ABSTRACTJan Patočka is known as a philosophical analyst of the phenomenological concept of the live-word, which contradicts the preoccupations expressed in Sir Herbert Read’s Art of Sc...

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, abstract art has formed a central stream of modern art. To attain purely aesthetic goals, many avant-garde artists turned painting in particular into a pursuit of breaking off the relations with natural forms. Instead of copying them, they have merely relied on their inner visions. When externalizing these visions directly on the canvas or sheets of paper, the practitioners of abstract art have inadvertently used the phenomenological method and its epoché. In this essay (...) I argue that the philosophies of Kupka and Husserl are largely compatible. This is not because the two use the same terminology, but because they virtually mean and do the same thing in their respective fields. Even where there are significant differences between them, these are not as great as it might at first seem. In the essay’s conclusion I sum up some of the most significant implications their compatible theories have for the philosophy of art and for various theories of art today. (shrink)

La controverse et le débat sur la phénoménologie transcendantale de Husserl et l’ontologie fondamentale de Heidegger sont devenus un thème central des révisions philosophiques, en grande partie et d’abord grâce aux efforts de philosophes tels que Ludwig Landgrebe, Eugen Fink et Roman Ingarden. Jan Patočka, lui aussi, a apporté une contribution importante au débat, qui n’est malheureusement pas toujours reconnue. Il présente une analyse fondamentale de la phénoménologie asubjective selon laquelle les philosophies de Husserl et de Heidegger n’ont pas entièrement (...) réussi à surmonter le cartésianisme et selon laquelle ces dernières n’ont pas donné les mêmes réponses à la question du fondement dernier de l’apparition de l’apparaissant. L’auteur de cet essai examine leurs contradictions de manière assez détaillée. Plus précisément, il vise à démontrer l’importance des critiques de Patočka pour comprendre sa doctrine non cartésienne de la phénoménologie asubjective, qui s’est en fait formée en opposition aux apparentes insuffisances tant de Husserl que de Heidegger. Le lecteur peut maintenant voir en détail comment Patočka lui-même cherche à y remédier dans sa pensée ultérieure et comment on peut échapper au péril du subjectivisme. Avec ces considérations en arrière-plan, cet exposé présente la phénoménologie asubjective comme une méthodologie philosophique viable et pertinente. (shrink)

The pedagogy and heuristics of Professor Dagfinn Føllesdal.

The first volume of La crise du sens contains six essays that address certain key themes common to Comte, Masaryk and Husserl, each in some way confronting issues critical to contemporary philosophy. The essays first appeared in Czech in the 1977 underground volume entitled Masaryk: Soubor statí, prednásek a poznámek. The "crise du sens" in the present title should be understood in a broader sense as referring to the concrete work of its author. Jan Patocka, one of the last disciples (...) of Edmund Husserl, literally lived through the crisis of Western culture. Except for three brief interludes, much of Patocka's work could not appear in print in his native Czechoslovakia, but appeared only in various alternative forms, such as mimeographed course lectures, as samizdat or simply as privately circulated typescripts. It is therefore most welcome that the present volume is at last becoming available in a language commonly understood by philosophers. (shrink)