The Czech philosopher Jan Patocka (1907-1977), who studied with Husserl and Heidegger, is widely recognized as the most influential thinker to come from postwar Eastern Europe. Refusing to join the Communist party after World War II, he was banned from academia and publication for the rest of his life, except for a brief time following the liberalizations of the Prague spring of 1968. Joining Vaclav Havel and Jiri Hajek as a spokesman for the Chart 77 human-rights declaration of 1977, Patocka was harassed by authorities, arrested, and finally died of a heart attack during prolonged...

Heretical Essays is Patocka's final work, and one of his most exciting and iconoclastic. Patocka begins with prehistory, approached through the "natural world" as conceived by Husserl and Heidegger.

According to Patocka, nature is as an alien construct, and history, which began as a quest for higher meaning, ends with life as self-sustaining consumption. Patocka explains how Europe declined from its Greek heritage to seek power rather than truth, splintering into ethnic subdivisions, and then how the Enlightenment moved Europe from an ethical to a material orientation.

This book...

Devatenáctý svazek Sebraných spisů Jana Patočky obsahuje filosofovy zápisky na nejrozmanitější témata, kterými se zabýval v letech 1946-1950. Sám k tomu říká v zápisu ze dne 14. XII. 1946: Původně byla to technika úmyslné formace, koncentrace, která vynucovala obraznost myšlenkovou. Úmyslem bylo dirigovat myšlenku dopředu, podle jistých hesel či pojmů, které se zdály důležité. Nyní technika jaksi a posteriori: teprve když se nápad již zformoval, hledím jej zaznamenat. První technika byla čekáním na nápad, vynucováním nápadu všelikou slovesnou...