Background
Patocka, Jan was born in June 1907 in I, Turnov.
Patocka, Jan was born in June 1907 in I, Turnov.
DSc, PhD, Charles University of Prague, 1931. Habilitation, Charles University of Prague, 1936. 1932-1933, University of Berlin, where he studied under N. Hartmann, while also working with Brock, Reichenbach and Klein.
After 1933, went to Freiburg, where he studied with Husserl and Fink.
Dozent, Charles University of Prague, 1945-1948. With the Communist takeover in 1948 he was banned from teaching. Became an archivist, Masaryk Institute.
1948; when the latter was closed he found a clerical post in the Comenius Archive of the Pedagogic Institute. Professor of Philosophy. Charles University of Prague, 1965-1970.
In reading Patocka’s work it is apparent that here ls an original mind struggling with the limitations °I Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, while, at the same time, attempting to extend it to the sphere of the existential and the historical. In this regard, Patocka's philosophy has much in c°mmon with most post-Husserlian philosophy represented by thinkers such as Sartre. ^lerleau-Ponty and Levinas. In his dialogue with Husserl Patocka begins by observing that a numan being inhabits two worlds that interweave into each other. First, there is the objective world of logic and mathematics, that is, of science. Second, there is the pre-objective world of common sense—what Husserl would later call Lebenswelt. Philosophy has the task, Patocka insists, of interrogating these two worlds in order to reveal the underlying domain of human praxis as the source of creativity. But, contrary to Husserl’s idealism, philosophy does this not by reducing brute reality to consciousness but by accepting the irreducibility of reality to consciousness. Transcendental phenomenology must, it would seem, find a way to accommodate a reality that is completely other. It finds it through an alliance with Heidegger’s existentialhistorical analysis of Dasein and Being. Only then would philosophy be in a position to analyse the problem of how the human individual can regain itself, i.e. ‘win itself’, through the dialectical movement of ‘self-surrender’ to the world of ‘objectifiable’.
Ancient philosophy; phenomenology. Hemeneutics; philosophy of science.
Ancient philosophy (especially Plato and Aristotle); the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl; the existential treatment of Dasein and the hermeneutics of Being of Martin Heidegger; the humanism of the Moravian philosopher T. G. Masaryk.