Aither is a double-blind peer review, Open Access online academic journal. It is indexed at ERIH+ and Scopus. It is published by the Faculty of Arts of the Palacký University in Olomouc in cooperation with the Philosophical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. It comes out twice a year. Every second issue is international and contains foreign-language articles (mainly in English, but also in German and French). The journal is registered under the number ISSN 1803-7860.
Aither 15/2016:4-29 | DOI: 10.5507/aither.2016.001 
In my paper I am dealing with the problem when and in what form the notion of causality appeared in ancient Greece. It is mostly assumed that already the Presocratics (even the Milesians) dealt with causes. However, none of the extant Presocratic fragments mentions the Greek term for cause (aitia or aition), which is why we should look for the origin of the conception of causality elsewhere. The elaborate conception of causality is to be found in the Corpus Hippocraticum, whose oldest texts originate from the second half of the fifth century B. C. As the close analysis of the Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred Disease suggests,...
Aither 15/2016:30-45 | DOI: 10.5507/aither.2016.002
Popper more or less abandoned the field of Plato interpretation after 1945, restricting himself to a few corrections and additions and to mostly formal replies to Levinson and Wild. Today, his Plato interpretation is often neglected or considered just an oddity. I defend Popper against two objections raised recently by Jiří Stránský: that (1) his campaigning against modern totalitarianism is unacceptable as a viewpoint for dealing with Plato, and that (2) Popper neglects the dramatic reading approach. I show that Popper is in fact - regardless of how controversial his particular arguments are - not naive but quite sophisticated methodologically (and...
Aither 15/2016:46-71 | DOI: 10.5507/aither.2016.003
Aristotle's influential conception of the four causes may have tendentiously skewed our view of his predecessors, but even so, we might be able to discern in it the outlines of the original Presocratic conceptions. We could thus see the emphasis on 'origins' as, among other things, the archaic thinkers' focus on the origin and maintenance of life. These are, after all, the reasons which Aristotle himself lists in connection with Thales's conception of origin in the first book of his Metaphysics, where he discusses the connection between moisture, warmth, and life. Interest in these factors is characteristic for archaic philosophy. We can, meanwhile,...
Aither 15/2016:72-83 | DOI: 10.5507/aither.2016.004
The article explores the possibility of Aristotle's inspiration by tragic thought in the topic of cause. In the first part, the author presents a general exposure of the theory of causes in Aristotle's philosophy. The second part focuses on the issue of cause in Posterior Analytics. In the third part the relation between cause and chance is analysed. The author builds on his earlier exploration of interrelation between nature and the human world in Aristotle. According to Boháček, Aristotle's conceptualization of this relationship is the result of reflection of the older conception of fate and chance.Therefore, the fourth and largest part...
Aither 15/2016:84-93 | DOI: 10.5507/aither.2016.005
The paper is divided into two main thematic parts. The first part aims at basic characteristics of Neoplatonism in general with an attempt to point out the place of Iamblichean thought in the system of later Neoplatonism and to put the light on several innovative ideas which had been brought by him into the philosophy of Neoplatonism. The second part involves bilingual translation of selected excerpts from his work The Exhortation to Philosophy in order to scrutinize the usage and meaning of the term φρόνησις.
Aither 15/2016:94-109 | DOI: 10.5507/aither.2016.006
The presented study deals with one of the best-known medieval disputes on beauty and art. It tries to valorize possible mutual influences and relations between the main actors of this argument: Bernard of Clairvaux and Suger of Saint-Denis. The work derives from Erwin Panofsky's thesis, which states that Suger was, in his work, driven by the effort to defend his actions from Bernard of Clairvaux's complaints. The text tries, on a very limited space, to both present the contemporary discussion and to valorize the preserved sources, which are relevant in context of this issue (it deals both with the authors' texts and their correspondence). Last but...
