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Ladislav Hejdánek: Meontology

Class at Faculty of Arts |
AFS500240

Annotation

The content of the course is reading and interpretation of selected texts by the late Czech philosopher Ladislav Hejdánek. We will focus on a group of his texts explicitly devoted to "méontology", which Hejdánek himself considered a basic philosophical discipline.

According to Hejdánek, ontology as a traditional philosophical discipline, the subject of which is "being as being", proves to be insufficient and in itself incapable of examining reality, as it is limited only to its external or objective aspects. If reality is to be philosophically thematised as a whole, without excluding its most essential aspects, the ontology must be supplemented by méontology, the task of which is to deal with those aspects of reality which, from the point of view of the objective approach of being, appear to be non-existent, i.e. in particular with its “non-objective” aspects.

We will not only get acquainted with Hejdánek’s own notion of méontology in the course, but we will also occasionally place this concept in the context of the philosophical tradition which Hejdánek both follows and criticises (Aristotle, Leibniz, Heidegger, Patočka, etc.). Because the concept of “non-objectiveness” represents the very core around which Hejdánek’s thinking revolves, the course can also serve as an introduction to the central themes of his philosophy.

In addition to already published texts, attention will also be paid to previously unpublished texts from the manuscript estate.