Filozofia is an academic journal publishing original articles in a wide range of areas including metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, history of philosophy, social and political philosophy, and related disciplines, such as logic, methodology and ethics. Filozofia is double-blind peer-reviewed journal and is open to all authors, independently of their methodology and/or theoretical background. Filozofia is published 6 times per year: in February (no. 1), April (no. 2), May (no. 3), September (no. 4), October (no. 5), and December (no. 6).
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Introduction to the Monothematic Block: Heidegger, Daoism, and Intercultural Thinking Today
Miscellaneous (Scientific events, Critical notes, …)
Copyright (c) 2026 Kurt C.M. Mertel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
An Ethic of Empathy: Articulating the Normative Grounds of Dialogic Interpretation
Contrary to concerns that grounding ethics in empathy fails to account for normative ideals like autonomy, respect, and universal equality, a viable path towards an empathetic ethic advancing those values is presented. In the first step, the normative entailments of dialogic interpretation are articulated and correlated with Kantian ideals to define the goalposts. Avoiding metaphysical or transcendental groundings, we then sketch the profile of a hermeneutic phenomenology revealing basic and morally impactful phenomena as normative sources. Finally, the conception of a dialogic self can be shown to entail the cognitive potential to rightly respond to such phenomena. Empathetic capabilities entail a set of normative ideals expressing the rich value-orientations of a culturally sensitive yet universalistic concept of moral agency.
Copyright (c) 2026 Hans-Herbert Kögler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
80 Years of the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences as an Integral Part of Filozofia’s History
Copyright (c) 2026 Jon Stewart https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
200 rokov Maďarskej akadémie vied: Kontakty maďarskej a slovenskej vedy v dejinách a súčasnosti akadémie
Copyright (c) 2025 Laura Kladeková https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Lea David: A Victim‘s Shoe, a Broken Watch, and Marbles: Desire Objects and Human Rights
A book review of Lea David's A Victim‘s Shoe, a Broken Watch, and Marbles: Desire Objects and Human Rights. New York: Columbia University Press 2025, 328pp.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tatiana Sedová https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Daoism, Heidegger, and AI: Reflections on Technology, Alienation, and the Case Hypnocracy
This article offers some comparative reflections on technology and the alienating potential of AI. These reflections are inspired by theoretical affinities between Daoism and Heidegger’s philosophy. In particular, I focus on the work Hypnocracy that recently sparked an international debate about the notion of authorship and the problematic relationship between AI-generated textual content and creative writing. The main thesis is that Daoism and Heidegger’s philosophy encourage a critical use of technology that rejects a reason dominated by sheer instrumental usefulness without rejecting technology as a whole. Ultimately, both philosophies favor the passage from the uncritical exploitation of technological affordances as mere means-to-ends to a deeper awareness characterized by an end-to-means, i.e., the equanimous releasement of purposive action expressing an ethics of relationality.
Copyright (c) 2026 Rudi Capra https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Heidegger, Nothingness, and Presence: Between Parmenides and Laozi
This contribution reconsiders standard accounts of Heidegger’s concept of being as presence by tracing other moments revealed in his thinking of nothingness, emptiness, and the clearing in the context of his European and East Asian sources. Heidegger’s interpretations of Parmenides, early Greek philosophy, and of being as presencing (Anwesenheit) appear to assert the primordiality of “the one” and a hypostatized, monistic “metaphysics of presence.” This paper sketches a pivotal alternative thread within Heidegger’s thinking, most evident in his interactions with East Asian discourses, by outlining how a distinctive interpretation of nothingness, emptiness, absence, darkness, hiddenness, and mystery emerged in his readings of Laozi and Zhuangzi and in his dialogue with a Japanese interlocutor. Heidegger’s East Asian sources informed a key thread and model of his thinking that refused to reduce constitutive absence, emptiness, and nothingness to givenness, positivity, and presence or the logic of affirmation.
Copyright (c) 2026 Eric S. Nelson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Genealogy of Bakunin’s Theory of Revolt
This review study critically engages with Felipe Corrêa’s Freedom or Death: The Theory and Practice of Mikhail Bakunin. Although Corrêa works with the entirety of Bakunin’s corpus, he fails to adequately examine the double-negative aspect of revolt in Bakunin’s philosophical anthropology. My aim with this paper is to remedy this, vis-à-vis an exegesis of Bakunin’s appropriation of Hegel’s concept of negation, and its naturalized reemergence in a theory of revolt.
Copyright (c) 2026 Dominik Kulcsár https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Right Use of Reason in the Moral Theories of Aristotle and Habermas
The Aristotelian distinction between technical and moral reason, production and interaction permeates Habermas’s thought. But in moral theory, Habermas’s main emphasis is on the decontextualized justification of moral norms, while Aristotle’s focus is on contextualized judgment. The paper argues that Aristotle’s theory of practical wisdom could be instructive for discourse ethics. Habermas has not been open to this possibility because he has appropriated the neo-Aristotelian interpretation of Aristotle, in which practical wisdom is subordinated to traditional norms, an interpretation that neglects the role of reason in moral deliberation. Moreover, the contemporary ethos is impregnated with universal moral demands which, it is supposed, should guide our moral judgments. It is further argued that there are elements in Habermas’s theory of moral and social development which can serve a role comparable to that of teleology in Aristotle. The paper maintains that a possible way to strengthen discourse ethics by incorporating practical wisdom is to tease out the implications of the fact that both Habermas and Aristotle build their views on the human capacity for speech and reasoning.
Copyright (c) 2025 Vilhjálmur Árnason https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Auseinandersetzung: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and Intercultural Engagement
Heidegger’s relation to Asian philosophy should be guided by the notion of Auseinandersetzung. Often translated as con-frontation, this term plays a pivotal role in understanding Heidegger’s engagements with Asian philosophy. Auseinandersetzung (and related terms) can help us realise the changed perspectives on our own thinking that we derive from engagements with culturally and/or historically other types of thinking. Heidegger warns us against facile endeavours of comparing and contrasting, which, as a form of comparative philosophy, he sees as a kind of dialectics unworthy of true thinking. Thinking through the term Auseinandersetzung allows us to reflect more meaningfully on comparative philosophy.
Copyright (c) 2026 Steven Burik https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Aesthetic Dimension of Philosophical Works (With an Emphasis on Describing the Classic and the Inverse Model of Functional Configuration in Philosophy)
This paper describes the classic, contamination, and inverse models of functional configuration in philosophical works. Methodologically and terminologically, it draws on ideas from Czech structural aesthetics, which can systematically explain the aesthetic dimension of philosophical works without bringing them into the realm of art. Through the interpretation of texts by Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche, the study demonstrates how philosophical works can functionally activate the aesthetic principle to promote philosophical goals.
Copyright (c) 2026 Marcel Forgáč https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Introduction to the Monothematic Block: The Human Being in the Coordinates of Symbolic Structures
Copyright (c) 2025 Jaroslava Vydrová, Jon Stewart https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
FACUNDO BEY (Ed.): Hans-Georg Gadamer. Cuestiones abiertas / Open Questions
A book review of Facundo Bey's (ed.): Hans-Georg Gadamer. Cuestiones abiertas / Open Questions. Quito: Filosófica Editorial 2025, 476 pp.
Copyright (c) 2025 Martín Prestía https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Michel Eltchaninoff: Lenin Walked on the Moon
A review of the book of Michel Eltchaninoff: Lenin Walked on the Moon, trans. by Tina Kover. London: Europa Editions, 2023, pp. 256.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mark Coeckelbergh https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Introduction to the Monothematic Block: Socrates in the 20th Century
Copyright (c) 2025 Jozef Majerník, Refik Güremen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Metapopulistická demokracia ako filozofia interregna
The review study focuses on the philosophical interpretation and critical reflection of the concept of metapopulist democracy as developed by Michael Hauser. Against the backdrop of the crisis of the liberal order and the transformation of political rationality, it examines how Hauser redefines the concepts of the people, representation, and human rights in the conditions of interregnum. The text uses a hermeneutic-critical approach and shows that metapopulism can be understood as an attempt to renew emancipatory politics in an era of exhausted modern ideals. The study also evaluates the theoretical and methodological contributions of Hauser’s concept to contemporary political philosophy and its Central European context.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anna Mravcová https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Hegel and Gombrich on the Particular Forms of Art and their Persistence
Hegel’s aesthetics is not only organized around a developed account of the differing artistic genres (from architecture to poetry) but also articulates the importance of the particular forms of art (i.e., the symbolic, classical and romantic). The oppositions involved in Hegel’s treatment of the particular forms of art – particularly that between the symbolic and the classical – also have an importance for the twentieth-century art historian E. H. Gombrich, who frames their relation as an opposition between what he called the “incarnational” side of art and the “challenge to the senses” that he thought the symbolic art form posed. This paper compares Gombrich’s and Hegel’s views of these art forms and turns in a final section to an exploration of the post- Hegelian, post-Gombrichian legacy of these issues.
Copyright (c) 2025 Allen Speight https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?
There has recently been widespread discussion of whether large language models such as the GPT systems might be sentient or conscious. Should we take this idea seriously? I will discuss the underlying issue and will break down the strongest reasons for and against.
Copyright (c) 2025 David J. Chalmers https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Vasil Gluchman: Podoby sekulárneho humanizmu na Slovensku v 20. storočí (do roku 1989)
A review of the book of Vasil Gluchman: Podoby sekulárneho humanizmu na Slovensku v 20. storočí (do roku 1989). Prešov: Prešovská univerzita v Prešove 2024, 228 pp.
Copyright (c) 2025 Dmytro Tomakh https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Patočka’s Socrates and His Socratic Politics
This paper gives an account of Jan Patočka’s reception of the figure of Socrates. Patočka sees as Socrates’ most important insight his knowledge of ignorance – the fact that we lack knowledge of the most important things in life, but we merely have opinions of them. Socrates then questions and examines such opinions, his own as well as those of others, and this practice of questioning thinking is what Patočka calls care for the soul, and which he understands as the general form of all genuine philosophic questioning. The mature Patočka understood the entirety of Plato’s thought as rooted in his account of the self-moving soul, and this account as arising from reflection on Socratic questioning. Finally, I argue that Patočka’s decision to actively engage with the Charter 77 movement was explicitly motivated by the example of Socrates.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jozef Majerník https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Problém autonómie subjektu v Nussbaumovej teórii spôsobilostí
This paper deals with autonomy in political philosophy and theories of justice. The starting point is a critique of traditional, abstract concepts of autonomy (stoicism, social contract theory), which, according to Martha C. Nussbaum, fail to adequately respond to real human vulnerability and inequality. It presents an alternative – the capabilities approach, which redefines autonomy as a set of real possibilities for leading a dignified life. The core is a critical analysis of Nussbaum’s theory. It identifies three key tensions: between antipaternalistic respect for choice and the normative character of her list of capabilities; between the individualistic basis and the necessity of collective action; and between the emphasis on external conditions and the insufficient elaboration of internal, psychological barriers to autonomy. The article assesses that Nussbaum’s main contribution lies not in the final solution, but in the productive redefinition of the question of the conditions of human autonomy.
Copyright (c) 2025 Martin Foltin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Tatarka’s Community of God: Utopia or Realistic Concept of the Common Good?
The article examines claims that Dominik Tatarka’s concept of the “community of God” (obec božia), developed during the Prague and Slovak Spring of 1968, was utopian. Tatarka saw it as a form of communion (obcovanie) – a space for free and responsible interaction among citizens, independent of communist ideological control. This idea arose in response to two decades of negative socialist experience in Czechoslovakia and was halted by the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968. The author argues that Tatarka’s vision was not a utopia but a realistic ideal of the common good, which continued in the “revolution with a human face” at the turn of 1989 – 1990. It reflected values of humanity, human dignity, the moral right to a free life, its growth, development, and cultivation, as well as the values of justice, responsibility, tolerance, and duty to oneself and others. Its humanistic message remains relevant.
Copyright (c) 2026 Vasil Gluchman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
K autonómii a ľudským právam: je autonómia nevyhnutná?
The paper deals with the distinction between different aspects of autonomy. Kant’s two kinds of freedom are discussed. Regarding human rights there are interpreters who claim that autonomy and human rights are barely distinguishable and, by contrast, other thinkers who deny any relevance of autonomy for human rights. The author tries to propose a middle ground interpretation.
The Experience of Strangeness and the Possibility of Manifestations in Social Roles with Reference to A. Schutz and H. Plessner
The aim of the article is to describe the peculiar situation of a stranger and a homecomer from the perspective of what they have at their disposal and how they occur in social relations. In this regard, firstly, we explore the configurations of the experience, and secondly, the forms of performing roles in private and public space, diplomacy and tact. This is examined with reference to the ideas of liminal subjectivity in A. Schutz and radical artificiality in H. Plessner. Both thinkers drew from the phenomenological tradition and were concerned with questions of social relations, although they rarely appear together in theoretical considerations. The study does not intend to compare them; however, it does indicate how an exploration of their ideas can contribute to gaining greater insight into peculiar intersubjective relations.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jaroslava Vydrová https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Zouhar (2020) offers a critique of the pragma-dialectical definition of argumentation, drawing on model dialogues between cooperative speakers. I argue that this critique is unfounded. The dialogues in question do not constitute counterexamples, as the pragma-dialectical definition does not require the presence of an opponent, the controversiality of the defended proposition, or even the preexistence of a clash of opinions. I further compare the aims and values embedded in the pragma-dialectical definition with those articulated in Zouhar’s general definition of argumentation. I contend that the difference between the two is merely a matter of formulation and that both definitions capture an identical underlying concept of argumentation in the same redundant fashion.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marek Picha https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Feuerbach’s Anthropomorphic Critique of Kant’s Theism
Scholars have not noticed that Immanuel Kant’s theoretical and practical (moral) conceptions of God inspired the structure of Ludwig Feuerbach’s general account of God in his The Essence of Christianity and that Kant’s theism is a primary target in Feuerbach’s anthropomorphic critique. To recognize the role of Kant’s account of God in Feuerbach’s Essence opens up new vistas in understanding both philosophers on the origin, nature and reality of the concept of God. I conclude by defending the plausibility of Feuerbach’s anthropomorphic critique of Kant’s theism, although Feuerbach does not always construe Kant’s views accurately.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lou Matz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Neofregeovská reinterpretácia Traktátu a pojem holého indivídua
In the article “Frege’s Der Gedanke as a Rival Project to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” we considered the question of the explication of the concepts of fact and world to be the key difference between these projects. Tichý proposed reconciling the two by reinterpreting Wittgenstein’s complexes as abstract procedures that rely on the modal concept of the bare individual. Russell’s misunderstanding of Frege’s distinction between the sense and denotation of an expression significantly influenced Wittgenstein. Tichý’s concept of an abstract procedure closely resembles Frege’s concept of compound thought. We supplement Tichý’s explanation of the concept of the bare individual by distinguishing between two suppositions of proper names, de dicto and de re. This distinction brings us closer to Frege’s own distinction between the sense and denotation of proper names. Finally, we present an explanation that the core of the semantic error of logical atomism is the assumed tropism.
sense and denotation (reference) of an expression
Copyright (c) 2025 František Gahér https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
A Precursor to Dialogical Philosophy? Buber’s Ambiguous View of Socrates
Martin Buber’s reception of Socrates is complex and its emphases shifted over time. In the present article I first demonstrate how Buber included Socrates in his project of dialogical philosophy and depicted him as an ally in his confrontation with monological philosophical paradigms. Subsequently, I highlight those aspects of Socrates’ doctrine which Buber considered problematic, often discussing them in connection with Jewish spirituality. I continue by analyzing Buber’s ideal of dialogical education, in which his confrontation with Socrates plays a central role. Finally, I present an overall evaluation of Buber’s reception of Socrates, commenting on its development and dynamics.
Copyright (c) 2025 Peter Šajda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Conflict between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars and Kierkegaard’s Relation with Speculative Thought
In this article I offer a historical analysis of Kierkegaard’s early, unpublished theatrical work, The Conflict between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars. In this comedy, it is possible to trace a number of expressions that ridicule the philosophical view of Martensen, which in turn is associated with Hegelianism and speculative thought. However, I wish to argue that, if one pays close attention to some passages in Kierkegaard’s early journals in the 1830s, specifically the so-called journal of Gilleleje, one notes that he actually seems to agree with Martensen on several points. In my view, this would show that, despite Kierkegaard’s hostility towards Martensen in the Soap-Cellars, he was actually sympathetic to some of the latter’s ideas. This analysis would help us to better understand the philosophical position of young Kierkegaard, who, as it turns out, had a more favorable opinion of speculative thinking than is often thought.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nassim Bravo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
When the discourse on crises sidesteps the system’s shortcomings democracy is in a bad way. Institutions, social networks and individualism are to blame. It's the fault of the “radicalism of extremes,” or even of our powerlessness in the face of economic violence, which needs to be softened. Yet capitalism is founded on the division between the economic and the political, which makes it fundamentally anti-democratic.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nancy Fraser https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0