Recenzent konfrontuje dvě knihy věnované Antonínu Novotnému (1904–1975), československému prezidentovi (1957–1968) a prvnímu tajemníkovi Ústředního výboru Komunistické strany Československa (1953–1967). Přibližuje složitý vznik první z nich, sepsané novinářem stalinistického přesvědčení Rudolfem Černým na základě rozhovorů, které vedl s Antonínem Novotným po jeho odstavení z funkcí a veřejného života v první polovině sedmdesátých let. Na rozdíl od knihy Karla Kaplana, popisující Novotného působení a vztahy ve vrcholných funkcích, která je standardní historickou prací s přednostmi i nedostatky, poskytuje publikace Rudolfa Černého značně subjektivní výpověď s řadou těžko ověřitelných informací z politického zákulisí. and The reviewer compares two relatively recent works on Antonín Novotný (1904–1975), President of Czechoslovakia (1957–68) and First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (1953–67). He discusses the complicated origin of the first of the two publications, which was written by Rudolf Černý, a Stalinist journalist, on the basis of interviews he conducted with Novotný after his removal from office and public life in the early 1960s. Unlike the second book, a standard piece of historical scholarship by Karel Kaplan, with its advantages and shortcomings, describing Novotný’s work and relations in high office, Černý’s publication is a clearly subjective statement with much hard-to-verify information from behind the scenes of political events.
The discovery of lungfish (Dipnoi) in 1837 instantly became a zoological sensation. Because of their amphibian affinities, these fishes were generally considered a transitional form between aquatic vertebrates and tetrapods. Due to substantial morphological differences between recent lungfishes and early fossil forms of tetrapods this position was later questioned and the main focus switched to the coelacanth and its fossil relatives. However, the advent of genome analyses has reshaped our views. After 170 years of intensive research, the 6 species of dipnoans now indeed appear to be the closest living relatives of land vertebrates.
The article offers a systematic interpretation of the turn to embodiment in continental philosophy based on the distinction of two different lines of thought: the phenomenological and the ontological. The first of these, which involves the shift of the intensional structures of consciousness into embodied existence, is connected with a tendency to the spiritualisation of the body. The second line returns to the theme of bodily substance as the element of thinking which is endowed with its own causal activity: this line rejects any analogy between embodiment and transcendental subjectivity. In considering the first line, the article works with Husserlian motifs, including the adoption of an Aristotelian analogy of sense perception and the rational faculties, and it traces the development of these motifs up to the attempt at an erotic reduction in the work of J.-L. Marion. In considering the second line attention is given to the link between Deleuze’s conception of the body and Stoic ontology, and to Deleuze’s radicalisation of Spinoza’s conception of the structure of the body as a scheme that is co-extensive with the ideas of the human mind. The article also tackles the question of the connection between cogitative and bodily happening in Merleau-Ponty, in whose work we find elements of both the lines that we have described.