The Most Famous
PHILOSOPHERS from Czechia
This page contains a list of the greatest Czech Philosophers. The pantheon dataset contains 1,267 Philosophers, 14 of which were born in Czechia. This makes Czechia the birth place of the 16th most number of Philosophers behind Iran, and Austria.
Top 10
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary Czech Philosophers of all time. This list of famous Czech Philosophers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of Czech Philosophers.
1. John Amos Comenius (1592 - 1670)
With an HPI of 79.49, John Amos Comenius is the most famous Czech Philosopher. His biography has been translated into 66 different languages on wikipedia.
John Amos Comenius (; Czech: Jan Amos Komenský; German: Johann Amos Comenius; Polish: Jan Amos Komeński; Latinized: Ioannes Amos Comenius; 28 March 1592 – 15 November 1670) was a Czech philosopher, pedagogue and theologian who is considered the father of modern education. He served as the last bishop of the Unity of the Brethren (direct predecessor of the Moravian Church) before becoming a religious refugee and one of the earliest champions of universal education, a concept eventually set forth in his book Didactica Magna. As an educator and theologian, he led schools and advised governments across Protestant Europe through the middle of the seventeenth century. Comenius introduced a number of educational concepts and innovations including pictorial textbooks written in native languages instead of Latin, teaching based in gradual development from simple to more comprehensive concepts, lifelong learning with a focus on logical thinking over dull memorization, equal opportunity for impoverished children, education for women, and universal and practical instruction. He also believed heavily in the connection between nature, religion, and knowledge, in which he stated that knowledge is born from nature and nature from God. Being lifelong proud of his origin from Moravia, he nevertheless for most of his life – mainly due to the difficult wartime circumstances in the homeland and fear from religious persecution – lived and worked as an exile in various regions of the Holy Roman Empire and other countries: Sweden, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Transylvania, England, the Netherlands and Hungary. An offer to immigrate to the New England and take up the presidency of the newly founded Harvard University he turned down.
2. Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938)
With an HPI of 76.75, Edmund Husserl is the 2nd most famous Czech Philosopher. His biography has been translated into 80 different languages.
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl ( HUUSS-url; US also HUUSS-ər-əl, German: [ˈɛtmʊnt ˈhʊsɐl]; 8 April 1859 – 27 April 1938) was an Austrian-German philosopher and mathematician who established the school of phenomenology. In his early work, he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic based on analyses of intentionality. In his mature work, he sought to develop a systematic foundational science based on the so-called phenomenological reduction. Arguing that transcendental consciousness sets the limits of all possible knowledge, Husserl redefined phenomenology as a transcendental-idealist philosophy. Husserl's thought profoundly influenced 20th-century philosophy, and he remains a notable figure in contemporary philosophy and beyond. Husserl studied mathematics, taught by Karl Weierstrass and Leo Königsberger, and philosophy taught by Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf. He taught philosophy as a Privatdozent at Halle from 1887, then as professor, first at Göttingen from 1901, then at Freiburg from 1916 until he retired in 1928, after which he remained highly productive. In 1933, under racial laws of the Nazi Party, Husserl was expelled from the library of the University of Freiburg due to his Jewish family background and months later resigned from the Deutsche Akademie. Following an illness, he died in Freiburg in 1938.
3. Hans Kelsen (1881 - 1973)
With an HPI of 71.33, Hans Kelsen is the 3rd most famous Czech Philosopher. His biography has been translated into 47 different languages.
Hans Kelsen (; German: [ˈhans ˈkɛlsən]; October 11, 1881 – April 19, 1973) was an Austrian jurist, legal philosopher and political philosopher. He was the principal architect of the 1920 Austrian Constitution, which with amendments is still in operation. Due to the rise of totalitarianism in Austria (and a 1929 constitutional change), Kelsen left for Germany in 1930 but was forced out of his university post after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 because of his Jewish ancestry. That year he left for Geneva and in 1940 he moved to the United States. In 1934, Roscoe Pound lauded Kelsen as "undoubtedly the leading jurist of the time". While in Vienna, Kelsen met Sigmund Freud and his circle, and wrote on social psychology and sociology. By the 1940s, Kelsen's reputation was already well established in the United States for his defense of democracy and for his Pure Theory of Law. Kelsen's academic stature exceeded legal theory alone and extended to political philosophy and social theory as well. His influence encompassed the fields of philosophy, legal science, sociology, theory of democracy, and international relations. Late in his career while at the University of California, Berkeley, although officially retired in 1952, Kelsen rewrote his short book of 1934, Reine Rechtslehre (Pure Theory of Law), into a much enlarged "second edition" published in 1960 (it appeared in an English translation in 1967). Kelsen throughout his active career was also a significant contributor to the theory of judicial review, the hierarchical and dynamic theory of positive law, and the science of law. In political philosophy he was a defender of the state-law identity theory and an advocate of maintaining an explicit contrast between the themes of centralization and decentralization in the theory of government. Kelsen also advocated separating the concepts of state and society in their relation to the study of the science of law. The reception and criticism of Kelsen's work and contributions has been extensive with both ardent supporters and detractors. Kelsen's neo-Kantian defense of legal positivism was influential on H. L. A. Hart, Joseph Raz and other legal theorists in the analytical tradition of jurisprudence.
4. Karl Kautsky (1854 - 1938)
With an HPI of 69.47, Karl Kautsky is the 4th most famous Czech Philosopher. His biography has been translated into 51 different languages.
Karl Johann Kautsky (; German: [ˈkaʊtski]; 16 October 1854 – 17 October 1938) was a Czech-Austrian philosopher, journalist, and Marxist theorist. A leading theorist of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Second International, Kautsky advocated orthodox Marxism, which emphasized the scientific, materialist, and determinist character of Karl Marx's work. This interpretation dominated European Marxism for two decades, from the death of Friedrich Engels in 1895 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Born in Prague, Kautsky studied at the University of Vienna. In 1875, he joined the Social Democratic Party of Austria, and from 1883 founded and edited the influential socialist journal Die Neue Zeit. From 1885 to 1890, he lived in London, where he worked with Engels. In Germany, he became active in the SPD and wrote the theory section of the party's Erfurt Program (1891), which became a major influence on other European socialist parties. He briefly left in 1917 to join the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) because of his opposition to the increasing collaboration of the SPD with the war effort, but rejoined in 1922. By the 1930s, his influence and involvement in politics was dwindling, and he died in Amsterdam in 1938. Kautsky's interpretation of Marxism held that history could not be "hurried", and that politically workers and workers' parties must wait for the material economic conditions for a socialist revolution to be met. Under his influence, the SPD adopted a gradualist approach, taking advantage of bourgeois parliamentary democracy to improve the lives of workers until capitalism was brought down by its internal contradictions. His positions led to disputes with other leading Marxists, including Eduard Bernstein, who favored a reformist approach; Rosa Luxemburg, who advocated revolutionary spontaneity; and Vladimir Lenin, who Kautsky believed had initiated a premature socialist revolution in Russia in 1917 and led the Soviet Union toward a dictatorship.
5. Bernard Bolzano (1781 - 1848)
With an HPI of 69.10, Bernard Bolzano is the 5th most famous Czech Philosopher. His biography has been translated into 50 different languages.
Bernard Bolzano (UK: , US: ; German: [bɔlˈtsaːno]; Italian: [bolˈtsaːno]; born Bernardus Placidus Johann Nepomuk Bolzano; 5 October 1781 – 18 December 1848) was a Bohemian mathematician, logician, philosopher, theologian and Catholic priest of Italian extraction, also known for his liberal views. Bolzano wrote in German, his native language. For the most part, his work came to prominence posthumously.
6. Jerome of Prague (1379 - 1416)
With an HPI of 65.66, Jerome of Prague is the 6th most famous Czech Philosopher. His biography has been translated into 30 different languages.
Jerome of Prague (Czech: Jeroným Pražský; Latin: Hieronymus Pragensis; 1379 – 30 May 1416) was a Czech scholastic philosopher and theologian. Jerome was one of the chief followers of Jan Hus and was burned for heresy at the Council of Constance.
7. Jan Patočka (1907 - 1977)
With an HPI of 58.83, Jan Patočka is the 7th most famous Czech Philosopher. His biography has been translated into 22 different languages.
Jan Patočka (Czech pronunciation: [ˈpatot͡ʃka]; 1 June 1907 – 13 March 1977) was a Czech philosopher. Having studied in Prague, Paris, Berlin, and Freiburg, he was one of the last pupils of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In Freiburg he also developed a lifelong philosophical friendship with Husserl's assistant Eugen Fink. Patočka worked in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic for almost his entire career, but never joined the Communist Party and was affected by persecution, which ended in his death as a dissident spokesperson of Charter 77. Patočka was a prolific writer and lecturer with a wide range of reference, contributing much to existential phenomenology as well as the interpretation of Czech culture and European culture in general. From his Czech collected works, some of the most notable have been translated to English and other major languages. These include the late works Plato and Europe (1973) and Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (1975), in which Patočka developed a philosophy of history identifying the Socratic-Platonic theme of the care of the soul as the basis of "Europe".
8. Vilém Flusser (1920 - 1991)
With an HPI of 57.64, Vilém Flusser is the 8th most famous Czech Philosopher. His biography has been translated into 21 different languages.
Vilém Flusser (May 12, 1920 – November 27, 1991) was a Czech-born Brazilian philosopher, writer and journalist. He lived for a long period in São Paulo (where he became a Brazilian citizen) and later in France, and his works are written in many different languages. His early work was marked by discussion of the thought of Martin Heidegger, and by the influence of existentialism and phenomenology. Phenomenology would play a major role in the transition to the later phase of his work, in which he turned his attention to the philosophy of communication and of artistic production. He contributed to the dichotomy in history: the period of image worship, and period of text worship, with deviations consequently into idolatry and "textolatry".
9. Karel Kosík (1926 - 2003)
With an HPI of 54.20, Karel Kosík is the 9th most famous Czech Philosopher. His biography has been translated into 22 different languages.
Karel Kosík (26 June 1926 – 21 February 2003) was a Czech Marxist philosopher. In his most famous philosophical work, Dialectics of the Concrete (1963), Kosík presents an original reinterpretation of the ideas of Karl Marx in light of Martin Heidegger's phenomenology. His later essays can be called a sharp critique of the modern society from a leftist but not strictly Marxist position.
10. Theodor Gomperz (1832 - 1912)
With an HPI of 52.79, Theodor Gomperz is the 10th most famous Czech Philosopher. His biography has been translated into 15 different languages.
Theodor Gomperz (March 29, 1832 – August 29, 1912), Austrian philosopher and classical scholar, was born at Brno (Brünn).
People
Pantheon has 16 people classified as Czech philosophers born between 1379 and 1948. Of these 16, 1 (6.25%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living Czech philosophers include Tomáš Halík. The most famous deceased Czech philosophers include John Amos Comenius, Edmund Husserl, and Hans Kelsen. As of April 2024, 2 new Czech philosophers have been added to Pantheon including Theodor Gomperz, and Ernst Tugendhat.
Living Czech Philosophers
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Deceased Czech Philosophers
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John Amos Comenius
1592 - 1670
HPI: 79.49
Edmund Husserl
1859 - 1938
HPI: 76.75
Hans Kelsen
1881 - 1973
HPI: 71.33
Karl Kautsky
1854 - 1938
HPI: 69.47
Bernard Bolzano
1781 - 1848
HPI: 69.10
Jerome of Prague
1379 - 1416
HPI: 65.66
Jan Patočka
1907 - 1977
HPI: 58.83
Vilém Flusser
1920 - 1991
HPI: 57.64
Karel Kosík
1926 - 2003
HPI: 54.20
Theodor Gomperz
1832 - 1912
HPI: 52.79
František Tomášek
1899 - 1992
HPI: 52.66
Herbert Feigl
1902 - 1988
HPI: 51.89
Newly Added Czech Philosophers (2024)
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Overlapping Lives
Which Philosophers were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 13 most globally memorable Philosophers since 1700.
