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Dieter Henrich (1927-2022) was one of the most influential philosophers of the German post-war period. At the center of his extensive work - even where it is not explicitly discussed - is the theory of self-consciousness and human subjectivity. Henrich has worked on questions related to this in a large number of texts for more than sixty years. However, due to the complexity and diversity of these texts, as well as to the fact that Henrich has hardly ever presented an overview of his theory, the connections have remained unclear to many readers. Gutschmidt analyzes the development of his position from its beginning. He deals with important influences on Henrich's teaching and addresses the central discussion of his positions.

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The book brings together the major writings of one of the most thought-provoking and original thinkers of the 20th Century. Her works were chosen to show her exploration of the many facets of human destiny and cover politics, society, human obligations and rights, culture and morality, as well as science, school-studies and labour, all of which are a meditation on human condition, as well as mediation to the spiritual. The spiritual as our destiny is explored explicitly in essays on suffering and joy, on the various forms of love, on God and the Good as they are in and out of the world.

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The common topic of the nine essays in this book is the phenomenological dialogue involving Kant and his ›invention of autonomy‹. Is there any relevance left to the Kantian notion of autonomy after the intensive development of ethical and phenomenological thought, stressing the importance of otherness, which, by definition, is beyond the control of any autonomy? What are the fruitful aspects of the Kantian idea that still deserve preservation and development? While the first three contributions are immanently Kantian, the majority focus on the relationship between Kant and selected authors of the phenomenological tradition: E. Husserl, M. Heidegger, E. Levinas, J. Patočka and B. Waldenfels.

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Friedrich Schiller was the youngest of the so-called Weimar classics and one of the last great representatives of the German Enlightenment. His work, interrupted by an early death and endured under difficult living conditions, ranges from medicine to historiography or aesthetics to poetry, but its anchor and foundation is philosophical thinking. Not only as an author of theoretical writings, but especially as a dramatic poet, Schiller preached Enlightenment ideals and developed their systematic anchoring in dialogue with older rationalism as well as nascent idealism and romanticism. The presented book, following on from the author’s works on Herder and Goethe, tries to synthesize Schiller’s thinking across all areas of his work and to fill a noticeable gap in Czech knowledge of modern German culture, in which he tries to show precisely the link between philosophy, literature and social development.

[History of Political Thought. III/2, Political Directions and Thinkers of the Nineteenth Century.]

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In this second volume of the history of Modern political thought readers will find a philosophical and historical exposition of political thought from the American Revolution until the First World War. Special attention is paid to the emergence of the modern republic with democratic representation but also ideologies and thinkers (Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Weber) whose work was fully appreciated only in the twentieth century. Separate chapters then focus on the development of political thought in the nineteenth century in Russia and in the Czech Lands.

(Early Modern Political Thought)

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In this volume of the history of modern political thought, readers will find a philosophical and historical account of political thought from humanism and Renaissance until various movements in the French Enlightenment. Special attention is paid to the origins of theory of national states, Czech reformation, right to resistance, religious tolerance, natural and international law, and the theory of division of political power.

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While Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787) deals with theoretical philosophy, the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) discusses his practical philosophy and presents, in its entirety, the theory of moral law outlined already in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). It also offers Kant’s definitive answer to the question of metaphysics, presenting the nucleus of his reformed concept of metaphysics. The second, amended, edition of Jaromír Loužil’s translation of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (first published in Prague in 1996 by Svoboda Publishers), prepared by Jan Kuneš and Milan Sobotka, contains corrections of various oversights and inaccuracies and seeks to render some formulations more precise. This edition also includes an extensive subject index.

The paper examines the complex relation between anti-democratic forces ("the extremists") and the broader liberal-democratic institutional environment. The task of containing extremists is analysed both from a theoretical standpoint and in terms of its practical feasibility. I argue that the realities of political communication and the character of political argumentation make containing extremism in practice a much more daunting proposition than is usually understood in the literature. Insights from political philosophy, political science and communication theory are brought together to press these points.

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Though historically important, the notion of tacit consent plays little role in contemporary discussions of political legitimacy. The idea, in fact, is often dismissed as obviously implausible. The ambition of this paper is to challenge this assumption and show that tacit consent can become a key ingredient in a theory of legitimacy. Instead of defining tacit consent through residence (where, according to John Locke or Plato's Socrates, staying in the country amounts to tacitly consenting to its system of rule), the paper explores a different strategy, delimiting tacit consent as an absence of active dissent.

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Eighteen years after Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason had appeared, Johann Gottfried Herder published an extensive and rigorous critique of Kant’s opus magnum. Far from being a purely critical study, Herder’s Metacritique is also a presentation of his own thought in metaphysics and epistemology.
Herder rejected Kant’s so-called “Copernican revolution” with its preference of the subject and considered Kant’s precritical thinking the better theory. In his Metacritique, Herder connects epistemology with philosophy of language, history and cultural theory with metaphysics and universalistic values. He criticizes the subject-centred and mechanist theory of his days and presents a keen and detailed analysis of Kant’s transcendental theory.