Jan Patočka (1907-1977), Czech philosopher of world importance, wrote his habilitation script with Edmund Husserl in Freiburg, where he also became acquainted with the work of Martin Heidegger. In his own work, Patocka tried to resolve the philosophical conflict between their various concepts of phenomenology. The attempt to add a historical dimension to the notion of Lebenswelt and to the concept of phenomenon as such led him ultimately to formulate a phenomenological philosophy of history. In his last essay, which is (...) the main subject of my lecture, Patočka sketches out a “history of the philosophy of the meaning of human life, beginning with Kant” and sets forth his own concept of the meaning of history, influenced by Heideggerian motifs. I present a concise interpretation of his idea and take a critical position towards it. (shrink)

In this short piece I am not undertaking to give a full discussion of the whole of Patočka’s “heretical” work. I wish only make clear its most essential core. What, in Patočka’s view, made Europe Europe and what is Europe’s bequest to the world after what Patočka describes as its fall, completed by the two world wars? What should Europe look to conserve in itself if- as seems likely - it would like to once again play a respected role in (...) world events? Is there something which the globalised world should take over from old Europe, or something which it should eschew, if it does not wish history to end and utter decadence to ensue? (shrink)

The following article presents how the first Czech phenomenologist Jan Patoèka became a student of Edmund Husserl and how he motivated in the 70s a small group of Czech phenomenologists to begin the translation of Sein und Zeit, which started after his death in 1977. The article then describes how this translation was secretly “published” in the 80s, under the circumstances of the communist totalitarian regime, as successive installments. It then discusses examples of how the linguistic translation difficulties were solved (...) and how the entire book was finally and officially published in the middle of the 90s. (shrink)

This paper presents a short biography of Jan Patočka, as well as biographical data of the author in connection to the life and work of Jan Patočka. The paper describes Patočka’s academic activity at Charles University between 1968 and 1972, how he continued by giving private underground seminars in the dark years of 1972 to 1976, and how his engagement culminated in the dissident movement Charter 77. The author explains how the unofficial underground Patočka Archive was established on the very (...) day of Patočka’s death, even before the terrible events around his funeral. Before the official Patočka Archive was founded on the 1st of January, 1990, many volumes of his works were edited secretly during the period of 1977 to 1989. This made it possible to continue successfully publishing the series of the Complete Works of Jan Patočka after 1990. (shrink)

This paper presents a short biography of Jan Patočka, as well as biographical data of the author in connection to the life and work of Jan Patočka. The paper describes Patočka’s academic activity at Charles University between 1968 and 1972, how he continued by giving private underground seminars in the dark years of 1972 to 1976, and how his engagement culminated in the dissident movement Charter 77. The author explains how the unofficial underground Patočka Archive was established on the very (...) day of Patočka’s death, even before the terrible events around his funeral. Before the official Patočka Archive was founded on the 1st of January, 1990, many volumes of his works were edited secretly during the period of 1977 to 1989. This made it possible to continue successfully publishing the series of the Complete Works of Jan Patočka after 1990. (shrink)

This paper presents a short biography of Jan Patočka, as well as biographical data of the author in connection to the life and work of Jan Patočka. The paper describes Patočka’s academic activity at Charles University between 1968 and 1972, how he continued by giving private underground seminars in the dark years of 1972 to 1976, and how his engagement culminated in the dissident movement Charter 77. The author explains how the unofficial underground Patočka Archive was established on the very (...) day of Patočka’s death, even before the terrible events around his funeral. Before the official Patočka Archive was founded on the 1st of January, 1990, many volumes of his works were edited secretly during the period of 1977 to 1989. This made it possible to continue successfully publishing the series of the Complete Works of Jan Patočka after 1990. (shrink)

This paper presents a short biography of Jan Patočka, as well as biographical data of the author in connection to the life and work of Jan Patočka. The paper describes Patočka’s academic activity at Charles University between 1968 and 1972, how he continued by giving private underground seminars in the dark years of 1972 to 1976, and how his engagement culminated in the dissident movement Charter 77. The author explains how the unofficial underground Patočka Archive was established on the very (...) day of Patočka’s death, even before the terrible events around his funeral. Before the official Patočka Archive was founded on the 1st of January, 1990, many volumes of his works were edited secretly during the period of 1977 to 1989. This made it possible to continue successfully publishing the series of the Complete Works of Jan Patočka after 1990. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Bibliography.

The following article presents how the first Czech phenomenologist Jan Patoèka became a student of Edmund Husserl and how he motivated in the 70s a small group of Czech phenomenologists to begin the translation of Sein und Zeit, which started after his death in 1977. The article then describes how this translation was secretly “published” in the 80s, under the circumstances of the communist totalitarian regime, as successive installments. It then discusses examples of how the linguistic translation difficulties were solved (...) and how the entire book was finally and officially published in the middle of the 90s. (shrink)

In this paper I try to underline both the positive and negative circumstances in which I began translating Heidegger's "Sein und Zeit" in Greek. In 1971 I started, as a young student of philosophy, to study and translate this book, although I misunderstood it and considered it as a paradigm of "existentiell", not existential philosophy. I benefited essentially from both the English and the French translations and I've also received great help from my Greek mentor, E. N. Platis. I published (...) my translation in two volumes, one in 1978 and the other in 1985 and the critics have been very positive. At the beginning, I gave extended explanations about the translation problems and my solutions in a paper published in 1974. In the following years, I wrote articles about the Heideggerian concepts, in order to facilitate a better understanding of his philosophy.. (shrink)

In this article, we examine the political and educational relevance of Hannah Arendt’s account of friendship. Drawing from Arendt’s central works on friendship, we offer a novel interpretation of the concept by connecting the notion with the idea of educational ‘love for the world’, amor mundi. With this interpretation, we seek to demonstrate that the concept of friendship has both direct educational and indirect political significance. Thereby, we distinguish our interpretation from two previous understandings of the educational relevance of the (...) Arendtian notion of friendship—those by (1) Aaron Schutz and Marie G. Sandy, and (2) Morten T. Korsgaard—in which friendship is either assigned a specifically political role (as in (1)) or its significance to education is narrowly understood (as in (2)). We argue our interpretation of friendship offers both a new contribution to the understanding of the relationship between education and politics in the context of Arendt scholarship, and a novel way of thinking about the educational significance of friendship in the context of contemporary democratic politics, especially the prevailing political polarization. (shrink)

Introduction 'Indoctrination' belongs to a family of concepts which includes ' teaching', 'education', 'instruction', and 'learning'. ...

_Epistemic Logic_ studies statements containing verbs such as 'know' and 'wish'. It is one of the most exciting areas in medieval philosophy. Neglected almost entirely after the end of the Middle Ages, it has been rediscovered by philosophers of the present century. This is the first comprehensive study of the subject. Ivan Boh explores the rules for entailment between epistemic statements, the search for the conditions of knowing contingent propositions, the problems of substitutivity in intentional contexts, the relationship between (...) epistemic and modal logic, and the problems of composite and divided senses in authors ranging from Abelard to Frachantian. (shrink)

_Epistemic Logic_ studies statements containing verbs such as 'know' and 'wish'. It is one of the most exciting areas in medieval philosophy. Neglected almost entirely after the end of the Middle Ages, it has been rediscovered by philosophers of the present century. This is the first comprehensive study of the subject. Ivan Boh explores the rules for entailment between epistemic statements, the search for the conditions of knowing contingent propositions, the problems of substitutivity in intentional contexts, the relationship between (...) epistemic and modal logic, and the problems of composite and divided senses in authors ranging from Abelard to Frachantian. (shrink)

"The medical establishment has become a major threat to health. The disabling impact of professional control over medicine has reached the proportions of an epidemic. Iatrogenesis, the name for this new epidemic, comes from iatros, the Greek word for physician, and genesis, meaning origin. Discussion of the disease of medical progress has moved up on the agendas of medical conferences, researchers concentrate on the sick-making powers of diagnosis and therapy, and reports on paradoxical damage caused by cures for sickness take (...) up increasing space in medical dope-sheets [...] The public has been alerted to the perplexity and uncertainty of the best among its hygienic caretakers [...] This book argues that panic is out of place. Thoughtful public discussion of the iatrogenic pandemic, beginning with an insistence upon demystification of all medical matters, will not be dangerous to the commonweal."-- from Introduction. (shrink)

Lackey’s (2007) class of “selfless assertions” is controversial in at least two respects: it allows propositions that express Moorean absurdity to be asserted warrantedly, and it challenges the orthodox view that the speaker’s belief is a necessary condition for warranted assertibility. With regard to the former point, I critically examine Lackey’s broadly Gricean treatment of Moorean absurdity and McKinnon’s (2015) epistemic approach. With regard to the latter point, I defend the received view by supporting the knowledge account, on which knowledge (...) is the necessary condition for warranted assertion. After examining two defenses of KA, by Montminy and Turri, I propose two alternative approaches. Although I remain neutral between them, I develop in more detail the view which classifies “selfless assertions” as “presentations”, a type of assertives distinct from genuine assertions. This account is motivated further by allowing for the expansion of the normative approach to other assertives, a feature we may be interested in, in the light of a recent wave of normative accounts of speech acts. (shrink)

O utopianismo científico de Neurath é a proposta para que as ciências sociais se envolvam na elaboração, desenvolvimento e comparação de cenários contrafactuais, as ‘utopias’. Tais cenários podem ser entendidos como peças centrais de experimentos de pensamento científicos, isto é, em exercícios da imaginação que não apenas promovem a revisão conceitual, mas também estimulam a criatividade para lidar com problemas vivenciados, já que utopias são esforços para imaginar como o futuro poderia ser. Ademais, experimentos de pensamento utópicos podem oferecer conhecimento (...) científico para informar debates e decisões políticas, contribuindo para formatar a sociedade. Este ensaio reconstrói um evento histórico como um exemplo da metodologia utopianista de Neurath. No final dos anos 1970 e início dos anos 1980, uma comissão científica e política designada pelo parlamento da Alemanha Ocidental inventou e comparou quatro cenários para políticas energético-econômicas futuras. Conclusões da comissão informaram decisões políticas que puseram a Alemanha Ocidental (e depois reunificada) em um caminho para se tornar uma potência industrial verde. Uma parte fundamental do trabalho da comissão envolveu um apelo à imaginação, permitindo a caracterização sob a metodologia de Neurath. (shrink)

The "theory of mind" framework has been the fastest growing body of empirical research in contemporary psychology. It has given rise to a range of positions on what it takes to relate to others as intentional beings. This book brings together disparate strands of ToM research, lays out historical roots of the idea, and indicates better alternatives.

"Ivan Illich alights on such topics as education, history, language, politics, and the church. The conversations range over the whole of Illich's published work and public career as a priest, vice-rector of a university, founder of the Centre for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and author of such classics as Tools for Conviviality, Medical Nemesis, and Deschooling Society.".

An assertion is existentially known if and only if: (i) the speaker knows that the sentence she uses to make the assertion expresses a true proposition; (ii) she makes the assertion based on that knowledge; and (iii) she does not believe, have justification for, or know the proposition asserted. Accordingly, if existentially known assertions could be made correctly—as argued by Charlie Pelling in his ‘Assertion and the Provision of Knowledge’—this would show that the norm of assertion cannot be the speaker's (...) belief in, justification for or knowledge of the proposition. In this paper, I try to show that Pelling's argument is inconclusive, as it rests on two assumptions which can be resisted. In turn, I offer a pair of alternative strategies to explain how we can deal with existentially known assertions under the assumption that the speaker's knowledge is the norm of assertion. (shrink)

Conversation analysts have noted that, in psychotherapy, formulations of the client's talk can be a vehicle for offering a psychological interpretation of the client's circumstances. But we notice that not all formulations in psychotherapy offer interpretations. We offer an analysis of formulations that are diagnostic: that is, used by the professional to sharpen, clarify or refine the client's account and make it better able to provide what the professional needs to know about the client's history and symptoms. In doing so, (...) these formulations also have the effect of shepherding the client's account towards subsequent therapeutic interpretation. In a coda, we notice that sometimes the formulations are designed discreetly. We examine one such discreet formulation in detail, and show how its very ambiguity can lead to its failure as a diagnostic probe. (shrink)

An overview on archaeological evidence, provided by Colagè and d’Errico, reveals that the timing, location, and pace of cultural innovations are more consistent with scenarios that take culture, rather than genetic evolutionary processes, as the key driving force for human cognition. The authors elaborate on those mechanisms by which cultural evolution operates, with a specific focus on cultural exaptation and cultural neural reuse.

Epistemic logic is one of the most exciting areas in medieval philosophy. Neglected almost entirely after the end of the Middle Ages, it has been rediscovered by philosophers of the twentieth century. Epistemic Logic in the Later Middle Ages provides the first comprehensive study of the subject. Ivan Boh explores the contrast between epistemic and alethic conceptions of consequence, the general epistemic rules of consequence, the search for conditions of knowing contingent propositions, the problems of substitutivity in intentional contexts, (...) the considerations of epistemic/doxastic iterated modalities, and the problems of composite and divided senses in authors ranging from Abelard to Frachantian. Boh concludes with a comparison between medieval endeavors and the epistemic logic of our own times. Written in a clear and readable style with minimal symbolic apparatus, this book employs modern symbolism and conceptual frameworks, and complements the studies of the syntacticand semantic dimensions of medieval logic. (shrink)