Jan Patočka and French Phenomenology

Abstract

In his phenomenological works Jan Patočka increasingly referred to movement and lived/physical corporeality. He conceived the concept of the world in terms of the correlation of life with its milieu. In conjunction with Edmund Husserl’s late phenomenology of the lifeworld, he took lived corporeality as his starting point and guiding motif in a way that is parallel to Merleau-Ponty’s work. The article expresses an opinion, that it was also one of the reasons why he kept his distance from Eugen Fink’s philosophical cosmology. And still, it is Patočka’s reference to this cosmological project that has had, and keeps on having, an important impact on the recent reception of his work in France.