Jan Sokol – författare

In this compact yet informative book, former dissident, occasional politician, software developer, and noted Czech philosopher Jan Sokol offers a way to teach young radical students about philosophy. Drawing on his own experiences, Sokol explains that one does not start teaching by talking about philosophers and theories specifically, but by aiming to excite students and from there leading them to think philosophically about the important questions that have faced humans for centuries. Divided into thirty short chapters, Thinking about Ordinary Things is a unique perspective on the teaching of philosophy.

General complaints about moral decay, however frequent and even justified they may be, are of little use. This book does not complain; it acts. Jan Sokol's Ethics, Life and Institutions applies our ever improving knowledge in various fields to questions of morality in an effort to enhance our ability to discern different moral phenomena and to discuss them more precisely. With few exceptions, moral philosophy considers the acting person to be an autonomous, independent individual pursuing his or her own happiness. But in the context of social institutions for example, in workplaces it is often an organization's goals, not an individual's, that take precedence. In complex networks of organizations, morals take a different shape. Divided into three parts, this book begins by exploring basic notions such as freedom, life, responsibility, and justice, and their relationship to practical philosophy; looks to the main schools of Western thought in the search for a common moral foundation; and reintroduces the forgotten idea of biological and cultural heritage an idea that could prove fundamental in addressing our responsibility not only to human lives, but also to the natural world.In a closing analysis, Sokol brings all of these moral concepts to bear on problems connected to the growing complexity of institutions, offering hope for a practical philosophy for the modern world.