PREFACE
This volume on human dignity is the result of a conference on the same theme sponsored by The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy (RVP) and The Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. It reflects a variety of philosophical approaches to the issue of human dignity. (Additional papers relating this to ethics and the foundations of social and political life will be part of Czech Philosophical Studies, III.)
The rationale of this scheme of research was twofold. On the one hand, the topic of human dignity integrates the organic core of the phenomenon of human existence or its intrinsic transcendence. This provides a solid ground for reasonable socio-political argumentation able to withstand the current wave of deconstruction. (Though presumably post-modern, this in fact is but a typically modern destruction of any coherent systemic and reliable basis for philosophy and the human sciences.)
On the other hand, Prague was an appropriate locale for this conference. Communist totlitarianism had constituted a project for the total annihilation of human dignity. In contrast, the new conditions of thought in this Central European capital provide an especially fertile, yet fragile, ground for endeavors to recuperate the genuine philosophical sense of human dignity. This is reflected in the writings of the mostly Czech contributors.
The two exceptions are symptomatic as well. Aviezer Tucker , an Israeli philosopher, wrote his doctoral dissertation in the U.S. on the Czech philosophical underpinnings of the Charter 77 opposition movement. He elaborates the thought of Czech phenomenological philosopher, Jan Pato
…ka, disciple of Edmund Husserl. Eventually, the Charter, as a cultural and political anti-totalitarian movement, gave birth to the new post-communist Czech political elite at the end of 1989.Vincent Shen from Taiwan -- itself a relatively new democracy -- extends the purview to the possibility of a synthesis between Husserl´s phenomenology of the human person and the Confucian tradition of China.
Thus, all the presentations converge in revisiting the traditions of the philosophy of human dignity in the light of the overwhelming cultural challenges and opportunities of this turn of the millennia. These it seeks to infuse with respect for the human dignity of individuals, nations and civilizations. To do so the chapters lay a common and substantial philosophical basis for diversity in unity. This expands magnificently the sense of human dignity beyond the old individualist and communal paradigms, opening the person first to society, and then to nature as well.
This work, then, is not just a defense of a minimal sense of an inviolable individual. Rather, in the sense of Charter 77 and for the new millennium, it is a proclamation of the dignity of human persons and peoples with their proper destiny, mission and responsibilities.
Miloslav Bedná
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