Karel Kosík

Karel Kosík
Born 26 June 1926
Prague, Czechoslovakia
Died 21 February 2003(2003-02-21) (aged 76)
Prague, Czech Republic
Alma mater Charles University in Prague
Leningrad University (no degree)
Moscow State University (no degree)
Era 20th-century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School Continental philosophy
Western Marxism[1]
Main interests
 Social philosophy, politics, ethics, aesthetics
Notable ideas
 The Pseudo-concrete[2]

Karel Kosík (26 June 1926 – 21 February 2003) was a Czech Neomarxist philosopher. In his most famous philosophical work, Dialectics of the Concrete (1963), Kosík presents an original synthesis of Martin Heidegger's version of phenomenology and the ideas of Young Marx. His later essays can be called a sharp critique of the modern society from a leftist position.

Biography

Karel Kosík was born on 26 June 1926 in Prague.

From 1 September 1943 until his arrest by the Gestapo on 17 November 1944, he was a member of an illegal anti-nazi communist resistance group Předvoj (The Vanguard) and a chief editor of an illegal journal Boj mladých (The Fight of Youth). After his seizure Kosík was accused of high treason and repeatedly questioned. From 30 January to 5 May 1945 he was imprisoned in Theresienstadt concentration camp.

From 1945 to 1947, Kosík studied philosophy and sociology at the Charles University in Prague. In the years 1947–1949, he also attended courses at the Leningrad University and the Moscow State University in the USSR. He graduated in 1950 in Prague at the Charles University. In this part of his life he met his future wife Růžena Grebeníčková (later laureate of Herder prize), from this marriage came three children (Antonín Kosík, Irena Kosíková and Štěpán Kosík). In 1963, he published his opus Dialectics of the Concrete, a re-working of Marxian categories in terms of humanist phenomenology, which earned him an international reputation as a leading philosopher of humanist Marxism. During the "Prague Spring" of 1968, Kosík became a leading voice for democratic socialism (a distinction he shared with Ivan Sviták, Czechoslovakia's other prominent Marxist humanist). This political engagement led to Kosík's dismissal from university work in 1970, after the period of democratization had ended. He remained unemployed until 1990, when he returned to public intellectual life as one of Central Europe's few prominent leftist social critics.

Work

Bibliography

Major works
Articles

References

  1. ↑ Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas, University of California Press, 1984, p. 5: "Although such thinkers as the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski (during his Marxist Humanist phase) and the Czech philosopher Karel Kosík were certainly important in their own right, their work was nonetheless built upon the earlier thought of Western Marxists, as was that of the Yugoslav theoreticians published in the journal Praxis."
  2. ↑ Kosík, Karel. Dialectics of the Concrete, trans. Karel Kovanda and James Schmidt (Boston and Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976).

External links

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