Between 1976–1986, when Lubomír Nový was banned from pedagogical work at the Brno Faculty of Arts, he would write “obituaries for the living” to celebrate their jubilees. They were written for “jolly narrow circles” so that the honored people could learn something about themselves while alive, as he said. We present an excerpt from a published collection Obituaries for the Living (Brno 1988) that was dedicated in august 1980 to one of his closest friends.

This commemorative essay brings back the 1960s, the time when reform Marxism flourished due to the work of the faculty members of the Department of Philosophy and Logic. The author also focuses on Jiří Gabriel and his colleagues´ work in philosophy of religion and religion studies.

The essay presents a brief overview of the three dacades of Jiří Gabriel’s publishing activity, as recorded by the author of this essay. The first decade – the 1980s – is characterized by organizing conferences and publishing symposia of presented papers. The 1990s brought great synthetic works. The first decade of the 21st century is marked by Gabriel’s focus on long-postponed themes from the history of Czech philosophy.

The aim of this short memorial is to point out a courageous act happened a few years ago. Jiří Gabriel, followed with his collaborates, succeeded editing an alphabetically arranged Slovník českých filozofů (Dictionary of Czech Philosophers), Brno 1998, including personalities representing German, Slovak (etc.) thinkers, bound to Czech lands. The Dictionary appeared in the situation after the revolutionary change in 1989 when a part of the society supported the Czech nationalism disguised in „searching the national identity“.

This contribution tries to show that it is not easy to present something as a “philosophical dimension”, to say nothing about its “national specificity”. For the young, philosophy seems to be like a “serpent from the Paradise”. The author remembers the late 1940s at the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University and, in three short chapters (3–5), concisely annotates the following decennia in the field. The last third of the 20th century can be characterized as a steep increase in scientific knowledge where the majority of ontological and epistemological questions were better answered scientifically than it had been the case with philosophy of all the preceding periods. It may be a contemporary problem to find something like a “key” (not only a “cue”) for one’s own life, something what has been called “wisdom”, or a “guide in life”. The miracle of life started a rather long time before the so-called Phanerozoicum. Mere speculations about life and the meaning of the Universe do not lead anywhere as such. On the other hand, ethics and the analysis of language can still be useful as “philosophy”. The Czech intellectual tradition has always conserved a deep interest in an interpretation of the social and cultural reality of the country. The Department of Philosophy at the Masaryk University has seen it as an exhortation to evaluate this trend for more than half a century. Philosophically, is it enough?

When professor Jaromír Bartoš suddenly died in 1972 the author of this essay lost the supervisor of his diploma thesis on Condorcet. With a new theme for his thesis focusing on the beginnings of Czech philosophical thinking in the early phase of national revival he approached Jiří Gabriel, who agreed to take charge. The thesis focused on an interesting figure of Czech Josephianism, the enlightened clergyman Václav Stach and his educative Handbook of a Folk Teacher, which reflected contemporary European philosophical ideas. The thesis was successfully defended and thanks to Jiří Gabriel partly published in the Proceedings of the university. This work is an expression of gratitude for the salvation and for the possibility to publish by a 1973 graduate and a committed teacher of philosophy and social sciences at Brno grammar schools.

To celebrate Jiří Gabriel‘s anniversary, the author presents the conception of rationality by Hans Albert, seeing some parallels between the two thinkers. Rationality, as understood by H. Albert, does not just cover a segment of reality. It is capable of sensitive and adequate understanding of all dimensions of the world, life and human life. Rationality is not ethically neutral. It can initiate engaged action to carry out what has been found reasonable. Rationality as a simple methodological principle bridges the illusory abyss between sciences and humanities. Rational discourse is not compatible with religious discourse – viz Albert‘s dispute with G. Ebeling and H. Küng.

Intellectual contacts of Polish philosophers with Jan Patočka date back to the 30s of the 20th century. They developed in the times when the phenomenological movement in Poland had already been established, mainly as a result of the activity of Roman Ingarden, which is why the interest in Patočka’s ideas and further contacts with him enhanced Polish phenomenological thought. In the newest history of Polish philosophy, the presence of Patočka’s ideas, including his original interpretation of phenomenology, has been little studied. – Polish contacts with Patočka were initiated by Tadeusz Kroński and Irena Krońska still before the Second World War. In the post-war years they continued and developed into warm bonds of friendship, mostly owing to Krońska herself and Kroński’s friends and colleagues: Bronisław Baczko and Leszek Kołakowski. Close relations between Patočka and the Polish philosophical community owe much to Tadeusz Kotarbiński. The ideas of Slavonic cooperation were close to Kotarbiński’s heart. He met Patočka in Prague, hosted him in Warsaw and in the 70s openly appealed to Polish and Czechoslovakian authorities to stop political persecution of the Czech philosopher.

This paper presents a short reflection of the life and work of Vítězslav Gardavský, who was one of the most important representatives of the Czech marxistic version of dialogical philosophy in the second Half of the 20th Century.

Voltaire criticized clericalism and religion. Not religion per se, but its superstitious forms. He found those in nearly all religions known to him (except for Chinese religion). Christianity became the focus of his interest. However, even the worst religion was, according to Voltaire, better than atheism, accompanied by a loss of the sense of moral value. Voltaire tried to design a new form of religion – deism. It meant respect for the supreme being, which is in its totality beyond human comprehension. We know, though, that the supreme being provided nature with eternal laws and us with reason and moral sense, which are necessary requirements for the existence of cohesive society.

A book of essays written to celebrate an important anniversary of Jiří Gabriel, a teacher of philosophy that the author is heavily indebted to, dealing with various approaches to philosophy and life with philosophy. It is an expression of gratitude for models of conduct and behavior of a man trained in philosophy, critical thinking and rational assessment of life situations, as well as an attempt to sketch traits of Gabriel’s personality distinguishing him from various, not always praiseworthy unwritten rules of common life in university society. The work is not meant to be a tract describing, assessing and classifying Gabriel’s educated work in institutionalized philosophy, nor does it aspire to be. The times of tracts shall only come and, as usual with tracts, they make living thought something it never was and wished to be. The work is a mere reflexion of forms of Jiří Gabriel’s influence on the authors life in the past decades of the author’s life; an influence far greater than Jiří Gabriel is aware of.

The essay recapitulates the life and career of Rudolf Krejčí, a Czech–American philosopher, born in south Moravia. Krejčí left for exile in 1949, first to Austria and in 1958 to USA, where he has been living for 52 years, 42 of which in Alaska. The essay reminds of the basic dates of his life, places where he has lived, schools where he studied, jobs that he has had and his work at the University of Alaska, where he founded the Department of Philosophy and Humanities. He has brought up 15 000 students there, held important academic functions and done philosophical research in philosophy of science and ethics. He has also lectured in Canada, England, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Greece, China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan.

The meditation focuses on the biblical concept of quietude, as described in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. It presents quotations from various editions of the Bible and offers basic etymological and semantic context which makes the content of the idea more accessible. Besides that the work stresses the revolutionary character of Christianity with respect to Judaism, Greek rationalism and Roman etatism: those at the social periphery mean hope for its future. The core of the work is an attempt to analyze the inner structure of the phenomenon of quietness with the following constants: seeming passivity, taste and decency. The content of the constants is distinguished from the ordinary language content by means of a confrontation with historical-philosophical conceptions.