Hans Albert, Münchhausenovo trilema a bootstrapová racionalita

In this article, I focus on a fundamental problem of traditional epistemology, which Hans Albert reformulates in his Treatise on Critical Reason, referring to it as “Münchhausen’s Trilemma”. The treatise and the trilemma are the result of Albert’s journey towards critical rationalism and discussions with contemporaneous currents of thought in German philosophy, especially the so-called transcendental pragmatism of Karl-Otto Apel. I try to compare different epistemological interpretations of the trilemma within and outside critical rationalism, and at the same time the differences in the attitudes of Popper and his students towards the obligations of critical rationalism, which most of them accept as the only possible solution to the trilemma. In the article’s conclusion, I try to draw attention to the fact that the reconceptualization of the traditional dichotomy between knowledge and opinion and the replacement of the principle of justification by the principle of critical investigation is not the final step of critical epistemology, the so-called pancritical rationalism. I believe that it is necessary to devote more systematic attention to the existing proposals for a consider - ably more detailed evolutionary-epistemological perspective, one that connects the incredible stories of Baron Münchhausen (better known in the Czech environment as Baron Prášil) with the effort to develop a critical rationality based on the bootstrap