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Czech philosophy, has often eschewed "pure" speculative philosophy,[1] emerging rather in the course of intellectual debates in the fields of education (e.g.Jan Amos Komenský), art (e.g.Karel Teige), literature (e.g.Milan Kundera), and especially politics (e.g.Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk,Ivan Sviták,Václav Havel). A source drawing from literature, however, distinguished the Czech national philosophy from the speculative tradition of German thought, citing that it emerged from folk wisdom and peasant reasoning.[2]
Masaryk is credited for introducing theepistemological problem into the modern Czech philosophy, which in turn influenced the discourse on symbol and symbolization.[3] Czech philosophers have also played a central role in the development ofphenomenology, whose German-speaking founderEdmund Husserl was born in theCzech lands. CzechsJan Patočka andVáclav Bělohradský would later make important contributions to phenomenological thought. Philosophy inCommunist Czechoslovakia officially had to conform toSoviet-styleMarxist-Leninistdialectical materialism, but this also produced some interesting moments such as the thought ofKarel Kosík or the international Marxist-Christian dialogue led byMilan Machovec in the 1960s leading up to thePrague Spring.
Positivism became an important and dominant trend of modern Czech philosophy, eclipsingherbatianism, in what is explained as a collective "post-revolutionary" thinking characterized by an attempt to open a window to Europe in order to eliminate traces of philosophical provincialism.[4]
