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Kalendář
The Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Education of the Technical University of Liberec profess to the idea of philosophy, as it was created in the ancient Greece, where it represented a universal frame of knowledge of all kinds. At the time of Thales was philosophy mainly a natural science and never later left this focus entirely; philosophy always meant to describe the whole of being, its structure and meaning. The term of philosophy can be then translated as a fondness for wisdom and knowledge, desire for these or devotion to wisdom and sciences; therefore philosophy represents wisdom based on knowledge. For present needs we can define the term of philosophy as a generalizing transversal branch of critical thinking, which is after all evident from the motto above. In transversality dwells even the real reason of having Isaac Newton in the logo. He stands for us as a symbol along with a crossroad of modern thinking: his person, which essentially inclines to delimitation of human position in the universe and a sense of its life, connects the heritage of antiquity with new truths and findings of modern period and modern science where the world of physics, cosmology, theology, anthropology and ethics creates a meaningful frame of interpretation that strives to what a present evolutionary science calls self-transcendence. Inevitable transversality of philosophy as a branch is the reason why department members at the time of its foundation chose the name, which can be read in the heading and that had never been changed, although there were many discussions about. We have always decided not to replace it with
a descriptive title "Department of Social Sciences"; description is always only a starting point of reflexion that should never lose sight of interdisciplinary connection and attempts at expository synthesis, which would satisfy not only pragmatically motivated need of knowledge but also desire for cognition in its deeper sense of the word. Such a cognition is consciousness of sense in the last instance, whatever we understand it; a sense of life is what we feel, without being able to express it every time, it is a feeling of meaningfulness of life. Life is not only a human life: it is life of everything alive what inhabits this planet, which have not stopped to be the mother Earth. Evolutionary science makes effort for such a cognition and interpretation of world; the so-called neo-Darwinian paradigm is a logic way out of a branch that attempts to be transversal and universal. The fact, that the department offers even religious subjects which, strictly taken, are not evolutionary oriented, is not in contradiction with this attitude; a present philosopher, to what extent wants to keep pace with his period and its needs, sees religion as an evolutionary conditioned phenomenon, i.e. understands subjects of this kind as a service for opinion minorities, where Christian denominations of the Czech Republic belong, and as educator's preparation for work with these minorities. We do not always have to agree on the meaning of this and that statement and book, or life and universe, but we should always agree on one that is where the heart of the meaning of our life, which will forever remain communal on this varied planet, is. Philosophy understood like this refers to tolerance and humanity which does not stop to be an inalienable part of professional competence for not only education branches.