The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem

Introduction

Patočka’s habilitation appeared in 1936, in the same years in which Husserl was developing the concept of the life-world in his “Crisis”. Patočka asks how the world of everyday experience, which precedes all science and is taken for granted, can become a problem for philosophy. He reconstructs how modern science since Galileo and Descartes replaced this world with a mathematised nature and argues that philosophy must return to the natural world as the horizon of all meaning, not as a primitive stage to be overcome. In a long afterword written more than thirty years later he criticised the subjectivist starting point of the book and moved towards an asubjective phenomenology of movement. It is read today as an independent contribution alongside Husserl’s late work.

More works by Jan Patočka

• 1975Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History