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This paper focuses on Arthur Danto’s approach to literature. One of the leading philosophers of art in the analytical philosophical tradition, Danto published on art ontology, defining art and art historicity as well as serving as an art critic for the magazine The Nation in the late phase of his career. The essence of Danto’s philosophy thus lies in the visual arts, and it seems he was not interested in literature from a philosophical point of view. However, following Garry L. Hagberg, I show that Danto was not only a keen reader but also reflected on literature, its specificity, and its role. In the first part of the paper, I scrutinize what — in Danto’s view — is a literary work of art, and I compare his position to the view of New Criticism. In the second part, I explore the often neglected dimension of Danto’s philosophy of art, i.e., the spectator’s emotional response to an artwork. I argue that Danto draws on works of literature to illustrate the nature of this response for the reason that they provide the basis for a deeper understanding in this context.

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 critically examines moral contractarianism, a moral theory centred on rational agreements among self-interested individuals to establish moral rules and social norms. It explores the challenges faced by moral contractarianism while also highlighting its strengths. Major issues, such as accommodating justice and fairness within the contractarian framework, are discussed, along with other challenges. Additionally, the paper provides a brief discussion of moral contractualism (a theory similar to moral contractarianism in certain aspects), highlighting its strengths in addressing some of the challenges faced by moral contractarianism while also discussing its limitations. The paper concludes by offering a revised framework of moral contractarianism that provides solutions to the major problems of injustice and partiality that the theory faces.

The paper focuses on identifying the possible, and assumed, implications of the concept of the Anthropocene for thinking about the human in a philosophy that accepts the transition from Holocene to Anthropocene thinking. The aim of the paper is to produce a systematic treatment of the philosophical-anthropological presuppositions of the concept of the Anthropocene. Illuminating the relationship between the concepts of the Earth System, the planetary boundaries and the Anthropocene has to be the focus if we are to delineate the basic anthropological issues so that they can be further conceptually elaborated from a philosophical-anthropological perspective. Such an approach aims to highlight the various interpretive disagreements not only in understanding the concept of the Anthropocene but also in understanding the meaning of the concept of humanity as a geobiophysical force.

This paper examines the Talyshi people, an Iranian ethnic group divided by the Araxes River between Azerbaijan and Iran. The division, a result of the Russo-Persian War (1804-1813), placed the Talyshis within two distinct political and cultural paradigms. The northern Talyshis, under the successive rule of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and Azerbaijan, were confronted with a Turkish political and cultural orientation that contrasted with their Iranian linguistic and cultural heritage. This orientation led to significant shifts in identity, with the Talyshis becoming minorities within a Turkic-speaking, Turkish-oriented Azerbaijan. Southern Talyshis who remained in Iran experienced a more consistent cultural development within the Iranian paradigm, despite political changes. This study examines the impact of these divisions on Talyshi identity, language preservation and socio-cultural adaptation. It discusses the challenges of assimilation and cultural preservation faced by the Talyshis, their linguistic characteristics, and the revival of Talysh self-awareness and nationalism in the face of external pressures. The paper uses a comprehensive analysis of historical, linguistic and ethnographic data to provide insights into the resilience of Talysh identity amidst political and cultural change.

This paper examines the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) among the Dawoodi Bohra community in Pakistan. FGM, a non-therapeutic alteration of the female genitalia, is examined through the lenses of religion, culture and health. The Dawoodi Bohra, predominantly based in Karachi, practice FGM as a religious and cultural rite, linking it to notions of purity and social acceptance. Despite global efforts to outlaw and eradicate FGM, it persists, underpinned by deeply held beliefs and the insular nature of the community. The physical and psychological effects of FGM are profound, leading to immediate and long-term complications such as severe pain, infection and psychological trauma. This paper discusses the impact of these practices on women’s health and rights, while critiquing the lack of an effective legal framework in Pakistan to combat FGM. In addressing this issue, the paper contributes to the broader discourse on gender-based violence and the rights of women and children in patriarchal societies.

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.

Much critical attention has been given to Alan Gewirth’s argument concerning agents’ move from prudential to moral right-claims. Less ink has been spilled on the question of why prudent agents should claim rights to goods needed by agents in general rather than to goods needed for the realization of their individual and particular purposes. In this paper, I intend to show that Gewirth’s concept of prudence makes it necessary for agents to identify with the role of a generic agent and that this identification provides them with rationally valid reasons not only to claim prudential rights to freedom and well-being but also to recognize a moral principle stating that all agents have these rights. More generally, my argument points to the central role played by the concept of prudence in his theory.

MacIntyre’s ‘liberal’ view of the state’s toleration of hate speech may seem surprising given his radical rejection of liberalism. It appears liberal because MacIntyre agrees with some classical liberal conclusions, as formulated by Locke, concerning the requirement of evaluative neutrality of the state. This seems to be the main reason why MacIntyre argues that the hate speech toleration at the governmental level should not be ‘content-based’, i.e. it should be strictly ‘context-based’. The paper argues that MacIntyre’s ‘context-based’ approach seems problematic because it does not take the relevance of different political contexts seriously enough and should be modified towards the ‘regime-based’ model, in which hate speech bans are justified only by the insufficient quality of a given democratic society.

The present article deals with the possibilities of diagnosing social pragmatic communication disorder (SPCD), focusing on questionnaire methods, test methods and assessment scales. Abroad, diagnosis of this disorder is often done through a combination of interviews, questionnaires, rating scales, observations and other methods. The aim of this paper was to create an integrative overview, i.e. to summarise questionnaire methods, rating scales and test methods that are aimed at diagnosing pragmatic language. For this purpose, seven methods were selected that deal with the recognition of deficits in pragmatic language, developed between 1989 and 2023. The individual methods were evaluated in terms of age range, focus, content, norms, and time duration. These categories were followed for foreign diagnostic methods, since no materials of this type are yet available in the Czech Republic.

In this paper we discuss the InterACT - Attitude Change & Tolerance programme (Weidner, 2015) for preschool and younger school-age children, as well as the process of its adaptation into Polish (2019) and Slovak (2019-2023) languages. The programme builds on several research studies that have investigated children's attitudes towards stuttering and the possibilities of early exposure to relevant information about stuttering. Research has confirmed the need to address changing attitudes towards stuttering already at pre-school age. Statistically, the InterACT programme has been shown to be effective in improving children's attitudes toward stuttering and teaching how to appropriately interact with children with stuttering (Wesierska and Weidner, 2022). The programme is conceptualised in a way that it can be translated into other languages, with consideration of cultural contexts. As Slovakia is close in terms of language, culture and historical context to Poland, where the effectiveness of the programme is confirmed, we find the application of the results from their research relevant for Slovakia as part of speech therapy prevention and effective support of the process of anti-stigmatisation of stuttering.

Tethered oral tissues can be considered as an issue that belongs under the scope of many specialists, such as paediatricians, lactation consultants, dentists, speech therapists, orthodontists, physiotherapists, ENT doctors and others. It is necessary to look at tethered oral tissues comprehensively in a broader timeframe. The article summarises the impact of tethered oral tissues on the patient throughout their development and highlights areas that could provide diagnostic clues to detect tethered oral tissues and their management from a multidisciplinary team perspective. The older the patient, the more specialists will be involved in their treatment. With this paper, we aim to arouse interest about the issue among different professionals and to prevent adverse effects on the health of the individual. Although tethered oral tissues are short stretches of tissue, they can have a very negative impact on the quality of life.

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.