Abstract

The paper offers a comparison of the achievements, conceptions and fortunes of two of the most important personalities of Czech and Slovak philosophies. They both were deeply convinced of the possibility and necessity of philosophical knowledge. What played a decisive role in their lives, were their convictions: on the side of Hrušovský it was scientific-structuralist and on the side of Pato?ka existential-phenomenological one. The paper outlines the parallels between the intellectual pathos and life ethos of both philosophers, i.e. between Pato?ka’s phenomenology of human condition and Hrušovský’s structurologist theory of being, as well as the disparity of their concepts of science