Discussion on the book A. Matoušek, Hlasy tvarů, Praha 2022

Conference Report

Czech translation of R. Rorty, Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism, in: Philosophy as Cultural Politics. Philosophical Papers, Volume IV, Cambridge 2007, pp. 27–41

Commentary on R. Rorty’s text, Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism

Obituary

Among all realities subject to domestication, fire occupies a unique position: it is the archetypal case of domestication. Without taming fire, no ordered sphere of the human world likely could have emerged. Within this order, it became possible to impose limits on plants, animals, and materials while at the same time assuming their own limits – or in other words, to incorporate them into the human world and develop forms of control over them. Fire is at once an invention and a device: the essence of technology and the first artifice through which nature revealed itself as appropriable, transformable, and governable. As an archetypal case, however, it contains within itself its own image – a reflexive quality it shares with imagination, with geometrical analogy, with motion, with the machine, and more generally with all phenomena that arise from continuity. To step onto the fiery ground is therefore to confront ambiguity, duality, and reflexivity – qualities that are the natural marks of continuity, and by which we may, in turn, impose limits and ultimately measure fire. From here, three paths of domestication can be traced: in imagination, in motion, and in machinery.

The paper examines Sextus’ concept of Pyrrhonian Scepticism, as presented in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Πυρρώνειοι ὑποτυπώσεις). Contemporary scholarship is in disagreement as to the appropriate meaning of Sextus’ work: whether the Sceptic suspends judgement on all issues, or whether he may hold some justified beliefs and act intentionally upon them. Proponents of the strong (so-called rustic) interpretation maintain that the Sceptic suspends judgement on all beliefs, whereas the more moderate (urban) view holds that the Pyrrhonian is capable of intentional action and that he lives an ordinary life, while suspending judgement only with respect to the scientific and philosophical beliefs of the dogmatists. For Sextus, it was essential to present the goal (τέλος) of the Sceptical school, which concerns both questions examined in philosophy and those of everyday life. The study proposes an argumentation scheme of Pyrrhonian Scepticism that adheres to Sextus’ account in the Outlines of Pyrrhonism and from which it is clear that the Pyrrhonian suspension of judgement (ἐποχή) does not concern matters of ordinary life, so that there is no reason to think that the Sceptic is unable to act intentionally and to live the same way an ordinary person does.

Book review on Jana Švorcová (ed.), Organismal Agency. Biological Concepts and Their Philosophical Foundations, Cham (Springer) 2024

Book review on On the Gods and the World. Orpheus and the Presocratics in the Derveni Papyrus, Oxford (Oxford University Press) 2024

The paper focuses on Boëthius’s verses on elements of matter and their properties in the ninth poem of Consolation of Philosophy, Book III. In this poem, while presenting the arrangement and order of the world according to Plato’s Timaeus, Boëthius described the properties of the elements in a way different from standard Platonic tradition. The paper assesses the possibilities of Aristotelian and Stoic influences on Boëthius’s characterization of the elements and the need of a mathematical bond among them. The analysis points out that tith regard to geometric proportion, the transmutation of elements, and cosmology, a more appropriate correspondence to Boëthius’s precise words in Consolation III, m.9 is provided by Stoic theories of the elements.