Czech Philosophy
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Czech Philosophy
Czech philosophy, has often eschewed "pure" speculative philosophy, emerging rather in the course of intellectual debates in the fields of education (e.g. Jan Amos Komenský), art (e.g. Karel Teige), literature (e.g. Milan Kundera), and especially politics (e.g. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Karel Kosík, Ivan Sviták, Václav Havel). A source drawing from literature, however, distinguished the Czech national philosophy from the speculative tradition of German thought, citing that it emerged from folk wisdom and peasant reasoning. Masaryk is credited for introducing the epistemological problem into the modern Czech philosophy, which in turn influenced the discourse on symbol and symbolization. Czech philosophers have also played a central role in the development of phenomenology, whose German-speaking founder Edmund Husserl was born in the Czech lands. Czechs Jan Patočka and Václav Bělohradský would later make important contributions to phenomenological thought. Positivism ...
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Jan Amos Komenský
John Amos Comenius (; cs, Jan Amos Komenský; pl, Jan Amos Komeński; german: Johann Amos Comenius; Latinized: ''Ioannes Amos Comenius''; 28 March 1592 – 15 November 1670) was a Czech philosopher, pedagogue and theologian who is considered the father of modern education. He served as the last bishop of the Unity of the Brethren before becoming a religious refugee and one of the earliest champions of universal education, a concept eventually set forth in his book ''Didactica Magna''. As an educator and theologian, he led schools and advised governments across Protestant Europe through the middle of the seventeenth century. Comenius introduced a number of educational concepts and innovations including pictorial textbooks written in native languages instead of Latin, teaching based in gradual development from simple to more comprehensive concepts, lifelong learning with a focus on logical thinking over dull memorization, equal opportunity for impoverished children, education ...
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Karel Teige
Karel Teige (13 December 1900 – 1 October 1951) was a Czech modernist avant-garde artist, writer, critic and one of the most important figures of the 1920s and 1930s movement. He was a member of the ''Devětsil'' (Butterbur) movement in the 1920s and also worked as an editor and graphic designer for Devětsil's monthly magazine ''ReD'' (''Revue Devětsilu''). One of his major works on architecture theory is ''The Minimum Dwelling'' (1932). Life and career Teige was born in Prague. With evidently endless energy, he introduced modern art to Prague. ''Devětsil''-sponsored exhibitions and events brought international avant-garde figures like Le Corbusier, Man Ray, Paul Klee, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Walter Gropius, among many others, to lecture and perform in Prague. Teige interpreted their work, sometimes literally, for the Czech audience. In his 1935 Prague lecture, André Breton paid tribute to his "perfect intellectual fellowship" with Teige and Nezval: "Constantly interpret ...
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Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera (, ; born 1 April 1929) is a Czech writer who went into exile in France in 1975, becoming a naturalised French citizen in 1981. Kundera's Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, then conferred again in 2019. He "sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores". Kundera's best-known work is ''The Unbearable Lightness of Being''. Prior to the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the communist régime in Czechoslovakia banned his books. He leads a low-profile life and rarely speaks to the media. He was thought to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was also a nominee for other awards. He was awarded the 1985 Jerusalem Prize, in 1987 the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 2000 Herder Prize. In 2021, he received the Golden Order of Merit from the president of Slovenia, Borut Pahor. Biography Kundera was born in 1929 at Purkyňova 6 (6 Purkyně Street) ...
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Tomáš Masaryk
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (7 March 185014 September 1937) was a Czechoslovak politician, statesman, sociologist, and philosopher. Until 1914, he advocated restructuring the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a federal state. With the help of the Allied Powers, Masaryk gained independence for a Czechoslovak Republic as World War I ended in 1918. He co-founded Czechoslovakia together with Milan Rastislav Štefánik and Edvard Beneš and served as its first president. Early life Masaryk was born to a poor, working-class family in the predominantly Catholic city of Hodonín, Margraviate of Moravia, in Moravian Slovakia (in the present-day Czech Republic, then part of the Austrian Empire). The nearby Slovak village of Kopčany, the home of his father Jozef, also claims to be his birthplace. Masaryk grew up in the village of Čejkovice, in South Moravia, before moving to Brno to study.Čapek, Karel. 1995 935–1938 ''Talks with T.G. Masaryk'', tr. Michael Henry Heim. North Haven, ...
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Karel Kosík
Karel Kosík (26 June 1926 – 21 February 2003) was a Czech Marxist philosopher. In his most famous philosophical work, ''Dialectics of the Concrete'' (1963), Kosík presents an original reinterpretation of the ideas of Karl Marx in light of Martin Heidegger's phenomenology. His later essays can be called a sharp critique of the modern society from a leftist but not strictly Marxist position. Biography Karel Kosík was born on 26 June 1926 in Prague. From 1 September 1943 until his arrest by the Gestapo on 17 November 1944, he was a member of an illegal anti-nazi communist resistance group ''Předvoj'' (The Vanguard) and a chief editor of an illegal journal ''Boj mladých'' (The Fight of Youth). After his seizure Kosík was accused of high treason and repeatedly questioned. From 30 January to 5 May 1945 he was imprisoned in Theresienstadt concentration camp. From 1945 to 1947, Kosík studied philosophy and sociology at the Charles University in Prague. In the years 1947–1949, ...
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Ivan Sviták
Ivan Sviták (10 October 1925 – 20 October 1994) was a Czech philosopher, critic, and poet who ranked among Europe's most prominent proponents of Marxist humanism. Career In a vast oeuvre of essays, Sviták addressed questions of democracy and socialism, of art in bureaucratic and consumer societies, and of the "unbearable burden" of political catastrophe in Czech history. In addition, Sviták wrote an extensive body of fiction and poetry, in which he "sought a unity of philosophy, literature, and politics, a unity of engagement, wisdom, and poetry." In this, Sviták consciously followed in the footsteps of the surrealist movement that he admired and critically defended on numerous occasions. These essays often self-published by Svitak were collected by Joseph Grim Feinberg and published in book form as “The Windmills of Humanity” by Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company in Chicago. In the 1960s, Sviták was one of Czechoslovakia's most vocal advocates of democratic socialism ...
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Václav Havel
Václav Havel (; 5 October 193618 December 2011) was a Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright, and former dissident. Havel served as the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992 and then as the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003 and was the first democratically elected president of either country after the fall of communism. As a writer of Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays, and memoirs. His educational opportunities having been limited by his bourgeois background, when freedoms were limited by the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Havel first rose to prominence as a playwright. In works such as '' The Garden Party'' and ''The Memorandum'', Havel used an absurdist style to criticize the Communist system. After participating in the Prague Spring and being blacklisted after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, he became more politically active and helped found several dissident ini ...
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Epistemology
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Epistemologists study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Debates in epistemology are generally clustered around four core areas: # The philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and the conditions required for a belief to constitute knowledge, such as truth and justification # Potential sources of knowledge and justified belief, such as perception, reason, memory, and testimony # The structure of a body of knowledge or justified belief, including whether all justified beliefs must be derived from justified foundational beliefs or whether justification requires only a coherent set of beliefs # Philosophical skepticism, which questions the possibili ...
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Phenomenology (philosophy)
Phenomenology (from Greek φαινόμενον, ''phainómenon'' "that which appears" and λόγος, ''lógos'' "study") is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany. It then spread to France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work. Phenomenology is not a unified movement; rather, the works of different authors share a 'family resemblance' but with many significant differences. Gabriella Farina states:A unique and final definition of phenomenology is dangerous and perhaps even paradoxical as it lacks a thematic focus. In fact, it is not a doctrine, nor a philosophical school, but rather a style of thought, a method, an open and ever-renewed experience having different results, and this m ...
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Edmund Husserl
, thesis1_title = Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations) , thesis1_url = https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:58535/bdef:Book/view , thesis1_year = 1883 , thesis2_title = Über den Begriff der Zahl (On the Concept of Number) , thesis2_url = https://www.freidok.uni-freiburg.de/data/5870 , thesis2_year = 1887 , doctoral_advisor = Leo Königsberger (PhD advisor)Carl Stumpf (Dr. phil. hab. advisor) , academic_advisors = Franz Brentano , doctoral_students = Edith SteinRoman Ingarden , birth_name=Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl ( , , ; 8 April 1859 – 27 April 1938) was a German philosopher and mathematician who established the school of phenomenology. In his early work, he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic based on analyses of intentionality. In his mature work, he sought to develop a systematic foundational science ba ...
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Czech Lands
The Czech lands or the Bohemian lands ( cs, České země ) are the three historical regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia. Together the three have formed the Czech part of Czechoslovakia since 1918, the Czech Socialist Republic since 1 January 1969 and the Czech Republic since 1 January 1993. The Czech lands are also referred to as Czechia. In a historical context, Czech texts use the term to refer to any territory ruled by the Kings of Bohemia, i.e., the lands of the Bohemian Crown (') as established by Emperor Charles IV in the 14th century. This would include territories like the Lusatias (which in 1635 fell to Saxony) and the whole of Silesia, all ruled from Prague Castle at that time. After the conquest of Silesia by the Prussian king Frederick the Great in 1742, the remaining lands of the Bohemian Crown—Bohemia, Moravia and Austrian Silesia—have been more or less co-extensive with the territory of the modern-day Czech Republic. Alternative names The term ...
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Jan Patočka
Jan Patočka (; 1 June 1907 – 13 March 1977) was a Czech philosopher. Having studied in Prague, Paris, Berlin, and Freiburg, he was one of the last pupils of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In Freiburg he also developed a lifelong philosophical friendship with Husserl's assistant Eugen Fink. Patočka worked in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic for almost his entire career, but never joined the Communist Party and was affected by persecution, which ended in his death as a dissident spokesperson of Charter 77. Patočka was a prolific writer and lecturer with a wide range of reference, contributing much to existential phenomenology as well as the interpretation of Czech culture and European culture in general. From his Czech collected works, some of the most notable have been translated to English and other major languages. These include the late works ''Plato and Europe'' (1973) and ''Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History'' (1975), in which Patočka developed a p ...
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