Just out: Simplicity and Reality: Insights Into the Challenging World of Enquiry and Progress

Political Science alumnus, Oldrich Bubak, and his colleagues have recently released an edited volume entitled, 'Simplicity and Reality'. The innovative book is aiming to bring the academic and public spheres closer; efforts seen as essential in encouraging public reflection on and support for social sciences.

The international project brings together scholars from Charles University, the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Mendel University, as well as Comenius University in Bratislava, among others. The author team is balanced in terms of gender, field of focus, and expertise, providing further depth to content as well as the key message.

About the book:

One of the greatest difficulties of contemporary society is not what we (don't) know, but our beliefs, conveniently simplified ideas often divorced from reality. Such a discrepancy between belief and reality becomes an obstacle to substantive debate and a source of tension or misunderstanding. A good start is to recognize that matters relating to society and its values, human psychology, governance, economics, education and other areas are not and cannot be defined as simply and certainly as they, from numerous viewpoints, usually appear. In Simplicity and Reality, experts across social disciplines try and facilitate such an understanding. Engagingly and from a variety of angles, they show that what is often perceived as clear and determined is under the surface perplexing and uncertain; all thus deserve more than a few lines of explanation and surely more than a cursory listing of assumptions