Volume 67 (2012), 6

There has been a myth about Richard Rorty circulated within analytic philosophy for long, which is now being dismantled. The myth casts him as a capricious thinker: someone who betrayed his analytic past by conjuring up a foggy form of pragmatism. The author discusses a possibility that does not yet blend in easily with the ongoing story of that myth dismantling,… Read more

The paper describes the key points of Rorty’s non-fundationalist, non-universalist conception of ethics. Rorty was a successful analytic philosopher before he became a neopragmatist thinker. Gradually he came to the conclusion that if philosophy is to be useful at all, it must be socially useful, weaving the fabric of a freer, better and just society. First Rorty… Read more

The paper discusses Richard Rorty’s views on intercultural hermeneutics as presented in his essay “Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens” and in his correspondence with the Indian philosopher Anindita Niyogi Balslev. The focus is primarily on Rorty’s presumption that instead of providing an “authentic” picture of another culture, the goal of intercultural studies or… Read more

Like his one-time teacher, Heidegger, Levinas makes a distinction between Being (Sein) and beings (Seiendes), but prefers to speak of ‘existence’ and the ‘existent’. Again, like Heidegger, Levinas understands existence in its verbal sense as the self-unfolding act of Being that is attested to in the manifestation of particular beings. Unlike his teacher, however,… Read more

The aim of this contribution is to show the Kantian concept of space as a hidden presupposition of Gauss’ geometrical treatises. First, the introduction of mathematization, origins of mathematics and geometry is depicted on the philosophical background of Husserl’s phenomenology as one possible interpretation of space. Further, Kant’s ideas on mathematics and… Read more

The paper aims at illustrating two different philosophical views on one and the same activity, namely a waiter’s job performance, in particular a waiter from the famous Parisian Café de Flore. The first view is exemplified by Sartre’s notes about the waiter’s behaviour in Being and nothingness [1943] which he probably wrote down just in that café. The second view… Read more

The paper deals with Aquinas’ theory of intentional forms, so-called species, insofar as it gives an account of the validity of human cognitive acts. Its focus is on the objectivity of knowledge and the basis of radical (Cartesian) scepticism, therefore the comparisons to the modern theory of ideas are employed. However, the author’s aim is not a defence against… Read more