Lubica Ucnik

In The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World, Ľubica Učník examines the existential conflict that formed the focus of Edmund Husserl’s final work, which she argues is very much with us today: how to reconcile scientific rationality with the meaning of human existence. To investigate this conundrum, she places Husserl in dialogue with three of his most important successors: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Jan Patočka. For Husserl, 1930s Europe was characterized by a growing irrationalism that threatened to undermine its legacy of rational inquiry. Technological advancement in the sciences, Husserl argued, had led science to forget its own foundations in the primary “life-world”: the world of lived experience. Renewing Husserl’s concerns in today’s context, Učník first provides an original and compelling reading of his oeuvre through the lens of the formalization of the sciences, then traces the unfolding of this problem through the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Patočka. Although many scholars have written on Arendt, none until now has connected her philosophical thought with that of Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka. Učník provides invaluable access to the work of the latter, who remains understudied in the English language. She shows that together, these four thinkers offer new challenges to the way we approach key issues confronting us today, providing us with ways to reconsider truth, freedom, and human responsibility in the face of the postmodern critique of metanarratives and a growing philosophical interest in new forms of materialism.

The first text to critically discuss Edmund Husserl’s concept of the "life-world," The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem reflects Jan Patocka's youthful conversations with the founder of phenomenology and two of his closest disciples, Eugen Fink and Ludwig Landgrebe. Now available in English for the first time, this translation includes an introduction by Landgrebe and two self-critical afterwords added by Patocka in the 1970s. Unique in its extremely broad range of references, the work addresses the views of Russell, Wittgenstein, and Carnap alongside Husserl and Heidegger, in a spirit that considerably broadens the understanding of phenomenology in relation to other twentieth-cen tury trends in philosophy. Even eighty years after first appearing, it is of great value as a general introduction to philosophy, and it is essential reading for students of the history of phenomenology as well as for those desiring a full understanding of Patocka’s contribution to contemporary thought.

The contributors to this volume shed light on the unique value of Patočka's asubjective phenomenology in the context of his entire oeuvre. Each original contribution highlights the importance of Patočka's historical engagement with phenomenology and modern thinking. Patočka's significance to phenomenology has largely gone unrecognised in the English- speaking world, a lacuna that this volume redresses.

This edited collection discusses phenomenological critiques of formalism and their relevance to the problem of responsibility and the life-world. The book deals with themes of formalization of knowledge in connection to the life-world, the natural world, the history of science and our responsibility for both our epistemic claims and the world in which we live. Readers will discover critiques of formalization, the life-world and responsibility, and a collation and comparison of Patoka's and Husserl's work on these themes. Considerable literature on Husserl is presented here and the two themes of epistemic responsibility and the life-world are discussed together. This work specifically emphasizes the interrelatedness of these existential aspects of his work - self-responsibility and the crisis - as not only epistemological, but also related to human life. This volume also introduces Jan Patoka to English-speaking readers as a phenomenologist in his own right. Patoka shows us, in particular, the significance of the modern abyss between our thinking and the world. Readers will discover that this abyss is of concern for our everyday experience because it leads to a rupture in our understanding of the world: between the world of our living and its scientific construct. We see that Patoka continually emphasized the relevance of Husserl's work to existential questions relating to human responsibility and the life-world, which he admits is left largely implicit in Husserl's work. This edited collection will spark discussion on the question of responsibility against the backdrop of formalized knowledge which is increasingly inaccessible to human understanding. Despite the complexity of some of the analyzed ideas, this book discusses these themes in a clear and readable way. This work is scholarly, exact in its discussion and authoritative in its reading, but at the same time accessible to anyone motivated to understand these debates.

Political developments in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989 have changed the map of the world and re-drawn the post Second World War political landscape. These changes have produced a further political and theoretical consequence: they have challenged our complacency about the rational conduct of human agents. Particularly worrisome was the eruption of nationalistic, tribal passions in the Balkans, the collapse of states and emerging claims to statehood by many new national groups. A vast amount of literature has been written to address these issues. In this book, rather than adopting a certain angle from an existing theoretical position. I will review some of the literature dealing with those political developments, using it as the specific background against which I write. The main contribution this book makes is to reassess the current debate by attempting a different broadly based yet coherent approach. The method employed is a combination of historical and critical analysis, paying attention to the discursive constructions of the state. I will trace the theoretical genealogy of such central concepts as reason, individual, natural and historical rights, and nation. The underlying question throughout is how the political is constructed, In the second part of the book. I will pay special attention to Slovak and Czech texts relevant to the quest for statehood.