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This paper examines the constructivist turn in political representation from the perspective of Nadia Urbinati’s diarchic model of democracy. To properly assess the significance of Urbinati’s work, it is necessary to situate diarchy within constructivism. While constructivism aims to create new representation spaces for the excluded and marginalized, this endeavour faces challenges in allegations of elitism and manipulation. This paper compares democracy as diarchy with two prominent constructivist approaches, Saward’s claim-making, and Laclau’s hegemonic representation, and it suggests that both fail to address these allegations because they see procedures as external to democratic will formation. This paper concludes that Urbinati’s understanding of how procedures are inherent to democracy provides a valuable synthesis of proceduralism and constructivism, thus providing a novel way of thinking about democratic legitimacy within the constructivist turn.

This paper examines Urbinati’s theory of populism, with the aim of bringing to the fore a lacuna in such theory. The lacuna concerns her appreciation of the role of rhetoric in populism and more generally in democracy. If Urbinati’s general understanding of politics recognizes an important role to rhetoric, such recognition is not accompanied by a systematic analysis of what rhetoric is and how it operates. The effects of such deficiency can be appreciated in her theory of populism. On the one hand, her critical account of populism seems to hinge significantly on the kind of rhetoric and more generally of style it adopts; on the other, the question of what precisely characterizes such rhetoric and style is left mostly unaddressed. The result is that Urbinati’s account of populism loses some explanatory power, with regards to both the nature of populism and the responses to it.

In the concluding part of Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, Jan Patočka thematizes the 20th century and claims that this entire period is a century of war. This paper identifies the main arguments supporting this thesis and examines Patočka’s reflections on how this essential character of the 20th century can be overcome. The article primarily focuses on revealing the ontological-anthropological framework that underlies Patočka’s argumentation, including the idea that polemos is the law of the world. More concrete analyses then demonstrate the problematic elements of Patočka’s concept.

The article compares the respective concepts of Central Europe held by Milan Kundera and Václav Bělohradský. It notes their similarities: both authors understand Central Europe as a phenomenon of the 19th and 20th centuries with a possible overlap into the present (overlap as a never-ending epilogue of Central Europe), and neither defines fixed geographical boundaries for the region, in both cases it is instead a “horizon that allows for a meaningful understanding.” In Kundera’s case, I emphasize the continuity of the theme in his writing from 1978 (with a prologue from 1967–1969) to 2007, while in Bělohradský’s case I emphasize the more complex relationship between the first significant thematization in 1981 and the 21st-century updating of the notion of Central Europe in his texts. As the focal point where the perspectives of both authors intersect and clash, I identify the notion of the non-self-evident nation. This notion allows Kundera to apply the strongly Goethean inspiration of the relationship between world literature and the literature of a small nation (and the function of national cultures as portals to world culture), but this strength is accompanied by a rather strong utopian excess in the realm of the political. An excess that leads to a skeptical rejection of politics, and this is where Bělohradsky’s critique comes in. The paper cites Bělohradský’s notion of natural language and hermeneutic community as a motif that allows the rupture between the two perspectives to be bridged.

This paper is dedicated to the memory of the recently deceased Milan Sobotka. A recognized historian of philosophy, Sobotka focused primarily on the tradition of German idealism. For him, the history of German idealism was the paramount philosophy, in which human freedom and moral practice were thematized in a way that surmounted Cartesianism and empiricism in modern philosophy. In the 1960s, Sobotka was a part of the wider current of humanist Marxism. The article examines the principle steps that later led him from the young Marx back to Hegel and also to Kant.

Descarte's Discourse on method can be approached from several sides, among which history and philosophy of science (HPS) and sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) belong among the most important ones. Jan Maršálek's published recently a criticism of the book Descartes Nikétés from the perspectives of SSK, in which he joins John Schuster in denying the relevance of Descartes' methodological pronouncements for the practice of real science. The aim of the present paper is to draw a borderline between SSK and HPS and to argue on historical grounds for the relevance of the Cartesian methodology. We see the main historical contribution of the Cartesian methodology in its pivotal role in the development of Newton's approach to natural philosophy. The young Newton was a Cartesian and the development of his own system of natural philosophy can be interpreted as the result of a modification and deepening of the principles of the Cartesian method.