Michal Bizoň

The paper examines some unpublished manuscripts from the literary estate of the renowned Slovak philosopher and translator, Teodor Münz (1926 – 2022). These manuscripts offer key insights into his spiritual and philosophical development. Through an analysis of two autobiographical fragments, the authors trace his journey from a profound Christian faith to atheism, and his existential search for God. The study emphasizes the decisive influence of Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy on this process, as well as its psychological and existential aspects. The authors demonstrate that Münz’s atheism does not entail the rejection of the question of God, but rather a philosophical quest for meaning, and later also a critical and open-minded search for God. The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of Münz’s literary estate in deepening our understanding of his personality and completing the existing view of his philosophical thought by incorporating his personal spiritual reflections.

The philosopher Martin Buber is well known for his emphasis on the singularity of intersubjective relations, preeminently dialogical relationship between individuals and their partners. In the introduction to his “programmatic” work I and Thou (1923), he writes: “There is no I taken in itself, but only the I of the primary word I–Thou and the I of the primary word I–It.” One might thus think it paradoxical, at the very least, to write about solitude in his thought. Yet, solitude is not just a minor digression in Buber’s writing on the philosophy of dialogue, but integral to its very development.

The year 2023 marked the centenary of the first publication of Buber’s philosophical-poetic classic I and Thou, in which he introduced the foundations of his philosophy of dialogue. To mark the occasion, Peter Šajda has produced the first Slovak translation of the book, which appeared at the end of last year. In the first part of the review study, I give a brief characterization of this most important work by Buber in the context of his entire oeuvre. In the second part, I outline the most important thematic lines of the book. In the third part, I make some comments on the Slovak translation and edition and compare it with the Czech ones.

Martin Buber’s The Question to the Single One appeared in Nazi Germany at a time, when collectivism in its totalitarian forms was at the height of its development. On one hand this little book is an immediate reaction to the social-political situation in inter-war Europe. On the other hand it is a consideration of the anthropological question of the modern man from the point of view of dialogical personalism. The paper focuses on Buber’s critique of both the individualistic and collectivistic doctrines of ethical relativism. It examines also his category of the “single one in responsibility” as a response to both doctrines.

The main aim of our paper is to identify the potential limits of Socratic dialogue in moral education. These limits will be identified using a) the original ancient writings preserving several versions of Socrates’ dialogue, and b) modern writing on the Socrates’ dialogue in moral education. We will determine whether these limits are to be found in the writing of Plato or Xenophon, or rather in the problems and paradoxes of this type of education. We assume that a historical exploration of the original Socratic philosophy will help us to more easily identify the limits and problems in moral education. However, our intention is not to reject the Socratic dialogue as such, but merely to point out some of the potentially controversial aspects of its use in moral education.

The paper deals with Martin Buber’s claim that responsibility “is the basic theme of my work in general.” As I show in the opening section of the article, his statement applies to the dialogical period of his work, but not the pre-dialogical. In the mystical phase of Buber’s thought there is no place for responsibility because the very nature of mysticism excludes that possibility. The incompatibility of mysticism and interpersonal responsibility is confirmed in the autobiographical fragment “conversion,” one of the two biographical moments I discuss in relation to the shift in his thinking on responsibility. The second is his relationship with his wife Paula Winkler, which profoundly influenced his thinking about the importance of love and marriage for an understanding of responsibility. I then explore his view of responsibility as a doctrine, which developed along with his dialogical philosophy. Finally, I examine his critical views on four basic ways of avoiding responsibility, which highlight the close connection between freedom and responsibility: belief in fate, individualism, collectivism, and religious acosmism.

This paper provides an analysis of Martin Buber’s not very well-known essay “Distance and Relation”, which is his most relevant contribution to philosophical anthropology. In the essay, which was published almost thirty years after the publication of his most famous book, I and Thou, Buber elaborated on the anthropological foundations of his cosmic vision of dialogical life. The central question is “How is man possible?” Buber’s answer is very important to the further development of his principle of dialogue in psychology (primarily his notion of confirmation) and philosophy of art, but it is not quite clear how compatible it is with some of his earlier theses from I and Thou. In particular, the relation between “distance” and the I-It relation is unclear. There are two seemingly contradictory statements: “In the beginning is the relation” and “The primal distance is a presupposition of the relation”. The aim of this paper is to examine these anthropological foundations and to elucidate this apparent contradiction.