he paper quantitatively analyses a sample of 300 Czech prayer books and other popular religious handwritten material (not including songbooks) from the 18th and 19th centuries. The author maintains that most of the material consisted of (partial) transcriptions of popular printed books and their widespread popularity was influenced by the growth of literacy and the individualization of piety. Their use was by no means limited to the milieu of the secret non-Catholics which were proscribed until 1781; indeed the majority of Catholic writings were not fully orthodox. The character and decoration of the writings in question were not directly related to the confessional nature of their originators and/or users; in fact the general rules of early modern popular culture played a much more important role and in many cases it is difficult to determine whether the source is catholic, protestant or sectarian. Prayer books fully reflected official forms of religion relatively late i.e. from the tum of the 18th and 19th centuries as a result of church domination over popular piety. However, even at this time the process did not result in absolutes: religious writings substituted the non-existence of baroque literature the printing of which was prohibited by the enlightened censorship prevalent at the time. Only a change in religious forms and new opportunities for the printing of pre-enlightenment books in the mid-19th century led to a decline in handwritten prayer books.
The study situates the events that took place on the Czech borderland on March 4th, 1919 into a greater historical context and refers to the usage of the imagery of the fallen Czech German protestors in contemporary literature. and Článek zahrnuje poznámkový aparát pod čarou
The author of this article reacts to a discussion study by Radim Šíp “How to Revive ‘Frozen’ Evolutionary Ontology” (Filosofický časopis, 62, 2014, No. 3). He argues that Šíp’s critique is unacceptable, as is his proposal for a radical reform of the doctrine of Josef Šmajs. He draws attention to Šíp’s misinterpretation of the evolutionary-ontological theory of information and to the consequences of this misinterpretation for the other arguments in Šíp’s text. Šmajs‘ diagnosis of the problematic relation of culture and nature consists in a cleavage between natural information (structural and semantic) and socio-cultural information (semantic and structural). Šíp, however, mistakenly supposes that in evolutionary ontology there is an opposition between semantic, experiential information (natural and cultural) on the one hand and structural, genetic information (natural) on the other. It is only because of this misinterpretation that Šíp can treat the conflict between culture and nature as a conflict between man and nature, subject and object. Only thus can he treat evolutionary ontology as early-modern metaphysics and call for the recognition of a greater continuity between nature and culture – for the “appreciation” of allegedly unappreciated socio-cultural information.
The study is a computer-assisted text analysis of corpora obtained from the web pages of nine volunteer, non-governmental organisations and interest groups. The analysis encompasses three areas of justice claims: trade unions (the relationship between employers and employees), feminism (the relationship between men and women), and human rights (the relationship between citizens, foreign nationals, and the state). The aim of the study, based on Foucaultian concepts, is to determine whether media communications are structured by the formative impact of the discourse of claim-making or justice. The main findings relate both to the content and the structure of textual production. First, the organisations examined do not make frequent use of normatively loaded words in their statements. The matter of justice is implicit in their texts. Second, the structure of the statements, represented by the thirty most frequently used words, exhibits a common pattern in all three areas studied. At the one end of the 'statement spectrum', there are words referring to the social situation of the contesting actors ('background'), while at the opposite end, words used in reference to their 'battlefield' (claim-making, bargaining and decision making) appear. This polar structure supports the hypothesis that the media communications of selected activist groups are influenced by the discourse of claim-making or justice.
The article analyses the “Iron Curtain” as a Czech site of memory.
The official communist narrative denied the Western term “Iron Curtain” and asserted the legalistic argumentation of “state borders protection” supported by nationalistic and ideological arguments. After the fall of the regime in 1989 and the opening of the state borders, the Western “Iron Curtain” paradigm was adopted by the democratizing Czech society whereas the communist narrative
became marginalised. It did not disappear, though, and both interpretations, the “Iron Curtain” as a central part of the new mainstream discourse and the “state border protection” as a peripheral part of post-communist memory, have remained alive side by side. and Článek zahrnuje poznámkový aparát pod čarou