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The meaning of Europe exceeds its territorial limits, and is not fully ascribable either to the events that characterized its history or to the institutions that regulated the lives of its inhabitants. Europe is all this, and yet it represents much more: a political concept and project, a cultural enterprise, and a system of power whose legitimacy is currently challenged by a series of internal and external crises that jeopardize its survival. There is no single definition that can describe what ‘Europe’ is, as this word evokes unity as much as division, solidarity and conflicts, progress and decadence, and coexistence and colonization. Besides all this, Europe is also a philosophical id...
An examination of the moral and political aspects of the philosophical work of Jan Patočka, one of the most influential Central European philosophers of the twentieth century.
What is solidarity and what makes us think it is something important? Is it just an abstract idea or something more like a prosocial practice that can grow to inform legal regulations and political decisions? How is it that solidarity is so widespread in everyday language while this rarely corresponds to concrete applications of this principle? And what kind of application does solidarity find in the European context, historically and in the present? European Solidarity gathers insight into all these questions, from scholars in fields including philosophy, political science, international law, sociology, and intellectual history. By focusing on its conceptual genesis, the thinkers and contexts that contributed to its evolution, and the practices that aim at implementing it, this book provides an interdisciplinary picture of European solidarity, highlighting its main features, limits, and potentialities.
An examination of the moral and political aspects of the philosophical work of Jan Patočka, one of the most influential Central European philosophers of the twentieth century.
A comprehensive exposition and analysis of Jan Patočka's political philosophy, in particular his idea of Europe and concept of 'post-Europe', and its continuing relevance to philosophy and contemporary politics.
Focusing on the conceptual genesis of European solidarity, the thinkers and contexts that contributed to its evolution, and the practices that aim at implementing it, this book highlights its main features, limits, and potentialities.
A comprehensive exposition and analysis of Jan Patočka’s political philosophy, in particular his idea of Europe and concept of ‘post-Europe’, and its continuing relevance to philosophy and contemporary politics.
Critically evaluating and synthesizing all the previous research on the phenomenology of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, the book brings a new voice into contemporary philosophical discussions. It elucidates the development of Patočka’s phenomenology and offers a critical appropriation of his work by connecting it with non-phenomenological approaches. The first half of the book offers a succinct, and systematizing, overview of Patočka’s phenomenology throughout its development to help readers appreciate the motives behind and grounds for its transformations. The second half systematically explicates, critically examines and creatively develops Patočka’s concept of the movement of existence as the most promising part of his asubjective phenomenology. The book appeals to new readers of Patočka as well as his scholars, and to students and researchers of contemporary philosophy concerned with topics such as embodiment, personal identity, intersubjectivity, sociality, or historicity. By re-assessing Patočka’s philosophy of history and his civilizational analysis, it also helps to better articulate the question of the place of Europe in the post-European world.
The dramatic introduction in two of Plato's late dialogues—the Sophist and the Statesman, both part of a trilogy that also includes the Theaetetus—of a stranger, the Eleatic Stranger, who replaces Socrates, is a consequential move, especially since it occurs in the context of decidedly new insights into the philosophical logos and life together in a community. The introduction of a radical stranger, a stranger to all native identity, has theoretical implications, and, rather than a rhetorical or merely literary device, is of the order of an argument. Plato's Stranger argues that in these late dialogues, Plato bestows on the West a philosophical and political legacy at the core of which the stranger holds a prominent place because it provides the foreigner—the other—with a previously unheard-of constitutive role in the way thinking, as well as life in community, is understood. What is to be learned from these late dialogues is that, without a constitutive relation to otherness, discursive and political life in a community—in other words, also of the way one relates to oneself—remain lacking.
The Czech philosopher Jan Patocka not only witnessed some of the most turbulent politics of twentieth-century Central Europe, but shaped his philosophy in response to that tumult. One of the last students of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, he inspired Václav Havel and other dissidents who confronted the Communist regime before 1989, as well as being actively involved in authoring and enacting Charter 77. He died in 1977 from medical complications resulting from interrogations of the secret police. Confronting Totalitarian Minds examines his legacy along with several contemporary applications of his ideas about dissidence, solidarity, and the human being’s existential confrontation wi...