My paper aims at laying out the main tenets of PatoÄka’s unusual and highly provocative position with regard to the question of history, drawing essentially on his Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History, while also gathering insights from other works such as Eternity and Historicity and Europe and post-Europe. In the first part, I set in place the overall framework of this analysis, and show that three distinct, yet entwined concepts of history are operative in PatoÄka’s work: the understanding of history as a specific regime of meaning, as an existential possibility of the human Dasein, and as a “epochal†dynamic. In the second part, I reconstruct the criticism PatoÄka mounts against the classical philosophies of history and indicate that his rejection of a teleological account of history is compatible with the attempt of establishing an intrinsic correlation between meaning and history. In the final part, I stress the importance acquired by the experience of the “shattering of meaning†for PatoÄka’s threefold understanding of history and argue for the possibility of crafting a unitary framework which would encompass his analysis.
CfP Studia Phaenomenologica vol. 23 (2023): Phenomenologies of the image
Editors: Emmanuel Alloa and Cristian Ciocan The 2023 issue of Studia Phaenomenologica will be dedicated to the question of the image and its phenomenologies. Images have been a remarkably constant preoccupation for the phenomenological tradition. From Husserl’s...