After demonstrating in which sense the death of the author coincides in Patočka’s case with the birth of his oeuvre, the article aims to show that the unity of Patočka’s work is not something given, but rather something to be artificially reconstructed, in an always disputable fashion, since the internal coherence of its various thematic divisions is necessarily itself a matter of ongoing interpretation. (shrink)

Předložený článek si na základě rozboru hlavních motivů ve Foucaultově a Canguilhemově pojetí norem klade za cíl vymezit, jaká je vzájemná vazba mezi biologickou a společenskou normativitou a jakým typem moci na nás normy vlastně působí. V souladu s interpretací navrženou Pierrem Macherey se pokusíme sílu norem vystihnout v termínech jejich „imanence a produktivity" a ukázat, proč nelze normy chápat dle modelu zákona, který by ke svému předmětu přistupoval zvnějšku. Poslední část pak přináší odpověď na otázku, jaký typ individualizace či (...) subjektivizace toto pojetí diskvalifikuje a jaké možnosti ponechává pro svébytnou singularitu v rámci normativního pole. (shrink)

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, I contend that emotions should be regarded as emerging from our “vital communication” with the solicitations of our physical and social surroundings. My intention is to present emotions as unitary phenomena arising from an incessant flow of motivations that can be later articulated in terms of reasons (in cognitive theories of emotions) or in terms of causes (in affective neuroscience). I further suggest that emotions should be considered a specific kind of conducts, since the way in which (...) a person acts out her emotions shapes their content, regulates their intensity and transforms the amorphous flow of felt motivations into a recognizable emotional stance for which she is held accountable. In conclusion, I put forward a series of arguments explaining why emotion tends toward its expression in conduct as if towards its completion. (shrink)

According to the traditional interpretation, Lévi-Strauss’ structural anthropology deposes the concept of man and the notion of human nature from its central place in human and social sciences. While it’s necessary to acknowledge Lévi-Strauss’ distance vis-à-vis all philosophy based on intentionality, experience and consciousness of subject, we argue that the most interesting purpose of the structural anthropology lies elsewhere. Not only Lévi-Strauss never declared himself being part of anti-humanism movement, but most of all, his famous polemics with Sartre at the (...) end of La Pensée sauvage should be interpreted as part of his fight against ethnocentrism. The project of “dissolving the man” can be thus read as deconstructing the idea that western man makes of himself in the light of ethnological findings about universal structures orchestrating all human societies. We further show that the notion of subject survived its very death announced by the most radical structuralist thinkers and that structural method could be effectively employed in order to study different techniques and modes of subjectivation, revealing that “becoming subject” is a process structured by our language, symbolic universe and ethical teleology. (shrink)

After taking into consideration the most relevant criticisms questioning the capacity of the thinking “I” to grasp itself in a transparent and undistorting way, I will ask what remains of first-person authority with regard to one’s own identity. I argue that first-person authority is not to be abandoned, but rather reformulated in terms of public commitments that nobody else can take up in my place. After recovering the original meaning of Heidegger’s claim “one is what one does,” I turn to (...) Arendt’s performative disclosure of the “who” through political initiative and suggest reading the requirement of public exposure as a model allowing for a better understanding of self-identification. In order to discern more clearly the shape of this new paradigm of self-identification, I draw on Ricoeur’s notion of self-attestation, Crowell’s analysis of our “being-answerable” and Larmore’s account of avowals in which we give ourselves a publicly binding shape. In synthetizing and prolonging the considerations of the abovementioned authors about the performative disclosure of the self, I demonstrate that one’s identity—in the sense of ipseity—is both constituted and manifested by the commitments that the self endorses and for which it is held accountable in front of others. (shrink)

Článek je věnován odůvodnění, projasnění a také kritickému zhodnocení poněkud zkratkovitého hesla o „primátu praxe“, který v očích mnoha amerických interpretů představuje společného jmenovatele Heideggerova díla a pragmatismu v širokém slova smyslu. V mém podání nesměřuje Heideggerův důraz na praxi ani tak k převrácení tradiční hierarchie, podle níž svět nejprve poznáváme, abychom v něm mohli jednat, ale spíše k přehodnocení ontologického rámce, v němž byla otázka ohledně přednosti teorie či praxe až dosud kladena. V druhé části proto ukážu, jak Heideggerovo (...) osobité pojetí praxe souvisí s jeho revizí bytí věcí a nás samotných, a podám důvody, proč na rozdíl od Dreyfusova, Okrentova a Blattnerova vymezení primátu praxe odmítám chápat veškerou srozumitelnost lidského života a světa jako něco odvozeného z našeho každodenního, praktického obstarávání. (shrink)

Discussion on Two Remarks on Ondřej Švec’s Note regarding Philosophy of History.

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)

An introduction to an English translation of Jan Mukařovský´s lecture The Semiology of Art. In this lecture Mukařovský, a Czech aesthetician, literary historian, theorist, and leading proponent of Czech structuralism, develops his interpretation of the semiotics of art from a detailed explanation of the basic functions of the artistic sign. He emphasizes the role of the aesthetic function, which is dominant but latently and potentially contained in all the other functions of the linguistic and the artistic sign. He then defines (...) the artistic sign as the dialectical negation of the communicative sign. (shrink)

Tento článek se zabývá problematikou (organizované) nespolupráce a černého pasažérismu; jeho cílem je ukázat „spolupráci“ a „nespolupráci“ jako relativní pojmy odpovídající různým úrovním popisu. Závěrem naznačuje, že fenomén organizovaného obcházení pravidel může představovat problém pro naturalistické varianty teorie společenské smlouvy.

In diesem Beitrag wird argumentiert, dass Beispiele nicht nur als rhetorische Unterstützung für eine vorgestellte allgemeine These verwendet werden, sondern auch ohne Erklärung zirkulieren (ob mit oder ohne versteckte Absicht). Wir treffen oft auf Besonderheiten (Personen, Fälle, Situationen, Geschichten usw.), die erst mit der Zeit die Bedeutung eines Beispiels für etwas annehmen. Das Lernen aus solchen Beispielen ist ein langwieriger Prozess, der darauf beruht, dass man ernsthafte und bedeutsame Aspekte (oft im Zusammenhang mit wesentlichen Strukturen des menschlichen Lebens) erkennt, die (...) sich in ihnen widerspiegeln, und der dazu führt, dass man i) in der Lage ist, bedeutsame Verbindungen zu anderen Besonderheiten zu erkennen und ii) nach dieser Erkenntnis zu handeln. Es ist umstritten, ob i) und ii) untrennbar miteinander verbunden sind. Der schwer fassbare Charakter des Lernens an Beispielen - die Schwierigkeit, zu entscheiden, ob ein Lernen stattgefunden hat - wird am Beispiel umweltbezogener Handlungen illustriert. (shrink)

Purpose of the article: Although the economic growth and society are two independent terms at the first sight, they are in fact closely connected and interact with each other. The main topic of this work is the creative economy, which is considered to be a part of growth theories. Thanks to the new approach, theorists supplement these theories with the demographic and the socio-cultural factor. First, the work establishes a comprehensive theoretical framework for economic growth. Furthermore, it analyses the representation (...) of creativity in the regions of the Czech Republic. Methodology/methods: The primary aim of this work is to carry out an analysis that charts the representation of the creative potential in the regions of the Czech Republic. The analysis uses the new creative index, which was created by modifying of the Richard Florida´s creative index. Consequently, the work uses the new creative index within the framework of smaller regional units as opposed to national groupings. Additional advantages of this model include the number and measurability of the indexes. Scientific aim: The aim of this work is not just demonstrating the dependence between the presence of creative people and economic growth, but in addition, the work aims to seek out the factors that influence the allocation of creative employees. Findings: The work demonstrates high mutual dependence between creativity and economic growth with the help of the correlation coefficient. The assumptions that creative regions are more attractive on the social and knowledge basis were also confirmed. Conclusions : Territorial units must consequently work to develop conditions, which support the establishment and the development of the creative environment in order to retain their competitiveness and support the economic growth. (shrink)

A review of Allen Carlson‘s and Sheila Lintott‘s (eds) Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, 458 pp. ISBN 9780231138864).

This article presents a general conception of aesthetic experience built on an analysis of the relationship between the narrative and the ambient dimensions of the aesthetic value of a natural environment, the forest. First of all, the two dimensions are presented with respect to the possibilities and problems raised by distinguishing between them. Next, the possibilities of their relationship are analysed and it is argued that they are strongly complementary. This complementarity becomes the core of the proposed conception of aesthetic (...) experience, which can explain the difference between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic, and can also provide an answer to the question of the non-reductive differentiation between the aesthetic experience of nature and the experience of a work of art. The conclusion of the article is mainly concerned to eliminate one of the problems localized in presenting the ambient dimension (the ambience paradox), by means of Ricoeur’s conception of the relationship between time and narrative. (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)

The following paper is based on a broad understanding of communication that considers as text basically anything that has been created within the framework of a cultural interaction by an author and that is perceived by a recipient. The first part of the paper introduces, explains and follows mostly cases in which the author’s violations of the recipient’s expectations have a communication value, i.e. provoke, in the recipient, a communication effect that matches the author’s intentions. In such cases, this effect (...) results as a consequence of an violation of the communication „cooperative“ principles. This, at the recipient’s end, translates into an event of expectancy violation. Each of such violations provokes an arousal in the recipient, which further motivates him/her to search for its cause. Finding this cause, and being “confronted” with the related violation pertaining to it with the norm equals, for the recipient, getting to the meaning of the text, or identifying its communication value etc. As part of the conclusion, a commented scheme is presented which offers a spectrum of possible communication outcomes “positioned” between the predictability of each textual element and the stochasticity of choice. The effort to illustrate all the explained facts results, in the paper, in a rich set of examples stemming from miscellaneous spheres of human activity – from “high styles” to rather day-to-day activities, to pop-culture. The objective is to show that the described principles, if not valid in general, permeate at least all forms of interaction. (shrink)

In the following paper, the meaning of philosophy as a specific intellectual activity would be presented on the example of revolutionary thoughts of Peter Tkachov. The paper concerns with the understanding of philosophy, its characteristics and status within the Russian intellectual movement in the second half of the 19th century. The understanding of both, individual and social functions of philosophy in the work of Tkachov revolutionary writing, is introduced. The paper is set within a wider framework of Thachov thoughts and (...) his idea of progress. After connecting these two specific topics of Tkachov, the question is formulated: Who is capable to answer the question of what is progress? While looking for an answer and studying works of Tkachov, a wide spectrum of possible variations is offered. The work is purposely conceptualized with an opened closure to present a concrete problem for further analysis and discussion. (shrink)

The occasion of the 100th anniversary of I. Kant’s death was a colossal impulse for many researchers of Immanuel Kant’s legacy. One of the goals of the paper is to introduce one of the less known anniversary critical texts, which appeared in the Russian intellectual milieu. It attempts to disrupt the usual approach regarding the interpretation of Bely’s comprehension of Kant’s legacy, i.e., Kant as a skeleton of philosophy or a police officer of thinking. The paper points to a more (...) systematically conceived scale of Bely’s reflections of Kant. From Bely’s point of view, Kant is the author of firm grounds for the shaping of thought. On the unstable background of philosophy, which during the historical development of thought succumbed to erosion, it is Kant’s philosophy that serves as the stabilizing base. Bely tries to highlight that Kant’s epistemology forms distinctively outlined the foundations of a knowledge of the world and philosophical comprehension not only of history but also of symbolism. The symbolism of Andrei Bely. (shrink)

To what extent is Nietzsche’s critique of Kant empty rhetoric, and to what extent is it a substantive argument to be taken seriously? Within the broad Nietzschean- Kantian polemics, the study is concerned with the ethical domain. It starts from the title phrase “the Chinese of Königsberg” (“Das Königsberger Chinesenthum”) found in Nietzsche’s late book The Antichrist, and goes back to earlier forms of Kant-critique. At its core is the universalist, uniforming claim of the categorical imperative expressed by the motif (...) of duty, and its broader framework is a dualist notion of reality with the postulated noumenal sphere. The aim of the paper is not to offer a clear resolution to the dispute but to highlight its inspirational moments: these include the negative, refuting emphasis in the foundation of ethics and personal autonomy as the basis of self-respect and duty in both protagonists. The Kantian perspective can integrate Nietzsche’s “autonomy of the body” into the autonomy of pure practical reason. (shrink)

Love—for most of its theorists—involves thinking about certain further things that define what love is. Thus, according to some theories, love amounts to unconditional concern about the beloved’s well-being.1 Other theories, such as Troy Jollimore’s, suggest that love is a kind of appreciative response to the qualities of the beloved person.2 These viewpoints seem to require a particular kind of epistemic focus on the part of the lovers. You have to be clear about what promotes your beloved’s well-being; spare an (...) active thought for it. According to this view, loving someone cannot do away with preoccupation about that... (shrink)

The paper discusses the unique approach to the problem of evil employed by the Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion and ethics that is primarily represented by D. Z. Phillips. Unlike traditional solutions to the problem, Phillips’ solution consists in questioning its meaningfulness—he attacks the very ideas of God’s omnipotence, of His perfect goodness and of the need to ‘calculate’ God’s goodness against the evil within the world. A possible weakness of Phillips’ approach is his unreflected use of what he calls ‘our (...) religious language’, against which he measures the meaningfulness of theodical conceptions. He apparently underestimates both the heterogeneity of the ‘ours’ and how philosophical ideas pervade and inform the actual practice. On the other hand, Phillips rightly identifies the fact that some theodical conceptions, if understood as general doctrines, commit the sin of insensitivity and do not pay appropriate respect to human suffering. The reason is that they neglect the seriousness and importance of the difference between issuing the theodical accounts in the first person and in the third person. He may, however, thereby accuse theodicies of failing in a task that theodicists never intended to undertake. Possible problems are also involved in Phillips’ use of the Holocaust as the central discussion example. (shrink)

The paper discusses alternatives of philosophical approach to addiction. While not denying the central position of problems of will or craving, it focuses on the broader anthropological context of addiction, using Heidegger’s existential analyses. It appears that addiction – in some cases, because an essentialist exposition is not viable here – is characterized by a defective pattern of the agent’s choice among possibilities and of temporality. The anecdotic observations can be synthesized into a treatise of addiction as a normative disorder: (...) a systematic inability of the addict to function within usual normative practices of various social contexts. The relevance of this perspective is testified also by therapeutic practice: addicts are treated not exclusively with respect to problems concerning will, but as persons who have to be re-socialized, i.e. led to a responsible attitude both towards themselves and society. (shrink)

The World of Rules - Rules and the Particularity of Agents - The Orientation Turn - Rules and Persons in Morally-Loaded Situations - Addiction: A Normative Disorder - Beyond Perspective: Towards a Story - The Difficult Blessing of Being a Normative Creature.