Starting from Patočka’s understanding of history as a reflective confrontation with the “shaken present”, I will examine his understanding of human responsibility. For Patočka, human responsibility is impossible to think if the basis of our investigation is couched in the formalised scientific explanation. To think about human responsibility is to recognise that our lives are not something in the world, unchanging and open to investigation by formalised knowledge as a tree or rocks are. We must be responsible for the way (...) we live. In that sense, science is incapable to account for the meaning of life. However, this does not mean that to speak of the meaning of life is meaningless. The life one leads is an achievement. What kind of an achievement it is depends on the way we understand the world and our place in it, who we want to be. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue that Patočka’s decision to become a signatory and one of the spokesperson of Charter 77 was both deeply informed, and in fact necessitated, by his whole philosophical understanding. I will suggest that the importance of Patočka’s contribution to Charter 77 goes beyond the original aim of the declaration, pointing to the broader significance of the moral and political crisis in a society reduced to the sphere of instrumental rationality. For Patočka, to think about humans (...) and their existence in the world is irreducible to instrumental rationality. (shrink)

(2013). PATOČKA'S SOLVITUR AMBULANDO: modern science and human existence. Angelaki: Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 179-189.

Our experience of the present is defined by numbers, graphs and, increasingly, an algorithmically calculated future, based on the mathematical and formal reasoning that began with the rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Today, this reasoning is further modified and extended in the form of computer-executed, algorithmic reasoning. Instead of fallible human reasoning, algorithms—based on mining databases for ‘information’—are seen to provide more efficient processes, offering fast solutions. In this paper, then, I will follow Jan Patočka, (...) who suggests that we live in an age of supercivilisation, one in which human reasoning has become self-sufficient, ceasing to depend on the supernatural or cultural traditions that previously guided human lives. My argument is that Patočka’s analysis of supercivilisation can open up a different way to reflect on the ‘spiritual foundation of our times’. As Patočka says, to reflect on our situation does not mean that we can change it, but reflection can give us a new understanding that will open up different ways to think about our human future. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline Kant’s attempt to account for the category of relations, which is concomitantwith his effort to prove that atomism cannot describe human experience. Kant’s journey from the FirstCritique to his last work the Opus Postumum is a struggle against atomistic versions of the world. Inthe last instance, it is a transit from I think to I act; and it is also recognition that to act can only beperformed in a relational manner in community with others. In (...) order to substantiate his explanation ofreal forces in the world, Kant rethinks and extends his understanding of the subject from the subject asthe unity of apperception to the self-positing subject living in the world with others. In order to defend‘the being in the world’ who ‘has rights,’ I argue that we need to return to Kant’s general account ofrights for all humans in the world. (shrink)