News and Articles

A recent workshop organized by the editorial team of the Contradictions journal highlights dissident concepts that are based on non-liberal-minded intellectual traditions. See our YouTube channel.

The spread of the Covid-19 virus has in many cases significantly affected the usual mode of scientific work. It has also produced new challenges for the existing "rules" for the development and use of technologies. The aim of thematic issue of the Theory of Science journal is to address the question of what is an "emergency situation" in relation to science and to do so from the perspective of studies of in science and technology. Call for papers.

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Christmas card pdf

Have you held an international conference in uncertain Covid times? Have you challenged a sequence of decisions whether to move it online or cancel it? Then you had to quickly re-order all the organizational ordering and to give a hard thought how to “translate normal physical conference“ into a virtual meeting of hundreds of people…?! Share experiences of your colleagues in a reflection written by Filip Vostal who talks about the preparations of this years´ conference entitled “Locating and Timing Matters: Significance and Agency of STS in Emerging Worlds.”

CONTRADICTIONS, billingual journal dedicated to professional research and discussions about history and presence of critical social thought in Central and Eastern Europe was included in Scopus, the largest index database of reviewed literature. The Scopus brings a complex overview of world´s research outcomes in science, technology, medicine, social sciences and humanities.

Continuous online reading from the works of John Amos Comenius called “Reading Comenius Universally”, which starts on Saturday night, is an original way of commemorating 350 years since this thinker’s death. Academics and enthusiasts promised to support this 24-hour initiative by their reading. Passages from Comenius’s philosophical and educational treatises but also personal correspondence will be read in 17 languages, thus accentuating this thinker’s world-wide renown.

A full-day marathon will launch on 14 November at midnight CET in Prague. Each fifteen minutes, the relay will be taken over by the next reader. Participating readers come from the Czech Republic, Germany, United Kingdom, Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, United States, Japan, Colombia, Russia, Israel, and a number of other countries. Most are representatives of universities, academic institutions, museums, but the group also includes for instance students and teachers from five continents. Just in the Czech Republic, there are readers from Brno, Olomouc, Ostrava, Pardubice, Uherský Brod, and Přerov.

Seventeen languages, included Kashubian
‘For the introduction, we selected a fragment from the Panegersia, or Universal Awakening, in which Comenius turns to citizens of the whole world,’ explains Comenius scholar Vladimír Urbánek of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, who organises this marathon together with his colleagues from the Department for Comenius Studies and Intellectual History of Early Modern Era. Alongside Czech and Latin, two languages which Comenius spoke and wrote in, his texts will also be read in German, English, Russian, Japanese, but even Esperanto, Kashubian, and other languages. Texts were selected from well-known philosophical and educational treatises such as Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart, Didactica Magna, The School of Infancy, from his textbook Orbis Sensualium Pictus or his pansophic works related to the idea of universal reform, such as Via Lucis and the General Consultation on the Improvement of Human Affairs.

This virtual journey of Comenius’s thoughts through the world will end at midnight CET of 15 November again in Prague. The event will be streamed throughout. Listeners can enjoy it live at Comenius online Youtube channel youtube kanálu Comenius.

John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) won world-wide renown with his pioneering works on didactic methods and education, which won him the epithet ‘Teacher of nations’. Still valued are also his writings on philosophy and theology.