Annotation
The aim of this course is to introduce students to historical and contemporary social and scientific reflections of Europe and the West as a specific civilizational and geopolitical unit, especially from a philosophical (and a political) perspective. Students will get acquainted with basic texts reflecting the issue of the transformation of European / Western identity from the Middle Ages to the present, with a special emphasis on authors and works from the 19th to 21st century. Great attention will also be paid to Bohemian texts from the period of 1918–1989. After completing the course, students should be able to orientate themselves independently in contemporary discussions on the problems of Europeanism and related national identities, all within a broader cultural-political and philosophical-political context. All of this should lead students to deepen their methodological and pedagogical erudition, as part of the intentions of the study program in the philosophy of education.
Content:
● An introduction and interpretation of basic concepts defining European / Western coordinates in contacts with the "other" and the "foreign" from the Middle Ages to the present (Europe / Christianity / West / East…), and European self-reflection and its philosophical / intellectual context (Pierre Dubois, Dante Alighieri, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Juan Luis Vives, Tommasso Campanella, John Amos Comenius, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Henri de Saint-Simon, Giuseppe Mazzin, Friedrich List Smetana, Charles Mackay, Constantin Frantz, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, František Palacký, Victor Hugo, Ernest Rennan, Jakov A. Novikov etc.).
● The current philosophical-political-scientific discussions on European / Western self-reflection regarding the questions of tradition, values and identities and in relation to the functioning of the current institutional framework, especially the European Union (Ralf Dahrendorf, Ulrich Beck, Gilles Lipovetsky, Peter Sloterdijk, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Tony Judt, Slavoj Žižek, Niall Ferguson, Boris Buden, Ivan Krastev etc.)