Pascalovské meditace – Bourdieu Pierre (2023)

This Czech-language book, one of Pierre Bourdieu’s most important theoretical works, looks back at his entire body of work and sets out the basic principles guiding his research. Its starting point is a critique of “scholastic reason”: an attempt to uncover the social conditions that make intellectual work possible, especially the situation of scholé, free time liberated from practical pressures. According to Bourdieu, professional thinkers, particularly philosophers, are usually unaware of the conditions shaping their position and wrongly generalise the scholastic view of the world. This produces numerous illusions and distortions, including a failure to understand the distinctive logic of practice and an excessively intellectualised view of human beings. In his “negative philosophy”, Bourdieu challenges these philosophical errors and presents his own understanding of humanity based on his sociological research, focusing on aspects of existence that the scholastic perspective usually overlooks, such as the role of the body in learning and knowing, the historicity of reason, and questions of power and violence.