Visnovsky Emil

There have been few attempts thus far to read Rorty through a humanistic lens. This paper is an attempt at making explicit some of the key features of his conception. My main objective is to show that humanism is integral to his philosophy and to explain what it consists in. I focus on Rorty’s secular humanism, which I believe lies at the center of his thought. In sections 2 and 3, I provide an account of key humanist sources, both pragmatist and non-pragmatist. Section 4 examines recent interpretations of Rorty as a humanist. In section 5, I focus on the distinction between the human and nonhuman as the central feature of his humanism. Section 6 outlines Rorty’s project to humanize humanity. In the concluding section, I summarize the key features of his humanism.

In this paper we suggest that the contemporary global intellectual crisis of our civilization consists in the fundamental transformation of the classical types of rationality towards the nonclassical one. We give a brief account of those classical types of rationality and focus on the more detailed description of the contemporary process of the formation of the new HTR which we label as nonclassical. We consider it to be one of the historical possibilities that might radically transform the fundamentals of our human world; in fact, this process has already begun. The paper mentions some of the main features of this process, such as formation of a new type of scientific object; new conceptual schemes; new logical and methodological equipment of scientific research; and new understanding of human nature, human mind, human action, and social order.

Richard Rorty interpreted religion as a historically constituted part of culture. As a philosopher, he sought primarily to understand religion’s socio-cultural nature and role. His approach was socio-critical, intellectually sympathetic and humanistic. The paper provides an account of Rorty’s key phases in his philosophy of religion. During phase one, he was primarily interested in whether, in a democratic society, religion should simply be a private matter or also one of public concern. During phase two, his thinking on cultural politics developed more broadly, and he wrote about ‘romantic polytheism’ and the future of religion, etc. In his writing from phase one, he portrays himself as a ‘secular humanist’ as well as an atheist and, in his writing from phase two, as a ‘non-theist’ and ‘anti-clericalist’.

The paper outlines the concept of the human being as homo biotechnologicus. This concept is just one version of many possible human self-interpretations, since human beings can answer their own fundamental question of ‘who are we?’ simply using their ‘human, all too human’ self-descriptions. However, technology is a substantial part of the human being as a natural being, and biotechnology is, moreover, its root. The biotechnology of today’s world means that humanity is set on a path to transcending its own human nature, with all the risky consequences that entails. The author considers these radical developments from the standpoint of posthumanism.

In this essay, Emil Višňovský and Štefan Zolcer outline John Dewey's contribution to democratic theory as presented in his 1916 classic Democracy and Education. The authors begin with a review of the general context of Dewey's conception of democracy, and then focus on particular democratic ideas and concepts as presented in Democracy and Education. This analysis emphasizes not so much the technical elaboration of these ideas and concepts as their philosophical framework and the meanings of democracy for education and education for democracy elaborated by Dewey. Apart from other aspects of Deweyan educational democracy, Višňovský and Zolcer focus on participation as one of its key characteristics, ultimately claiming that the notion of educational democracy Dewey developed in this work is participatory.

The "Practice Turn" in the Contemporary Socio-Human Sciences The paper provides an overview of the current situation in the socio-human sciences, which is characterised by attempts to overcome traditional one-sided approaches and look for new alternatives. One of the latest alternatives to traditional approaches in the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences is the "practice turn". It is the turn to another, non-traditional approach to practice but also to Aristotelian phronesis. The author gives an account of three main tenets of this turn with reference to both ancient Greek and modern conceptions of practice.

Pragmatist Conception of Participatory Democracy1 The paper considers the issue of participatory democracy which has recently got high in the European integration agenda. In the history of ideas, however, it has been a controversial as well as neglected idea associated mostly with Rousseauian and Leftist models of democracy. The autor points to the key features of participatory democracy such as the idea of self-mastery. The philosophical idea of participation lies at the heart of the pragmatist conception of democracy as developed by J. Dewey. Its functioning may be illustrated by the concept of "democratic normative community". This conception of participatory democracy as a broad social rather than a narow political phenomenon provides the framework that makes it both a vital ideal and a creative task for current global as well as local efforts to bring about the sociopolitical change.

The issue of democracy is alive once more. There is a growing number of works debating the current state of democracy both in theory and practice.1 In particular a pragmatist conception of democracy has also been revived. Not only has a Deweyan version of a participatory democracy become the focus but the intricacies of a Rortian version have also come to the forefront, from both sympathetic as well as critical viewpoints.2 Thus the impression that the contemporary world is in quite an exigent need of reconsidering—and perhaps even forming a novel conception of—democracy seems to be obvious, at least from a global point of view.3 Moreover, the fact that the idea or ideal of democracy still seems to be ..