Title: Jan Patočka : philosophy and selected writings /
Authors: Kohák, Erazim V.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press,
Year: 1989
Subjects: Patočka, Jan,; Philosophy.; Phenomenology.
Abstract: One of the most important Central European philosophers of this century, Jan Patočka (1907-77) was a student and heir of Masaryk, Husserl, and Heidegger as well as a philosopher and historian of ideas in his own right. Patočka, who was forced to retire prematurely from Charles University in Prague for his political convictions, died of a brain hemorrhage while under Czech police interrogation for having signed the human rights manifesto Charta 77. Although many of his works are available in French and German, in this volume Erazim Kohák has translated Patočka's central philosophical texts into English for the first time.
Contents: Part One: Jan Patočka: A philosophical biography -- The death of a philosopher -- The beginning: Husserl and and Masaryk -- The philosophical vocation -- The idea of the "natural" world -- The idea of history -- The idea of reason -- Humanity and culture -- Socrates, Plato, Aristotle -- The end of metaphysics and negative Platonism -- From ancient cosmos to the world of modern science -- The heritage of Comenius -- Second beginning: Husserl and Heidegger -- Husserl's philosophy and phenomenology -- Husserl's transendental turn -- The "natural" world and the subject-body -- The hardness of the real -- The danger of technology: Heidegger and Plato -- History and transcendence -- Thought and deed: Charta -- Jan Patočka - A appreciation -- Part Two: Jan Patočka: Selected writings on philosophy and phenomenology -- Titanism (1936) -- Masaryk's and Husserl's conception of the spiritual crisis of European humanity (1936) -- Two sense of reason and nature in the German Enlightenment: A Herderian study (1942) -- Negative Platonism: Reflections concerning the rise, the scope, and the demise of metaphysics - and whether philosophy can survive it (circa 1955) -- Husserl's transcendental turn: The phenomenological reduction in The Idea of Phenomenology and in Ideas I (1965) -- Edmund Husserl's Philosophy of the crisis of the sciences and his conception of a phenomenology of the "Life-World" (Warsaw Lecture, 1971) -- The "Natural" world and phenomenology (1967) -- The movement of human existence: A selection from Body, Community, Language, World (1968-1969) -- Cartesianism and phenomenology (1976) -- The dangers of technicization in science according to E> Husserl and the essence of technology as danger according to M. Heidegger (Varna Lecture, 1973) -- Two charta 77 texts (1977) -- The obligation to resist injustice -- What we can and cannot expect from Charta 77 -- Part Three: Jan Patočka: A bibliography.