Karel Kosík, Czech Marxism and the Dialectics of the Concrete

A discussion of the new volume of essays critically celebrating Karel Kosik and particularly his opus 'The Dialectics of the Concrete'

Further information

About this event

Karel Kosík (1926–2003), one of the most remarkable Czech Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century, owes his reputation as a creative thinker largely to his Dialectics of the Concrete, first published in Czechoslovakia in 1963. On this broadcast, we will discuss a new volume that reintroduces Kosík’s philosophy to English-speaking readers, showing that Kosík’s work is important not only as a leading intellectual document of the push for democratic socialism known as the Prague Spring, but also as an original theoretical contribution with international impact that sheds light on the meaning of labour and praxis, cognition and economic structure, revolution and the crises of modernity.

Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete, Historical Materialism Book Series, Volume: 243,

Editors: Ivan Landa, Joseph Grim Feinberg, and Jan Mervart

Contributors include: Ian Angus, Siyaves Azeri, Vít Bartoš, Jan Černý, Joseph Grim Feinberg, Diana Fuentes, Gabriella Fusi, Tomáš Hermann, Tomáš Hříbek, Xiaohan Huang, Peter Hudis, Petr Kužel, Ivan Landa, Michael Löwy, Jan Mervart, Anselm K. Min, Tom Rockmore, Francesco Tava, and Xinruo Zhang.

Published December 2021 Leiden: Brill
https://brill.com/view/title/33678?language=en

In Paperback December 2022 Chicago: Haymarket Books

 

Speakers:

Ivan Landa (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences).

Monika Woźniak (University of Wrocław and Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences).

Georgi Medarov (Institute for Philosophy and Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)

Chair: Isabel Jacobs (Queen Mary University of London)

Bios:

Ivan Landa, a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, is author of numerous articles on Czech philosophy, and is co-editor of Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete.

Monika Woźniak, an assistant professor at the University of Wrocław and a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, specializes in Polish and Russian Marxist philosophy, and is co-editor of a special issue of Contradictions: A Journal for Critical Thought on “Ecosocialism” (forthcoming in 2022).

Georgi Medarov is an assistant professor at the Institute for Philosophy and Sociology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He defended a PhD in Sociology in 2017 at Sofia University on the topic “From Liberalism to Authoritarianism: The Bulgarian case”. He is also a member of the Institute for Critical Theories of Supermodernity and a founding member of the Collective for Social Interventions, both based in Sofia. His academic interests are in critical theory, political economy and post-socialism.

Isabel Jacobs is a PhD student in comparative literature at Queen Mary University of London, where her work crosses the borders of global intellectual history, philosophy and art theory.

For those who wish to know more about the book and about research on Kosik, contact: Tato e-mailová adresa je chráněna před spamboty. Pro její zobrazení musíte mít povolen Javascript.

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