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This study of the concept of glory across four different religions begins with Christianity. There the term 'glory' translates Greek doxa, a word which, deriving from a root meaning 'to seem', denotes 'outward appearance', and has in secular Greek the basic meaning 'opinion'. The New Testament, however, not only omits this connotation but gives doxa an entirely new one (radiance, divine Presence). Given that symbols are rooted in the experiential well-springs of a people, why did the Christian experience not bring a totally new symbol to birth. The answer is two-fold: (a) Christians took the word from the Septuagint version of the Hebrew Bible wherein it was used to translate Kavodh (glory) and (b) the meaning of doxa resonated with the Christian Encounter. It had first resonated with the Hebrew experience. It is this thesis that doxa was used by Christians and Greek-speaking Jews precisely because of its root meanings ('to seem' 'outward appearance' 'manifestation') and that these meanings, resonating also with the experience of Zoroastrians and Buddhists, are reflected in their ideas of glory, albeit within their different conceptual frameworks. 'Glory' in all four religions is related to man's experience of polarities: Immanence/Transcendence, Manifestation/Hiddenness, Presence/Absence, and it speaks of a Reality beyond appearance. Man longs for the Real; he seeks Self-transcendence. In the measure that he becomes 'selfless' he comes closer to that which he seeks and sees things as they really are. He grows from glory to glory until he becomes what he is. In Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism man is of the essence of glory.

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This diploma thesis is focused on the part of the work of important philosopher and mathematician Bernard Bolzano, which is currently rather neglected. It is his utopian writing On the best state. The aim of my thesis is to find out (through the analysis of the selected representatives of the utopian genre from the 16th to half of the 19th century and their consequent comparison with Bolzano's utopia), where to put the book On the best state in context of European utopian thought. In Czech literature Bolzano's writing is considered to be an example of rationalistic utopia of Enlightenment; however this statement hasn't been proven by deeper comparative analysis. That's why this diploma thesis tries to review this statement in order to either confirm it or define newly the position of Bolzano's book in the history of political utopianism. The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first one gives basic introduction to Bolzano's professional and personal life, which is necessary for better understanding of his political thought. The second part analyzes important European utopias of Renaissance, Enlightenment as well as the utopias of the first half of the 19th century. The main part of this thesis is the chapter three, where are discussed selected political, economical and social aspects of the...

This thesis considers how Kleist and Hoffmann’s fiction might be considered as responding to the perceived shortcomings of enlightenment. The two writers, despite the barriers of literary categorisations, have a striking affinity in their sense that notions of truth and knowledge are intertwined with social and political agendas, rather than forming part of some natural teleology. The thesis breaks new ground in viewing the texts within a more expansive discourse context as literary interventions within a broad, cross-society engagement with enlightenment, in its various streams and factions. The texts studied, I argue, represent thought experiments, not merely reflecting and re-articulating the influences of literary peers and historically significant events, but instead testing the real-world application of key enlightenment ideas. The driving force for this thesis is the need to locate their work more rigorously in relation to enlightenment thought of their time than has previously been attempted. This is not so much a question of retrieving past influences, as one of viewing their work as being in dialogue with contemporary thought. Moving away from attempts using Kleist’s letters to theorise the relation between Kleist and Kant, this investigation instead turns to aspects of Kant’s philosophy to illuminate the texts. Hoffmann’s relationship to enlightenment, too, is explored beyond the prism of Romanticism. Taking a more comparative approach than previous work on the two writers, I identify not only thematic commonalities, but also a parallel aesthetic, in which multiple narratives coexist and where ‘truth’ is manufactured by the dominance of one particular narrative. The notion of 'MÃ1⁄4ndigkeit', central to Kant’s famous definition of 'Aufklärung' offers a useful guiding concept for the investigation and captures the emancipatory promise of self-realisation and the positive trajectory of human progress at the heart of the miscellany of moral and political theories and philosophies collectively known as ‘enlightenment’. The latter refers not to the historical period, but rather to a process of intellectual emancipation and an assemblage of ideals and values. As an intellectual movement, enlightenment was not, as is often assumed, monolithic, but encompasses conflicting notions of reason, freedom, and how its goals were to be achieved. Not only are the certainty and consequences of this intellectual emancipation evaluated in the texts, but I have also identified a radical questioning of the paradigms of thought which condition our understanding of narratives. Both Kleist and Hoffmann’s texts are narratively complex, often with shifts in focalisation, jumps in time, occasionally, figures whose identity changes leave the reader uncertain whether they are dealing with more than one character, and depictions of events which resist clarification through conventional understandings of time, space and causality. This project seeks to reconcile these ‘blind spots’ with a broader critique of enlightenment, in which absolute knowledge is shown to be illusory and truth simply reflective of constellations of power. The spatiotemporal and causal frameworks foundational to rational understanding and used to make sense of the world are revealed to be inadequate.