Abstract

Karel Kosik, along with Ivan Svitak, was the greatest philosophical influence during the “Prague Spring” of 1968. At that time Kosik taught at Charles University in the Philosophy Faculty and had written three books: Czech Radical Democrats: A Selection of Political Essays (1953), an anthology of writings by activists in the 1848 revolution with an introduction by Kosik; Czech Radical Democracy: A Contribution to the History of Clashes of Opinion in the Czech Society of the 19th Century (1958); and finally, Dialectics of the Concrete (1962), the work through which he is best known in the West.

Dialectics of the Concrete marked the theoretical maturation of Kosik's attempts to revitalize the “western Marxist” tradition exemplified by Lukács' History and Class Consciousness by recovering the phenomenological roots of the dialectic which remained obscured by Lukács' neo-Kantianism.