Petr Urban
I am Senior Researcher and Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. I also serve as Deputy Head of Department of Applied Philosophy and Ethics, Vice Chair of the Board of the Institute of Philosophy, and Project Coordinator of the EU funded project CETE-P.
My research interests lie in political theory, applied ethics and phenomenological philosophy. My work has appeared in journals such as Frontiers in Psychology, Ethics and Social Welfare, Environmental Philosophy, Horizon: Studies in Phenomenology, Philosophies, Humana Mente or Filozofia. I'm author or co-author of four monographs including Social Cohesion Contested (with Dan Swain, Rowman and Littlefield, 2024) and co-editor of Care Ethics, Democratic Citizenship and the State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Unchaining Solidarity: On Mutual Aid and Anarchism with Catherine Malabou (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) and Play and Democracy: Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge, 2022).
I held Paul Celan Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (2013), Fulbright-Masaryk Scholarship at the Graduate Center CUNY (2013/14), National Scholarship of the Slovak Republic at the Slovak Academy of Sciences (2017), and Visiting Fellowship at Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University (2022).
Supervisors: Pavel Kouba, Miroslav Petříček, Virginia Held, and Mark Coeckelbergh
Address: Institute of Philosophy
Czech Academy of Sciences
Jilska 1
11000 Prague 1
https://dape.flu.cas.cz/en/people
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7029-5455
https://cetep.eu
My research interests lie in political theory, applied ethics and phenomenological philosophy. My work has appeared in journals such as Frontiers in Psychology, Ethics and Social Welfare, Environmental Philosophy, Horizon: Studies in Phenomenology, Philosophies, Humana Mente or Filozofia. I'm author or co-author of four monographs including Social Cohesion Contested (with Dan Swain, Rowman and Littlefield, 2024) and co-editor of Care Ethics, Democratic Citizenship and the State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Unchaining Solidarity: On Mutual Aid and Anarchism with Catherine Malabou (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) and Play and Democracy: Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge, 2022).
I held Paul Celan Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (2013), Fulbright-Masaryk Scholarship at the Graduate Center CUNY (2013/14), National Scholarship of the Slovak Republic at the Slovak Academy of Sciences (2017), and Visiting Fellowship at Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University (2022).
Supervisors: Pavel Kouba, Miroslav Petříček, Virginia Held, and Mark Coeckelbergh
Address: Institute of Philosophy
Czech Academy of Sciences
Jilska 1
11000 Prague 1
https://dape.flu.cas.cz/en/people
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7029-5455
https://cetep.eu
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Books by Petr Urban
Dan Swain and Petr Urban trace the rise of the concept through the policy agendas of transnational and international bodies, and analyze the reactions of social researchers to the demands of policymakers for a clear and operationalizable concept. They argue that the term is frequently used in a way that assumes broad understanding and agreement, while in practice it is subject to contradictory definitions and often loaded with various implicit and explicit values, which become masked behind a veneer of scientific authority and normative legitimacy. The more that social cohesion is treated as a single substance with a clear and uncontroversial meaning, the more it narrows the space for debate and contestation around both the policies adopted in its name and the understanding of the social on which it rests. In contrast, if social cohesion is to mean anything it ought to be understood explicitly as a contested concept, and actively subject to contestation. The book thus provides not only a critique of a popular concept, but an example of engaged philosophical criticism of social research and policy.
Play and Democracy addresses four principal themes. Firstly, it explores how the relationship between play and democracy can be conceptualized and how it is mirrored in questions of normativity, ethics and political power. Secondly, it examines different aspects of play in urban spaces, such as activism, aesthetic experience, happenings, political carnivals and performances. Thirdly, it offers examples and analyses of how playful artistic performances can offer democratic resistance to dominant power. And finally, it considers the paradoxes of play in both developing democratic sensibilities and resisting power in education. These themes are explored and interrogated in chapters covering topics such as aesthetic practice, pedagogy, diverse forms of activism, and urban experience, where play and playfulness become arenas in which to create the possibility of democratic practice and change.
Adding extra depth to our understanding of the significance of play as a polit- ical, cultural and social power, this book is fascinating reading for any serious student or researcher with an interest in play, philosophy, politics, sociology, arts, sport or education.
Kniha mapuje způsoby, jakými se psychologická koncepce vývoje subjektivity a emočního zrání, kterou formuloval britský psychoanalytik a pediatr Donald Winnicott, rozvíjí a aplikuje v rámci politických teorií. Sílící přesvědčení, že politické teorie není možné oddělit od teorií psychologických či psychoanalytických, se v rámci winnicottovských studií projevuje dvěma různými přístupy. Buď je možné obrátit se k Winnicottovi z kontextu konkrétních politických či sociálních teorií a užívat ho jako opory či inspirace pro zodpovězení otázek formulovaných v těchto rámcích. Nebo je možné pokusit se ze samotné Winnicottovy koncepce domyslet a rozvinout důsledky platné pro oblast sociality a politické teorie. Tato kniha věnuje prostor oběma strategiím. V první části postupně rozvíjí myšlenky Winnicotta až do fáze zcela konkrétních reflexí týkajících se sociálně-politických fenoménů, včetně demokracie, politického prostoru, kulturní zkušenosti a života v institucích. Odkazuje se přitom na texty M. H. Bowkera, A. Buzbyové, J. Elkinse, M. A. Diamonda, J. LeJeuna a D. W. McIvora. V další kapitole se pak kniha věnuje způsobu, jakým Winnicottovu psychologii užívá ve své teorii uznání čelní představitel kritické sociální teorie Axel Honneth. Poslední kapitola představuje přístup současné liberální politické teoretičky Marthy Nussbaumové, která považuje Winnicotta za klíčového autora umožňujícího formulovat politickou psychologii, jež odpovídá liberálnímu politickému režimu.
Kniha je příspěvkem k aktuálním debatám o sociálním poznání a sdílené intencionalitě u lidí a někerých dalších živočichů. Autor propojuje filosofickou perspektivu se současnými poznatky na poli psychologie a výzkumu chování zvířat. Na pozadí kritiky pojetí sociálního rozumění jako připisování mentálních stavů druhým bytostem objasňuje autor bezprostřední povahu sociálního rozumění, roli tělesného výrazu a příbuznost sdílení světa u lidí a ostatních živých tvorů.
Papers in English by Petr Urban
The chapter maps different approaches of play studies towards the question of democracy. It enumerates the reasons why researchers explore the role and importance of play in social behaviour, social cohesion, conflict management, cultural dialogue, or policy-making and democratic life. It shows that the context of current societal and political challenges urges the community of play researchers to revisit the relationship between play and politics, or the contribution of play to imagining and creating more viable alternatives for the lives of communities. The authors introduce the term democracy as well as play as polysemic and ambiguous. The chapter argues that since these notions disrupt security, clarity and certitude of academic discourse, they also activate vigilance, a knowing how to work with open concepts, an academic practice of democracy as openness. The chapter further identifies four domains where the intertwining of democracy and play seems in particular philosophically inspiring: the philosophy of play and democracy in relationship to normativity; playful activism and democracy embodied in urban spaces; art and its power to resist political and normative dominance; and paradoxes of play and democracy in education.
Over the last few decades, the ethics of care and, from a different perspective, the enactive approach in cognitive science, have put forward a strong criticism of traditional individualistic and rationalistic accounts of autonomy, cognition and agency. Both approaches have suggested a revision of these notions in terms of a relational ontology with an emphasis on the embodied and situated nature of cognition and agency. In academia, however, there has not yet been any attempt to focus on theoretical affinities between these two approaches or to consider the prospective consequences of merging their perspective. The paper aims at filling this gap by sketching possible theoretical intersections of both approaches and by demonstrating the significance of the affinities at the level of practical implications. I argue that enactivism and the ethics of care can be mutually informative particularly in conceptualization of the processes of societal transformation and in grounding the strategies of addressing the exclusion and discrimination of people who are stigmatized as ‘different’ on the basis of their various disabilities.
Contemporary authors who may be seen as actively keeping up the phenomenological tradition do not take a unified stance on the question. The main aim of the considerations developed in the following pages is to present several distinctions that should help us take a more flexible and all-embracing approach to the question of the justification, potentials and limits of interdisciplinary collaborations with phenomenological philosophy.
Dan Swain and Petr Urban trace the rise of the concept through the policy agendas of transnational and international bodies, and analyze the reactions of social researchers to the demands of policymakers for a clear and operationalizable concept. They argue that the term is frequently used in a way that assumes broad understanding and agreement, while in practice it is subject to contradictory definitions and often loaded with various implicit and explicit values, which become masked behind a veneer of scientific authority and normative legitimacy. The more that social cohesion is treated as a single substance with a clear and uncontroversial meaning, the more it narrows the space for debate and contestation around both the policies adopted in its name and the understanding of the social on which it rests. In contrast, if social cohesion is to mean anything it ought to be understood explicitly as a contested concept, and actively subject to contestation. The book thus provides not only a critique of a popular concept, but an example of engaged philosophical criticism of social research and policy.
Play and Democracy addresses four principal themes. Firstly, it explores how the relationship between play and democracy can be conceptualized and how it is mirrored in questions of normativity, ethics and political power. Secondly, it examines different aspects of play in urban spaces, such as activism, aesthetic experience, happenings, political carnivals and performances. Thirdly, it offers examples and analyses of how playful artistic performances can offer democratic resistance to dominant power. And finally, it considers the paradoxes of play in both developing democratic sensibilities and resisting power in education. These themes are explored and interrogated in chapters covering topics such as aesthetic practice, pedagogy, diverse forms of activism, and urban experience, where play and playfulness become arenas in which to create the possibility of democratic practice and change.
Adding extra depth to our understanding of the significance of play as a polit- ical, cultural and social power, this book is fascinating reading for any serious student or researcher with an interest in play, philosophy, politics, sociology, arts, sport or education.
Kniha mapuje způsoby, jakými se psychologická koncepce vývoje subjektivity a emočního zrání, kterou formuloval britský psychoanalytik a pediatr Donald Winnicott, rozvíjí a aplikuje v rámci politických teorií. Sílící přesvědčení, že politické teorie není možné oddělit od teorií psychologických či psychoanalytických, se v rámci winnicottovských studií projevuje dvěma různými přístupy. Buď je možné obrátit se k Winnicottovi z kontextu konkrétních politických či sociálních teorií a užívat ho jako opory či inspirace pro zodpovězení otázek formulovaných v těchto rámcích. Nebo je možné pokusit se ze samotné Winnicottovy koncepce domyslet a rozvinout důsledky platné pro oblast sociality a politické teorie. Tato kniha věnuje prostor oběma strategiím. V první části postupně rozvíjí myšlenky Winnicotta až do fáze zcela konkrétních reflexí týkajících se sociálně-politických fenoménů, včetně demokracie, politického prostoru, kulturní zkušenosti a života v institucích. Odkazuje se přitom na texty M. H. Bowkera, A. Buzbyové, J. Elkinse, M. A. Diamonda, J. LeJeuna a D. W. McIvora. V další kapitole se pak kniha věnuje způsobu, jakým Winnicottovu psychologii užívá ve své teorii uznání čelní představitel kritické sociální teorie Axel Honneth. Poslední kapitola představuje přístup současné liberální politické teoretičky Marthy Nussbaumové, která považuje Winnicotta za klíčového autora umožňujícího formulovat politickou psychologii, jež odpovídá liberálnímu politickému režimu.
Kniha je příspěvkem k aktuálním debatám o sociálním poznání a sdílené intencionalitě u lidí a někerých dalších živočichů. Autor propojuje filosofickou perspektivu se současnými poznatky na poli psychologie a výzkumu chování zvířat. Na pozadí kritiky pojetí sociálního rozumění jako připisování mentálních stavů druhým bytostem objasňuje autor bezprostřední povahu sociálního rozumění, roli tělesného výrazu a příbuznost sdílení světa u lidí a ostatních živých tvorů.
The chapter maps different approaches of play studies towards the question of democracy. It enumerates the reasons why researchers explore the role and importance of play in social behaviour, social cohesion, conflict management, cultural dialogue, or policy-making and democratic life. It shows that the context of current societal and political challenges urges the community of play researchers to revisit the relationship between play and politics, or the contribution of play to imagining and creating more viable alternatives for the lives of communities. The authors introduce the term democracy as well as play as polysemic and ambiguous. The chapter argues that since these notions disrupt security, clarity and certitude of academic discourse, they also activate vigilance, a knowing how to work with open concepts, an academic practice of democracy as openness. The chapter further identifies four domains where the intertwining of democracy and play seems in particular philosophically inspiring: the philosophy of play and democracy in relationship to normativity; playful activism and democracy embodied in urban spaces; art and its power to resist political and normative dominance; and paradoxes of play and democracy in education.
Over the last few decades, the ethics of care and, from a different perspective, the enactive approach in cognitive science, have put forward a strong criticism of traditional individualistic and rationalistic accounts of autonomy, cognition and agency. Both approaches have suggested a revision of these notions in terms of a relational ontology with an emphasis on the embodied and situated nature of cognition and agency. In academia, however, there has not yet been any attempt to focus on theoretical affinities between these two approaches or to consider the prospective consequences of merging their perspective. The paper aims at filling this gap by sketching possible theoretical intersections of both approaches and by demonstrating the significance of the affinities at the level of practical implications. I argue that enactivism and the ethics of care can be mutually informative particularly in conceptualization of the processes of societal transformation and in grounding the strategies of addressing the exclusion and discrimination of people who are stigmatized as ‘different’ on the basis of their various disabilities.
Contemporary authors who may be seen as actively keeping up the phenomenological tradition do not take a unified stance on the question. The main aim of the considerations developed in the following pages is to present several distinctions that should help us take a more flexible and all-embracing approach to the question of the justification, potentials and limits of interdisciplinary collaborations with phenomenological philosophy.
with preference for a person who can combine both.
Qualified candidates must have research competence at the level of a postdoctoral researcher/ assistant professor and be willing to relocate to Prague. This is an exciting opportunity for collaboration in a vibrant and collegial international community of researchers and PhD candidates in one of the world’s most charming cities. The successful candidate is expected to work as a core member of the CETE-P research team
in collaboration with the ERA Chair Holder Prof. Mark Coeckelbergh and the CETE-P Research Team Leader, initiate and conduct high-quality research, acquire external research funding, supervise PhD candidates, conduct outreach and networking activities and carry out other duties in accordance with CETE-P’s needs.
In addition, participants will have the unique opportunity to explore firsthand the environmental challenges at the Polish Turów Coal Mine, which is the subject of ongoing international legal proceedings. This excursion will serve as a case study, allowing students to analyze it through theoretical concepts covered in lectures and workshops, such as justice in decarbonization, principlist ethical analysis, and the involvement of non-human actors. Moreover, the program offers a hike in the beautiful Jizera Mountains, along with social events such as a farewell party, barbecue, film screenings, and more
CETE-P – a newly created research center based at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, established in collaboration with the ERA Chair Holder prof. Mark Coeckelbergh – is seeking to appoint a graduate in philosophy or neighboring disciplines to a PhD Level Research Position with focus on environmental ethics and/or technology ethics. Since the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Science is a research institution with no PhD program of its own, the position is to be combined with PhD study at a Czech university under supervision of a CETE-P research team member.
• human interaction and social change
• temporality and historicity of social change
• ontology of social change - between project and event
• traumatic effects of social changes
• conditions that enable formation or dissipation of a collective agency
• macroscopic and microscopic social changes
• social visibility and social invisibility
• new media, new forms of sociality and social change
• social change between phenomenology and analytic philosophy
• interaction between phenomenology and critical theory
• social change between phenomenology and poststructuralism
• a phenomenology of social change from the feminist point of view
• contribution of minority studies and postcolonialism to a phenomenology of social change
• from phenomenology to sociology of social change
Keynote Speaker:
Joan Tronto (University of Minnesota, USA)
Conference Theme:
Despite its relatively short history, the moral theory known as “the ethics of care” or “care ethics” has become an influential current of contemporary moral thought. Soon after the first articulation of care ethics in the 1980s, care ethicists identified care as a crucial concept in political and social philosophy. In Moral Boundaries (1993), Joan Tronto criticized the traditional boundary between ethics and politics and made a case for placing care at the center of the political life. This argument laid ground for a dynamically developing exploration of the implications of care theory for a variety of political issues, such as welfare policy, public health care, education system, criminal justice, national security, international relations, etc. In her most recent book Caring Democracy (2013), Tronto breaks new ground by applying the theory of care to democratic theory.
The aim of the conference is to elaborate on Tronto’s invitation to rethink the very substance of democracy from the care perspective. The participants will enjoy the opportunity to discuss a variety of questions opened up by Tronto’s application of care theory to democratic theory.
In this paper I argue by drawing on Didier Fassin’s ethnography of the state and a recent proposal for a public ethics of care (Stensöta 2015) that it is vital for the development of a care politics to shift the focus from the abstract idea of the state and democracy to the ordinary functioning of public institutions and the practices of agents within these institutions. In particular, I aim to discuss Joan Tronto’s (2010) and Sophie Bourgault’s (2017) idea of caring public institutions and explore its applicability to the realm of the state’s government of precarious populations and spaces, i.e. to the very ‘heart of the state’ as Fassin puts it. It is my hypothesis that caring government of precarity requires not only desirable policies of ‘the caring welfare state’ (Engster 2015) but also an appropriate design of public institutions and highly developed ethical skills of public servants working within these institutions.
https://ecpr.eu/Events/EventDetails.aspx?EventID=115
To revisit and reassess the account of language at the origins of Husserl’s phenomenology with a special focus on the Logical Investigations
Main thesis:
There is an ambivalence in Husserl’s discussion of language in the Logical Investigations: On the one hand, Husserl is concerned with language as one of the most important symbolic systems and a requisite for scientific knowledge, emphasizing the role of linguistic discussions as ‘the philosophically indispensable preparations for the building of pure logic’; On the other hand, he applies the idea of a fundamental distinction between the realm of ideal and real being to his views on logic, science and language, which finally leads him to interpret the relationship between logic, scientific language and language as an inessential one.
More than 20 years ago, Linda McAlister, an attentive feminist interpreter, posed the question whether Stein’s thought on woman is worth studying – not merely for its historical interest but for what it can contribute to current debates on feminist theory and philosophy. McAlister provided sound reasons for a positive answer. In this talk, my aim is to add some fresh arguments in support of a positive answer, with a special focus on Stein’s phenomenological contribution to feminist thought. In particular, I apply Sara Heinämaa’s recent take on phenomenology of sexual difference, in order to offer a new line of interpretation of Stein’s ideas concerning the difference between man and woman.
In the second part of the talk, I will focus especially on the eminent place of play in caring practices: play as a culturally universal and essential medium of responsible parenting, artistic praxis, as an efficient tool in caring professions etc. I will hypothesize that the dimension of play with its specific ethical traits has been so far under-appreciated in the ethics of care, and that its profound reflection in dialogue with the philosophy of play may also promote important progress in the discourse of care ethics.
Description of the book:
In recent decades ‘social cohesion’ has emerged as a major concern of states, policymakers and researchers. ‘Social cohesion’ is represented as a desirable policy goal and as the basis for everything from economic growth to individual well-being. At the same time, it is increasingly presented as a single substance, which can be measured, tracked, and compared across diverse societies. But why should we think of the complex ways in which we can live well together in terms of a single substance? Social Cohesion Contested challenges this way of thinking, suggesting that ‘social cohesion’ has become a buzzword that obscures more than it illuminates.
Dan Swain and Petr Urban trace the rise of the concept through the policy agendas of transnational and international bodies, and analyze the reactions of social researchers to the demands of policymakers for a clear and operationalizable concept. They argue that the term is frequently used in a way that assumes broad understanding and agreement, while in practice it is subject to contradictory definitions and often loaded with various implicit and explicit values, which become masked behind a veneer of scientific authority and normative legitimacy. The more that ‘social cohesion’ is treated as a single substance with a clear and uncontroversial meaning, the more it narrows the space for debate and contestation around both the policies adopted in its name and the understanding of the social on which it rests. In contrast, if ‘social cohesion’ is to mean anything it ought to be understood explicitly as a contested concept, and actively subject to contestation. The book thus provides not only a critique of a popular concept, but an example of engaged philosophical criticism of social research and policy.
How can we consider human subjectivity as ethical, granted that human beings are essentially interdependent, self-opaque, vulnerable and ambivalent in their emotions? The aim of this paper is to tackle the question against the background of the relational notion of subjectivity developed in the ethics of care. First, we analyse Carol Gilligan's theory of moral development and focus on its underlying notion of relational subjectivity. Further, we revise some of Gilligan's ideas with the help of the object relations theory and Donald Winnicott's concept of transitive space of play in particular. Finally, we show how Winnicott's view of the role of play in human development, especially its capacity to be transformative, joyful, binding and critical, enriches the notion of relational subjectivity and its ethical implications as studied by care ethicists.
Tato recenzní studie se zaměřuje na dva nedávno vydané sborníky příspěvků k fenomenologii sociality. Článek dokládá, že editorům a autorům obou publikací se podařilo představit a nově zhodnotit bohaté zdroje, které nabízí klasická fenomenologie ve vztahu k problematice sociality, a to ve všech jejích klíčových aspektech kognitivních, intencionálních, afektivních, morálních a sociálně-politických. Článek se také pokouší zasadit fenomenologické analýzy do kontextu současné analyticky orientované filosofie sociality a doložit jejich relevanci pro aktuální diskuse o sociální ontologii, kolektivní intencionalitě a kolektivním jednání. V závěru je pak formulováno několik kritických otázek vůči oběma sledovaným publikacím.