Abstract

The first volume of La crise du sens contains six essays that address certain key themes common to Comte, Masaryk and Husserl, each in some way confronting issues critical to contemporary philosophy. The essays first appeared in Czech in the 1977 underground volume entitled Masaryk: Soubor statí, prednásek a poznámek. The "crise du sens" in the present title should be understood in a broader sense as referring to the concrete work of its author. Jan Patocka, one of the last disciples of Edmund Husserl, literally lived through the crisis of Western culture. Except for three brief interludes, much of Patocka's work could not appear in print in his native Czechoslovakia, but appeared only in various alternative forms, such as mimeographed course lectures, as samizdat or simply as privately circulated typescripts. It is therefore most welcome that the present volume is at last becoming available in a language commonly understood by philosophers.