Although Basel book printing had a major influence on the development of humanistic studies in the 16th century, its import into the Czech lands has not been studied so far. This study explores books printed by a famous printer Johann Froben (ca. 1460–1527), and their representation in selected Czech and Moravian libraries. Using methods of provenance research, I have identified specimens that arrived in our territory not long after their printing, paying a special attention to the titles created by people from the circle of the University of Basel. My research has shown that although Czech students rarely attended Basel University until the mid-16th century, works by Basel University scholars from Froben printing house were available in Bohemia and Moravia as early as in the second and third decade of the 16th century. Furthermore, the books printed by Froben penetrated much better into the Catholic regions of Bohemia and Moravia, more open to modern humanistic studies.
The evolution of Marxist theory in the course of the 20th century was characterized, among other things, by the opening up of Marxism to other currents of thought. One such confluence occurred between Marxism and existentialism. Thanks to their humanistic interpretations of Marxism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Karel Kosík are usually seen as leading representatives of this interface. Both emphasize the social situation of man in their theoretical approaches, but at the same time also give consideration to the uniqueness of his experience and practical relation to the world. This study will try to show that, though Sartre and Kosík share a number of motifs in their work, they cannot be said to belong to the same line of thought. They might converge, that is to say, but they started from opposite directions. Kosík opens Marxism up to ideas from existentialism while solving them on the soil of practical materialism; Sartre, though accepting Marxist social theory, still holds to existentialist assumptions in which the individual is situated against the world and their social environment. and Vývoj marxistické teorie se v průběhu 20. století vyznačoval mimo jiné otevíráním marxismu vlivu dalších myšlenkových proudů. K jednomu z takových setkání došlo mezi marxismem a existencialismem. Jean-Paul Sartre a Karel Kosík jsou díky jejich humanistickému výkladu marxismu obvykle vnímáni jako přední představitelé této interakce. Oba vycházejí z důrazu na sociální situovanost člověka, současně ale ve svých teoriích dávají prostor také jedinečnosti jeho zkušenosti a praktického vztahování ke světu. Tato studie se pokusí dokázat, že navzdory řadě shodných motivů v jejich díle nemůžeme Jeana-Paula Sartra a Karla Kosíka zařazovat do téže myšlenkové linie. Oba autoři totiž vycházejí k onomu sblížení z opačných pólů. Zatímco Kosík otevírá marxismus podnětům z existencialismu, ale současně je stále řeší na půdě praktického materialismu, Sartre navzdory přijetí marxistické sociální teorie stále drží existencialistické předpoklady, v nichž je jedinec postaven proti světu a svému sociálnímu prostředí.
The aim of the article is to characterise for the first time ever the role of book culture in building the confessionality of post-Hussite society and subsequent generations. For such an extensive research goal, it was necessary to choose a broad interdisciplinary approach, making it possible to place social phenomena previously assessed in isolation into the context of the day. The individual passages of the article are therefore devoted to editorial models, to the archaeology of the printed text and the basics of reading, to the history of illustration and book printing, to language and bookbinding. It has been confirmed that book culture - created by the reception of manuscript and printed products - can be understood as a faithful mirror of a religiously pluralistic society. However, where modern historiography ends with the research of confessionality, the study of book culture may begin to reveal the much more general mechanisms of the individual and social mentality in which the religious-political process took place. The mentality of the readers (burghers and partly the lesser aristocracy) for whom the copied and printed books were intended, was negatively impacted by the remnants of Hussitism and by contemporary Utraquism, which coexisted in a dualistic symbiosis with minority Catholicism. These influences, which at the time were commonly referred to as “renaissance”, bound readers to the Middle Ages. The more massive growth of their intellectual potential was made possible only by the cultural restart brought about by the change in the political situation after the Schmalkaldic War of 1547, which met with a somewhat negative response in both earlier and modern historiography. However, through the study of book culture, we are becoming convinced that the bourgeoisie began to compensate for the privileges which the monarch had deprived them of through various forms of self-education and self-presentation, by means of which it revived itself from these medieval residuals and at the same time competed with the aristocracy., Petr Voit., Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy, and Stuart Roberts [překladatel]
Th e aim of this article is to update some of Engels’s ideas on the topic of the dialectics of nature and to bring those ideas into the context of contemporary developments in the natural sciences (especially biology). Firstly, we examine the question of the very possibility of dialectics (dialectical processes) in nature because, at least since Lukács, there has been a signifi cant tradition denying the existence of dialectical processes in nature because nature has no acting, conscious subjects. We argue that dialectics is universally present not only in the actions of the subject, which is an old-fashioned relic of anthropomorphism, but in nature itself. Secondly, we identify some basic problems in Engels’s theory of nature as it is described in his Dialectics of Nature. We are especially interested in Engels’s employment of dialectics as a general method of investigating the nature of physical and biological reality. We fi nd that some principles of dialectics (as Engels understands them) are not consistent with the fundamental principles of physics, such as the second law of thermodynamics. In addition, in the domain of biology it would seem quite diffi cult to make Engels’s Lamarckian concept of evolution consistent with his own concept of dialectics, not to mention with the paradigmatic Darwinian approach. Finally, we point out that there is a renaissance of dialectical thinking in modern biology that can be understood as a partial confi rmation of Engels’s intuitions regarding dialectics. Especially in the works of Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, and Stephen J. Gould we can see how dialectics was applied in their disputes with genetic and environmental determinists and adaptationists.
The aim of the article is to characterise for the first time ever the role of book culture in building the confessionality of post-Hussite society and subsequent generations. For such an extensive research goal, it was necessary to choose a broad interdisciplinary approach, making it possible to place social phenomena previously assessed in isolation into the context of the day. The individual passages of the article are therefore devoted to editorial models, to the archaeology of the printed text and the basics of reading, to the history of illustration and book printing, to language and bookbinding. It has been confirmed that book culture - created by the reception of manuscript and printed products - can be understood as a faithful mirror of a religiously pluralistic society. However, where modern historiography ends with the research of confessionality, the study of book culture may begin to reveal the much more general mechanisms of the individual and social mentality in which the religious-political process took place. The mentality of the readers (burghers and partly the lesser aristocracy) for whom the copied and printed books were intended, was negatively impacted by the remnants of Hussitism and by contemporary Utraquism, which coexisted in a dualistic symbiosis with minority Catholicism. These influences, which at the time were commonly referred to as “renaissance”, bound readers to the Middle Ages. The more massive growth of their intellectual potential was made possible only by the cultural restart brought about by the change in the political situation after the Schmalkaldic War of 1547, which met with a somewhat negative response in both earlier and modern historiography. However, through the study of book culture, we are becoming convinced that the bourgeoisie began to compensate for the privileges which the monarch had deprived them of through various forms of self-education and self-presentation, by means of which it revived itself from these medieval residuals and at the same time competed with the aristocracy., Petr Voit., Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy, and Jan Pulkrábek [překladatel]