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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Futures Studies in the European Ex-socialist Countries FUTURES STUDIES IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC Frantisek Petrasek Some features of local futures studies ideology A paradigmatic base from which the local futures studies can derive their ideology, has some specific cultural features created in the history of the nation.

Such features can be labelled by the term “futurosophy” (like reasoning the logic used for thinking about the future or, in another words, like reasoning the ”futurology”) (1). The Czech futurosophy manifests via discrete ideas, generated in longer cultural history of the nation.

The first feature can be represented by teaching of Jan Amos Komenskì (Latin name Comenius, 1592-1670, the last bishop of the local protestant Christian church, expelled by Hapsburgs after defeating Czechs and their state, later acting in the northern and middle Europe like teacher and theoretician of pedagogy).

His teaching involves the thesis, that all ideas, which we create by learning, represent good information for the human being in case, that they are generated simultaneously with doing things. Doing things must be oriented by the Christian morality, otherwise ideas generated by that “learning by doing things” can motivate human being to act against himself.

His message represents challenges for various political reformers as far as they have to consider the future of the society strongly dependent not only on actual practice of doing things, but also on the “world of values”, which people implement in their contemporary decisions.

Futures studies, according to Comenius thinking, can bring adequate information for human survival in the case, that they lead not only to the creation of new structure of backlogs of knowledge suitable for exploitation in contemporary practice of doing things, but also to the establishing of values for practice of decision-making itself. The second cultural feature of the local futures studies relates to democratic conceptualisation of political problems.

A cosmopolitan and humanistic trust in an active role of human mind in creation of human future, which Comenius stressed in his idea of “pan-sophism” and which can be found also in many considerations of the Age of Enlightenment, was politically exploited 300 years later, by the first president of Czech and Slovak state, Tomas Garigue Masaryk, in 1918.