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This volume contains for the first time in English, Jan Patocka's seminal essay "The Phenomenology of Afterlife", as well as contributions surrounding and analyzing this text. In his essay, Patocka reflects on our relation to the dead and on how the departure of a loved one affects our continued existence. The premise of Patocka's investigation is that our existence always takes place by and through an originary and reciprocal "being for others".
The contributors in the volume extend the field of inquiry into the wider phenomenological and post-phenomenological discussion of death by being cognizant of how works of literature can broaden our understanding of the care of death, grief, forgiveness and non-reciprocal love. Also included are reflections on issues of philosophical anthropology, community, collective memory, and the ecstatic nature of life - issues that can all be related back to Patocka's initial reflections, but which nonetheless radiate intoa myriad of directions. This volume appeals to students and researchers in the field.
List of contents
1. Gustav Strandberg and Hugo Strandberg: Introduction.- 2. Jan Patocka: The Phenomenology of Afterlife.- 3. Jan Frei: To Live after Death: Where? Patocka's "Phenomenology of Afterlife" and Its Contexts.- 4. Gustav Strandberg: Dying with the Other: Death as the Manifestation of Community.- 5. Nicolas de Warren: The Intimacy of Disappearance.- 6. Hugo Strandberg: Forgiveness and the Dead.- 7. Tomás Hejduk: Postmortal Openness to Meaning.- 8. Ondrej Beran: The Other Modern Séances.- 9. Erin Plunkett: What Does It Mean to Love the Dead?.- 10. Lovisa Andén: Between Memory and History: Retracing Historical Knowledge through a Phenomenology of Afterlife.- 11. Antony Fredriksson: Drawing a Line or Blurring the Contour between Animate and Inanimate with Clarice Lispector and Jan Patocka.- 12. Niklas Forsberg: "Unresting Death, a Whole Day Nearer Now": Parfit and Patocka on Death and False Consolations.
About the author
Gustav Strandberg is a philosopher and translator, based at Södertörn University, Stockholm. He is the author of a monograph on Patöka, entitled
Politikens omskakning: negativitet, samexistens och frihet i Jan Patökas tänkande (The Tremor of Politics: Negativity, Co-existence, and Freedom in the Thought of Jan Patöka) and the editor of a forthcoming volume entitled
Populism and the People in Contemporary Critical Thought, published by Bloomsbury in 2023.
Hugo Strandberg is associate professor of philosophy at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. He is the author of several monographs, the two most recent being
Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception and
Forgiveness and Moral Understanding, both published by Palgrave (in 2015 and 2021).
