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In this paper I shall explore how self-fashioning, as conceived by Friedrich Nietzsche, is possible. My goal is to show that self-fashioning is not jeopardized by Nietzsche’s determinism and his rejection of traditional ideas of selfhood, agency, and freedom. First, I shall clarify why the abandonment of this traditional conception of human beings is seen by some as deleterious to the project of self-fashioning. Afterwards, I shall argue that Nietzsche is a determinist: he maintains that one could not have acted otherwise. If thought of in this way, freedom is impossible. However, Nietzsche also has a more positive conception of freedom. Following John Richardson’s reading of Nietzsche, I shall examine the three main stages through which freedom evolves. I shall expand Richardson‘s account with a corresponding analysis of Nietzsche’s notion of responsibility. Finally, we shall see how a discussion of such issues allows us to understand how self-fashioning is possible.

At the heart of the debate about generative or autonomous AI is the concern that it could take action away from humans. Hannah Arendt, who gave the concept of action a political profile and opposed the automation tendencies of modernity, provides a basis for assessing fears that humans will cede their political action to AI. After an introduction to Arendt’s political theory of action, the paper examines whether AI can and should act. The focus is on linguistic models.

Intention of the authors is to analyse the importance of national holiday of the Slovak National Uprising in a context of collective and historical memory of the Slovak nation. The aim of submitted paper is therefore to analyse various lines of opinion on the Slovak National Uprising, especially from the perspective of two totalitarian ideologies, as well as from the perspective of contemporary historiography after 1989. In the context of aforementioned analyses, authors deal with recent and historical interpretations from the historical and collective memory point of view, with an emphasis on legal consequences. The first years of independence and democracy brought to Slovakia re-increase of pro-fascist (ľudák’s) interpretation of history, which, however, did not succeeded in settling down in the collective memory of the Slovak nation. Nevertheless, the last years once again brought relativisation and misinterpretation of historical context of the Slovak National Uprising and its specific standing in society as a national holiday in particular. Reflecting these negative trends, the authors also consider possibilities of effective protection of national holidays, not only with the use of law.

The present study focuses on the question of the specialization of the councils of the Court of Appeal at the end of the 17th century, i.e. whether individual cases were assigned to judges according to their professional or other specialization. First of all, the paper defines the very notion of specialization as a phenomenon that can be perceived in terms of geography, language, subject matter and personnel. The initial sources are the minutes of the Court of Appeal, which survive for the end of the seventeenth century and from which it is possible to see which councils were assigned which cases to handle. On the basis of these protocols, the author conducts a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected sources and concludes that all four types of specialization were applied to a greater or lesser extent in the Court of Appeal, but that they were never fully implemented. Although this is an examination of a phenomenon that has not yet received the attention of the professional community, the results so far appear to be fruitful and may shed light on the internal workings of some courts, as it is a generally actionable phenomenon.

The study provides a new analytical model for interpreting early modern sacral architecture. The example of selected buildings from Moravia at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries shows the possibilities of applying the „anachronistic model", an alternative to linearly defined autonomist art history, especially in the case of Renaissance studies. In contrast, the buildings under study present themselves as objects with a specifically heterogeneous temporal identity that simultaneously applies the principles of historicity and modernity to the buildings in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ιn this paper, I compare the two conceptions of the “lawgiver” in the Platonic dialogue Cratylus. I present both the idea that words constitute imitations of things (resemblance naturalism) and the claim that names are tools which “separate” and “teach” being (the tool analogy). Then I examine the respective figures of the lawgiver (nomothetes) appearing in each of them. These are the lawgiver of the tool analogy (one who makes names on the model of a craftsman producing tools), and that of the lawgiver who introduces names constituting phonetic imitations of things. I argue that with respect to name giving, the former is in a much better position than the latter, and that mimetic naturalism faces the insuperable “paradox of institution.” My main claim is that, read in conjunction with the tool analogy, the notion of ἒθος introduced in 434e, offers a helpful framework for successfully overcoming the challenge of establishing the first names. Furthermore, the adoption of this perspective by Socrates allows him to navigate a complex position. This is a position that steers clear of both Cratylus’s “resemblance naturalism” and Hermogenes’s unadulterated conventionalism.

The aim of this paper is to study Cassirer’s philosophy of the body, and some of its foundations developed in the report entitled “Pathology of Symbolic Consciousness.” It details how patients with cerebral aphasia and apraxia are characterized by a loss of symbolization abilities in the performance of operational tasks, as well as in their linguistic performance, which translates into a decrease in the ability to create cultural meaning. These cases allow one to evaluate the definition of the human being as a “symbolic animal” that is presented in An Essay on Man. An interpretative reading of both works is proposed to underline the role of the body in the development of (a) the symbolic formation process and (b) cultural development.

The aim of the research is to investigate beliefs of Austrian and Czech preservice teachers of German about student self-assessment (SSA). In the first part of the paper important theoretical and empirical findings on and principles of SSA and about teachers’ beliefs are discussed. After the description of the research design the data analysis is presented. Results show that only a minority of trainee teachers participating in this survey have experienced SSA as students themselves and that even fewer have been able to implement SSA as teachers in their classroom. Moreover, it was verified that most of the trainee teachers have theoretical knowledge about student self-assessment. If one looks at the statements of the individual pre-service teachers as a whole and assign them to a growth mindset (=self-assessment skills can be learned with suitable training) or a fixed mindset (=self-assessment skills are only mastered by certain particularly reflective students), it is evident that although 43.8% cannot be classified and 9.4% make statements that can be assigned to both mindsets, 28.1% of the prospective teachers can be assigned to a growth mindset and 18.8% to a fixed mindset. Didactically, it would be desirable if it were clearly accentuated that self-assessment skills can be learned through suitable didactic training.

Learner self-assessment is a significant predictor of learning outcomes (Hattie, 2018). However, it is insufficiently implemented in Czech secondary schools (Czech School Inspectorate, 2021). One of the reasons for this may be the lack of teachers’ experience in developing their own self-assessment skills. This paper presents a study framed by a 12-week intervention programme to develop self-assessment skills focused on presenting in German among prospective teachers of German as a foreign language (n=15). The study examined the content (characteristics) of the participants’ self-assessment comments collected before and after the intervention program. A total of 25 self-assessment comments were collected using the “Lautes Erinnern” method (13 before the intervention, 12 after the intervention) and analysed using the inductive category formation of the qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2014). The analysis revealed three main characteristics of the development of self-assessment: increasing evidence in the self-assessment comments, a shift in focus from the predominance of non-languagespecific to language-specific assessment, and a shift in focus from mostly negative to also positive aspects of performance. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications for better teacher education that develops their self-assessment skills appropriately.

This work shows a view of Slovak composers and their song production, with a focus on profane songs accompanied by piano for foreign-language texts written by German, Austrian, Hungarian, French, English, Italian, Polish, Russian, Armenian, Swedish, and Czech poets. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part presents an overview of composers and their works from the predecessors and founders of Slovak national music to the music of modernism, and the second part from the period of the musical avant-garde to the present day. Our aim is to sum up the above mentioned song repertoire and – consequently – to provide a view of the development of vocal foreign-text literature within the history of Slovak music, incl. the possibility of their use in the concert repertoires of singers of all vocal segments.

My aim in this paper is to investigate what enables human flourishing from a Thomistic perspective by considering Aquinas’ natural inclinations. I will argue that human beings flourish in different ways, depending on their practices. However, not every practice contributes to human flourishing, but only those that are consistent with human nature, which agents grasp through their natural inclinations. To support this argument, I will critically analyze MacIntyre’s account, referring mainly to his latest work (2016). MacIntyre has the merit of highlighting the role of practices in human flourishing by considering the narrative dimension in the agents’ lives, but he fails to recognize the properly metaphysical framework of human nature, that would be provided by the proper consideration of natural inclinations.

In this paper, I claim that the project of recovering an “ethics of normality” not only consists of the attempt to return metaphysical concepts to their everyday meaning but also is dedicated to the goal of developing a theory of the ethically self-evident that ultimately leaves things as they are. In contrast to competing ethical theories of deontology and consequentialism, Aristotelian naturalism, as a promising approach to the justification of virtue ethics, is able to provide a particular heuristic of ethical reservedness. For example, Aristotelian naturalism gives us good reasons to formulate objections to efforts to improve human nature – and even to make this improvement a moral imperative – or to implement educational programs that exceed the reasonable measure of what is ethically acceptable. In particular, I argue that the neo-Aristotelian concept of a person, expanded or grounded in the way just described, offers the appropriate basis for developing an innovative and integrative bioethical ontology of the human being.