Kapitoly z dějin politické filosofie v českých zemích 17. století – Šolcová Kateřina, Sousedík Stanislav (2021)

The book provides an analysis of some contributions to political philosophy that emerged from the Protestant and Catholic sides in the Czech lands in the 17th century. The first part of the book deals with Protestant writings from the period before 1620, whose authors (Georg Erast Tschernembl, Jan Jesenský) – often direct participants in the ongoing estates' revolt – built upon the ideas of Calvinist monarchomachists and sought to justify resistance against the Catholic ruler based on this theoretical foundation. Another significant thinker – J. A. Komenský, although primarily not focused on the political realm, addressed some political themes within his extensive work, thereby foreshadowing future Enlightenment tendencies. In the post-Battle of White Mountain period, thinkers active in the Czech lands engaged in the then-ardently debated question in scholarly circles of whether the existence of a so-called philosophical sin, i.e., a transgression against natural law, could be admitted, even assuming that there were no God. The significance of the problem lies in the fact that by admitting the philosophical sin, the foundations for the development of later, already secularized forms of natural law theory were laid. The authors show that scholars active in the Czech lands, Rodrigo de Arriaga and Jan Caramuel from...