One of the most important Central European philosophers of this century, Jan Patocka (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. Patocka, 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 Kohak has translated Patocka's central philosophical texts...

"It is hard to put this profound book into a category. Despite the author's criticisms of Thoreau, it is more like "Walden" than any other book I have read. . . . The book makes great strides toward bringing the best insights from medieval philosophy and from contemporary environmental ethics together. Anyone interested in both of these areas must read this book." Daniel A. Dombrowski, "The Thomist"
"Those who share Kohak's concern to understand nature as other than a mere resource or matter in motion will find his temporally oriented interpretation of nature instructive. It is here in...

Presenting a wide range of views and strategies, The Green Halo analyzes the problematic relations between humans and the rest of the natural world. The author looks at the views of thinkers including John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Al Gore, and suggests alternative ways to view nature, assign it value, and respond to ecological crises.

Patocka's celebrated Introduction, here made available in English for the first time, is not an introduction in the ordinary sense of the term. Patocka ranges over the whole of Husserl's output, from The Philosophy of Arithmetic to The Crisis of the European Sciences, and traces the evolution of all the central issues of Husserlian phenomenology--intentionality, categorial intuition, temporality, the subject-body; the concrete a priori, and transcendental subjectivity. But rather than attempting to give a tour of Husserl's workshop, Patocka is himself hard at work on Husserl's...