Aims & Activities

The Center for the Study of Language, Mind and Society (LMS Center) functions as a research center at the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences with the generous support of the Philosophical Faculty, University of Hradec Králové. The main activity of the LMS Center is the organization of lectures, conferences, and seminars, which feature both prominent experts in the field of philosophy and the empirical sciences, as well as members of the department; and the publishing of related materials. Another important activity of the Center is to help doctoral students make their way into academic life, both by involving them in the organization of events, and by giving them a chance to present their research.

By organizing lectures, the LMS Center aims to increase the level of education in the humanities at the University of Hradec Králové, and to provide students of philosophy and other disciplines with the opportunity to connect with leading experts in their fields, participate in discussions about new knowledge, and comprehend the foundations of scientific work. In addition to the traditional Wednesday seminars, the LMS Center participates in the organization of a biennial conference “Hradec Philosophical Days”, and cooperates closely with the editorial team of the journal Filosofie Dnes (Philosophy Today). The LMS Center also brings its activities closer to a public audience through social networks, and by publishing lectures on its YouTube channel.

The aim of the LMS Center is to promote interdisciplinary research, connecting philosophy with the scientific disciplines whose results are relevant to understanding the nature and principles of the human mind, human language, and human society. In the spirit of the university’s original mission, the LMS Center seeks to overcome the significant atomization of human knowledge, and the resulting atomization of university education, by focusing on finding links between philosophy and other humanities on the one hand, and natural and technical sciences on the other. One of our goals is, for example, to examine the extent to which philosophical and social-scientific views on the functioning of human society are interconnected with the findings of the special sciences, such as evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and cybernetics. The activities of the LMS Center should also help to dispel the prejudice that philosophy is only a speculative discipline, far away from empirical reality and from other forms of knowledge, and thus to stimulate interaction between philosophy, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Consequently it should, on one hand, increase the interest of philosophers and students of philosophy in the results of the special sciences relevant for philosophical topics (such as the nature of mind, language, and society) and, on the other hand, present philosophy as a discipline which differs from the special sciences only in its attempt to generalize, clarify, and unify the results of the sciences.