Volume 68 (2013), Supplementary Issue 2
L’Individu et la famille

The terms “decadence“ and “family“ appear incompatible on the surface, at least after André Gide symbolically responded to Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart, Natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire by his novel Paludes, “a story of an old young man living in a log cabin in the middle of the swamp“. The majority of reclusive heroes of their novels… Read more

The writings of the French author Richard Millet depict the downfall of the western civilization as it has been announced already by Friedrich Nietzsche in his Thus spoke Zarathustra. In his essays and polemics, Millet expresses his discontent with the contemporary society explicitly, while the novels convey the same message indirectly. One such example is the… Read more

The article offers a brief analysis of selected 18th century writings dealing with education (especially the works of Rousseau and Mme de Genlis) focusing on the status of the individual and the family which they seem to imply. The writings in question are presented in the general context of the 18th century. The examples of pedagogical methods are given to… Read more

The paper deals with the problematic views of the Middle Ages theology and philosophy on women and the institution of marriage. The Middle Ages society gives the women some rights and privileges which make them free. It is mostly the family that offers to all women the place where they can profit from their nature of being a woman. Only in the family they can find… Read more

The contemporary scientific and media discourses point out to the crisis of the family: once a familiar place and a guarantee of a healthy development of individuals it is becoming to represent the very opposite of all these qualities: an unfamiliar, disturbing, strange and menacing place. However, in the past decades the unfamiliarity of the familiar is not… Read more

The relationship between the individual and the family is approached at first from the perspective of the formation of a person in the early period of her childhood. A child is first fully dependent on maternal care (or on care of a person replacing the mother). Later, at the age from three to five years the child experience the so called Oedipus complex as a… Read more

The article describes the little known and explored philosophical relationships between Polish and Czech philosophers during the Communist regime. Their main and rich expression was undoubtedly a long friendship between Polish philosopher and translator, Irena Krońska and the greatest Czech philosopher of the XXth century, Jan Patočka. The article examines the… Read more

What becomes of a person whose memory has been manipulated, whose identity has been wrongly associated with the Nazi movement, and who finds himself incapable of recalling a part of his past? The novel Magnus by Sylvie Germain traces back the quest for identity of the main character Magnus who is confronted with the mystification of his life due to the… Read more

The paper gives an analysis of two novels of Madame de Tencin, Mémoires du comte de Comminge and Les Malheurs de l’Amour, from an intertextual perspective bringing out the novelist’s literary inspirations. The novelist perceives herself as one of Madame de Lafayette’s “heirs”, therefore we point out to the apparent kinships of her novels with those of two… Read more

Philosophy was not really interested in the relationships between the individual and the family, which nourished literature. Indeed, the philosophers’ attention was attracted rather by society or State then the family, rather by individualism than individuation. First rehabilitated by Nietzsche, who reconsidered the condition of the individual, this idea assumed a… Read more