To celebrate the 85th birthday of the Czech-American philosopher Professor Rudolph W. Krejci, the founder of the first Department of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, we bring a paper by his student, currently an associate professor in California, Takashi Kato, who shows how respected Professor Krejci is even by people far away from his homeland.

The goal of this work is to popularize the philosophy of the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1920–1999) in Czech context. Even though he is gradually becoming one of the most discussed authors in the Anglo-Saxon world, Blumenberg is still largely ignored here. This work focuses on a key theme from Blumenberg’s theory of metaphorology and analyzes the history and development of human defensive reactions against alleged expressions of cosmic powers and their impact on human lives: heavenly signs, unnatural signs at birth or death of important figures, religious miracles, etc. In order to defend themselves against absolute forces of the universe, people have developed magic (homo magus occurred in human history) as a tool of prevention from cosmic interference, created new myths and escaped into their mythical shelters by means of further metaphors. In the final part, the work deals with the phenomenology of the metaphor of „stream“, used by E. Husserl.

The goal of the paper is to reconsider two incompatible stances on a possible cogni­tive gain from belles-lettres stories. Cognitivism is based on the fundamental state that a value of work of art is proportional to the degree of knowledge it brings. It is presupposed that a reader´s mental state before reading such stories is, in a way, poorer then thereafter. What kind of properties does such cognitive gain have? Is it a moral piece of knowledge? Or is it a piece of knowledge at all? A role of truth is mentioned. Two pros et cons arguments – namely Graham’s (argument about the cognitive value of the arts) and Stolnitz´s ones (argument about cognitive triviality of art) – are briefly examined. In the last part, a natural view of a literary cognitive gain is offered.

The author presents Hippolyte Taine´s conception of society and state, which are, in her interpretation as well as Taine´s theory, deeply interconnected. It is quite obvious, however, that Taine was a committed liberal. This follows from his explicit ideas on the function of the state, his ruthless criticism of the Jacobin phase of French Revolution and Napoleonic conception of state as well as the state in which he lived, because that state stemmed from the Napoleonic conception. In the second part the author focuses on Taine´s description of the English system. Taine sees both its advantages and drawbacks. Generally speaking, he finds the English system preferable to the French one. However, on the basis of the theory of race, moment and environment, it was not possible to imple­ment the English model in France.