Jan Záhořík, Linda Piknerová, Jan Šiška, Marek Hrubec, Valéria Bankóová, Albert Kasanda, Daniel Křížek, Veronika Sobotková

The book reflects up-to-date issues and challenges which the African continent expects in the following decades, be it demography, terrorism, trade and integration, education, or ecology.

Year of publication: 2022
Publisher: Praha Vyšehrad 
ISBN: 978-80-7601-641-5

Buy a book

Simona Castellano, Gabriela Fatková, Luigi Frezza, Andrzej Górny, Magdalena Izabela Kempna-Pieniążek, Eva Kušnírová, Julia Dorota Legomska, Lukáš Makky, Marta Kamila Margiel, Jana Migašová, Marco Navarra, Lorenzo Di Paola, Mario Tirino, Magdalena Wołek, Agnieszka Woszczyk, Jolanta Zabarskaitė, Agata Ewa Zygmunt-Ziemianek

This study carried out in the context of the ELEPHANT Project is a work destined to become a manual or a reference "white paper," with an enormously relevant social return, at least for three reasons. Firstly, it constitutes pioneering research on e-learning and distance learning. There are few texts based on empirical research on this learning modality and none of this scope, with ten universities in five different countries. Secondly, in addition to the large volume of online surveys, focus group interviews, and in-depth interviews of teachers, students, and didactic supervisors provided, all the material is based on matching criteria. That is, it is a proper scientific inquiry that, in the comparative analysis of the different Universities, provides relevant data on good practices in e-learning, implementation difficulties, and the openness towards tools explored during the pandemic. In addition, due to the methods used, this research supports an expansion to any other learning environment in any other country. Thirdly, the pandemic, a drama for many people, has also been an experimental laboratory for new forms of social bonding […] Throughout this study, in the extensive and generous responses of students, professors, supervisors, and academic staff, fundamental analyses are repeated, which allows drawing conclusions open to interpretation, application, and start-up. [from a review by Prof. Ivan Pintor Iranzo, Universitat Pompeu Fabra]

Year of publication: 2022
Publisher: Uniwersytet Śląski
ISBN: 978-83-966390-0-4

Buy a book

Barbora Pásztorová

Despite the large number of books and studies written about Metternich, there is still a period of his political career that scholars neglect to this day, the 1840s. This book offers an analysis of Metternich's German policy in the years 1840–1848 and thus fills a gap in Metternich studies. Analysing this period is important due to the fact that over the course of those less than nine years, Metternich lost his influence within the German Confederation. He represented a certain way of behaving – moderate, calm and reconciliatory – but it was an attitude which was rejected during the period of rising mass nationalism. Nevertheless, he continued to endeavour to steer this escalating nationalism, and by applying calming policies prevent it from causing armed conflicts in Europe. Since Metternich conceived the German Confederation at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as one of the pillars of the European peace settlement, the issue is viewed from the perspective of European crises of the time, from the Rhine Crisis to the Swiss civil war. Similarly, it presents his policy in a broader context of economic and social history. The book follows revisionist research on Metternich and refutes some of the clichés still associated with his policy.

Year of publication: 2022
Publisher: Berlin, Boston - De Gruyter Oldenbourg
ISBN: 978-3-11-076900-5

Buy a book

Monika Baumanová

This book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the precolonial to colonial transition in an urban context, by focusing on the changing distribution, character and role of public spaces and buildings. The volume focuses on three case study regions: East African coast, North-West Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula. The regions are selected to provide a novel perspective on the socio-spatial impact of colonialism on the public life of urban settlements, driven by different political forces, in different geographical contexts and time periods. The three study areas are also linked by sharing several features of urban lifestyle such as the role of trade and the influence of religion, Islam in particular. The intertwined influence of socio-spatial urban characteristics on public life is presented on a range of case studies selected from Africa and southern Europe. The approaches are rooted in archaeological thinking on the built environment as material culture and incorporate critical interpretation of ethnographies and historical accounts on both the precolonial and colonial eras. This volume is of interest to archaeologists and researchers working in urban history, anthropology, and heritage.

Year of publication: 2022
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 978-3-031-14696-1

Buy a book

Petr Jedlička, Jitka Paitlová

Objectivity is an essential concept with a convoluted history in both philosophy and science. Th is book presents a theoretical analysis and contemporary revision of the concept with the help of experimental philosophy. In recent years, experimental philosophy has substantially enriched philosophy by adopting methods from sociology, psychology and cognitive sciences, which have been successfully applied in many of its subfi elds, such as conceptual analysis or ethical decision-making. In this volume, these investigations are extended even further into areas concerning various aspects of objectivity, among them heuristics and biases, reproducibility, and the understanding of the nature of reality among scientists. However, it also defi nes some inherent limits to the implementation of the new methodology in philosophy.

Year of publication: 2022
Publisher: Červený Kostelec - Pavel Mervart 
ISBN: 978-80-7465-552-4

Buy a book

Lucia Spálová, Peter Mikuláš 

The issue of increasing migration is still relevant even after years of international efforts to address and stabilize the socio-economic increase in migration in the European context. The media are still the main source of information on distant topics, including the migration crisis, and are a mediator of people's access to social reality. Media discourses about migrants are essential for the public to form implicit attitudes towards them and can thus negatively influence the process of integration of refugees in the EU and contribute to strengthening prejudices among citizens. The publication presents a transdisciplinary view of the issue in the Trans-European context, i.e. in an area that has historically served as a buffer zone of migratory pressures.

Year of publication: 2022
Publisher: Berlin - Peter Lang Verlag
ISBN: 978-3-631-86275-9

Buy a book

Petr Lozoviuk, Martina Vítková

The beach is a very productive environment for reflection on several social processes and phenomena. In terms of purpose, it is not just a place for recreation, relaxation, or sport. In its complexity, it is a distinctive social space characterised by a distinctive perception and experience of corporeality and the presence of special implicitly perceived rules of behaviour. It is an environment in which social capital and prestige can be accumulated, a place of subsistence activities, distinctive forms of communication, and specific conflicts characterised by a high level of communication, which is not dominated by direct discursivity, although this too — that is, what is discussed here, with whom, and in what situations — has its charm in terms of research. It seems that non-verbal communication, whose prominent medium becomes the human body, is much more significant in this environment. The beach can be considered an environmental but also a unique social space where two basic principles characterising human behaviour are mixed. Aspects of personal intimacy, which usually remain hidden, are intertwined with otherwise commonly tolerated behaviour in public. Associated with this observation is a shift in the perception of the control of social behaviour and the rules for its formation practiced here: what is prohibited elsewhere is tolerated here. If public space is a "scene" for individual behaviour and private space is a kind of "backstage", then the beach can be considered a space that combines both of these characteristics. The authors of the monograph argue that the development of these and similar ideas is the focus of "beach ethnology", an original disciplinary contribution that seeks to reflect on the so-called culture of everyday life.

Year of publication: 2022
Publisher: Brno - Centrum pro studium demokracie a kultury 
ISBN: 978-80-7325-555-8

Buy a book

Jitka Bílková, Petra Hečková (Eds.)

Sepulchral monuments and historical cemeteries are traditional subjects of non-professional and expert interests, motivated by the understanding of the cemetery as a place where the historical memory of a certain region or settlement is concentrated. The historical cemeteries with its tombstones thus represent a unique source that preserves valuable information about the lives and fortunes of ordinary people, their standard of living, contemporary fashion, and the economic prosperity of the given area. Moreover, the tombstones themselves can be an interesting piece of craftsmanship reflecting the development of artistic production of the period. The book is critical catalogue of the exhibition. It presents the topic of historical cemeteries on the example of the historical Sudetenland, the area with predominantly German-speaking population and significant interruption of the continuity of settlement in modern history. The theoretical chapters focuses on some topics that have not yet received attention, such as the role of cemeteries in cultural landscape, poetic inscriptions on tombstones, photoceramics or cemetery vegetation. The second part of the book is arranged as a guide to the exhibition.

Year of publication: 2022
Publisher: University Pardubice
ISBN: 978-80-7560-447-7

Buy a book

David Franta, Ondřej Franta, Anastasija Iljinična Franta

Ondrej Frantaʼs Memories from Captivity were written in the 1930s in Jindrichuv Hradec (South Bohemia). They give account of exotic countries of Central Asia and of the journey through the Russian Empire in the course of so called Great War and the Russian Civil War between 1914 and 1920. Ondrej Franta entered World War I as a military chaplain of the Austro-Hungarian army, at the beginning of the war he was captured by the Russian army and got deported to Turkestan, imprisoned in Moscow and repatriated across the Baltic Sea to his native country. That was Austria-Hungary in 1914, but Czechoslovakia in 1920. The edition of the memories uses the latest version (1938) and includes editorʼs commentary, a historic and linguistic study, a vocabulary and picture documentation.

Year of publication: 2022
Publisher: University of West Bohemia, Pilsen
ISBN: 978-80-261-1111-5

Buy a book

Marie Větrovcová

This book is a collection of texts inspired by phenomenological philosophy (chiefly Patočka, Lévinas, and Barbaras) and Plato’s dialogues. The text discusses some of the key issues in the philosophy of mathematics, especially its foundation, in the light of the phenomenological investigations of existence, perception, and understanding.

Year of publication: 2022
Publisher: Praha OIKOYMENH
ISBN: 978-80-7298-556-2

Buy a book

Jitka Bílková

This book is focused on the life and work of the regional personality – Antonín Müller, the builder from the village of Nebřeziny in the Pilsen-North District. After the introductory part presenting information about his family background, studies, early career, work for the Pilsen municipality and public associations, the text concentrates on the Müller & Kapsa building company, whose co-founder and co-owner A. Müller was. The company was established in Pilsen in 1890 and its subsidiary was founded in Prague in 1904; soon, it became the best building firm working within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and competed successfully with similar companies active abroad; it specialised in the constructions of bridges and factory halls with the use of reinforced concrete. The chapters about Müller & Kapsa´s works are structured thematically and briefly describe the wide scale of the building activities and realizations of the firm: houses and villas, public buildings (schools, churches, hospitals), industrial buildings and factory halls, traffic facilities including great amount of bridges (the builders Antonín Müller and Vojtěch Kapsa were bridge construction specialists), water ducts and regulation works. The chapters are based not only on the published sources, but also on the materials held in the Archive of the City of Pilsen, State Regional Archive in Pilsen, State District Archive in Blovice and State Regional Archive in Prague. The information was also obtained from some period newspapers and periodicals and from the catalogues issued by A. Müller and V. Kapsa. As a supplement, the short biographies of A. Müller´s business partners, as well as the list of the company´s works are added.

Year of publication: 2022
Publisher: Praha Informační centrum ČKAIT, s.r.o.
ISBN: 978-80-88265-35-1

Funda, Otakar A., Zdeňka Špiclová

The book presents several open questions in the study of early Christianity. It is based on the conviction that in the religious studies of early Christianity, it is only possible to formulate open problems, but that it is not possible to truly base their unequivocal answers on reliable evidence. The nature of the sources available to scholars do not allow such certainty since they are texts written by certain groups, carried by particular interests, and not historical, unbiased accounts of events. Nevertheless even without definitive answers, this formulating of the problems and making some revision of the reasons for this or that solution is of value and an asset to the field. Although all scholarship on Jesus of Nazareth and the origins of the Christian faith is hypothetical and some distance must be kept even from one’s own hypotheses, it makes sense to ask what understanding of man and the world the early Christian texts present and develop and how they were perceived by their first recipients. Thus, the theme is transmitted to the next generation and helps preserve the very foundations of European identity. The questions the book raises concern the significant figures of early Christianity. The reader learns how diverse the picture of Jesus preserved in the Gospels is. Was Jesus ruthless, threatening with hell and damnation and radicalizing the commandments of Jewish law? Or was he a merciful herald of God’s forgiving love and a friend of sinners? Was he a wandering Galilean preacher from the lower social strata or an educated rabbi with ties to Jewish upper social circles? How did he understand himself? And what role did apocalypticism play in his thinking? These are all open questions that scholarship on Jesus as a historical figure must deal with and which cannot be resolved in any conclusive way. But it is possible to introduce which texts trace these conflicting interpretations of Jesus. The figure of the apostle Paul is presented similarly. In the chapter entitled “The Double Paul,” it is shown that even he from whom we have extant testimony in the form of authentic epistles remains in many ways hidden from us. At one time, he comes across as a rationally arguing theologian, at other times as a mystic and ecstatic man. Part of the book is also devoted to figures and currents not traditionally given much attention – James the Just, the brother of the Lord, the apostle Thomas Judas Didymus, and the Jewish-Christian groups, that in the early days of Christianity represented a serious alternative to the Pauline line of tradition. The book then concludes with the topic of the resurrection and the mysterious beloved disciple from John’s Gospel.

Year of publication: 2022
Publisher: Nakladatelství Karolinum - Praha
ISBN: 978-80-246-5170-5

Buy a book

Radim Kočandrle

Archaic Ionian cosmologies are among the most ancient attempts to explain the universe. They are conceptions of the Earth, heaven, and heavenly bodies proposed at the dawn of philosophy, in the 6th century BCE by Ionian thinkers: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes from Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophon, and Heraclitus of Ephesus. Very little survives of their own works, which is why we learn about their cosmology almost solely from reports in the works of later authors. Although one cannot reconstruct their cosmologies in detail, one can discern certain elements which all these conceptions shared. Especially notable is their ‘meteorological’ character: archaic Ionian thinkers tended to explain the formation of heavenly bodies in terms of ignition of evaporated moisture from the earth and the seas. Heavenly bodies were then described analogically to meteorological phenomena, which is also why they were thought to move only above the (flat) Earth. In this book, it is argued that the meteorological nature of archaic Ionian cosmologies and limitation of movement of heavenly bodies to the area above the Earth surface are but natural consequences of the basic concept of the Earth forming the lower dimension of the entire universe. According to this idea, the heaven stretches upwards from the Earth and the entire universe is thus limited to the area between the heaven and the Earth. Anaximander’s cosmology diverged from this prevalent explanation and forms, within the Ionian tradition of the 6th century BCE, an exception. One can also view the archaic Ionian cosmologies as the beginning of development of cosmological thinking in the Presocratic era. In the 5th century BCE, thinkers already tended to think of heavenly bodies in terms of concrete objects that could move also under the Earth, which was now viewed as a body in the space of the universe. This development may have been inspired by Parmenides’s formulation of the heavenly sphere, which was in a cosmological sense based on his notion of Being as an all-embracing unity of all there is. This notion led to the idea of space around a spherical Earth. The idea of a heavenly sphere and spherical shape of the Earth thus seems to have been the result of rational speculation, which ultimately spread and led to the gradual disappearance of the archaic Ionian vision of the world.

Year of publication: 2022
Publisher: Nakladatelství Karolinum - Praha
ISBN: 978-80-746-5546-3

Buy a book