Ľubica Učník – författare

In The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World, Ľubica Učník examines the existential conflict that formed the focus of Edmund Husserl's final work, which she argues is very much with us today: how to reconcile scientific rationality with the meaning of human existence. To investigate this conundrum, she places Husserl in dialogue with three of his most important successors: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Jan Patočka.For Husserl, 1930s Europe was characterized by a growing irrationalism that threatened to undermine its legacy of rational inquiry. Technological advancement in the sciences, Husserl argued, had led science to forget its own foundations in the primary "life-world": the world of lived experience. Renewing Husserl's concerns in today's context, Učník first provides an original and compelling reading of his oeuvre through the lens of the formalization of the sciences, then traces the unfolding of this problem through the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Patočka.Although many scholars have written on Arendt, none until now has connected her philosophical thought with that of Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka. Učník provides invaluable access to the work of the latter, who remains understudied in the English language. She shows that together, these four thinkers offer new challenges to the way we approach key issues confronting us today, providing us with ways to reconsider truth, freedom, and human responsibility in the face of the postmodern critique of metanarratives and a growing philosophical interest in new forms of materialism.

We see that Patocka continually emphasized the relevance of Husserl’s work to existential questions relating to human responsibility and the life-world, which he admits is left largely implicit in Husserl’s work.

​This edited collection discusses phenomenological critiques of formalism and their relevance to the problem of responsibility and the life-world. The book deals with themes of formalization of knowledge in connection to the life-world, the natural world, the history of science and our responsibility for both our epistemic claims and the world in which we live. Readers will discover critiques of formalization, the life-world and responsibility, and a collation and comparison of Patočka’s and Husserl’s work on these themes. Considerable literature on Husserl is presented here and the two themes of epistemic responsibility and the life-world are discussed  together. This work specifically emphasizes the interrelatedness of these existential aspects of his work – self-responsibility and the crisis – as not only epistemological, but also related to human life. This volume also introduces Jan Patočka to English-speaking readers as a phenomenologist in his own right. Patočka shows us, in particular, the significance of the modern abyss between our thinking and the world. Readers will discover that this abyss is of concern for our everyday experience because it leads to a rupture in our understanding of the world: between the world of our living and its scientific construct. We see that Patočka continually emphasized the relevance of Husserl’s work to existential questions relating to human responsibility and the life-world, which he admits is left largely implicit in Husserl’s work. This edited collection will spark discussion on the question of responsibility against the backdrop of formalized knowledge which is increasingly inaccessible to human understanding. Despite the complexity of some of the analyzed ideas, this book discusses these themes in a clear and readable way. This work is scholarly, exact in its discussion and authoritative in its reading, but at the same time accessible to anyone motivated to understand these debates.