Czech Marxist philosophy, if perceived as implicitly contained in Marxism, has its roots in the beginnings of the reception of Marxism into the Czech territories. This history started in the second half of the nineteenth century, while both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were still alive, and was a very complex process. For a long time, it depended mainly on the activities of culturally mature workers who acquired Marx's teaching at least fragmentarily. They used its spirit in their cultural and organizational work to promote self-awareness on the part of labour as an organized political power.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In the Czech milieu, the beginning of social democratic ideas, which some historians date back to 1869, was connected with the activities of the so-called pioneers of socialism. Among these were, above all, Josef Boleslav Pecka (1849-1897), Ladislav Zápotocký (1852-1916), Pankrác Krkoka (1861-1888), and Josef Hybe (1850-1921).

Practical steps toward self-awareness on the part of labor appeared in 1847 when the workers of Austria founded their party, within which the Czech workers then established the Czechoslovan Social Democratic Party in 1878. Later, during its Brno Convention in 1887, this party initiated the establishment of an international unity of the party in the whole of Austria, which came into existence in the Hainfeld Convention in 1889.

Each of the Czech pioneers of socialism contributed in his own way to the understanding of Marx's teachings. For example, J. B. Pecka, through the mediation of Joseph Dietzgen, interpreted the principles not only of scientific socialism but also of Marx's philosophy. At the turn of the `70s and `80s, Ladislav Zápotocký published parts of Marx's Das Kapital as well as other of his writings in the magazine Budoucnost (The Future). Pankrác Krkoka worked on the translation of Marx's Das Kapital and published its extracts in a Brno newspaper, Rovnost (Equality) in 1886. Josef Hybe also published extracts from Das Kapital in Rovnost in 1896, along with his popular interpretation of Engels' On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State under the title, "How the Oppression of Man by Man Came About". The first edition of a complete Czech translation of Marx's Das Kapital was published as late as 1913-1929, translated by Theodor meral, the brother of Bohumir meral, a prominent personage of both the 2nd and 3rd Internationals.⁽¹⁵⁹⁾

EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

From the second half of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century the social democratic movement in the Czech territories was a significant democratizing factor in Czech society and influenced the democratization processes throughout the whole Austrian kingdom.

The shaping of Czech Marxist philosophy in the twentieth century originated as part of the wider whole of Czechoslovak Marxist philosophy. This wider whole involved Czech and Slovak participation as well as other nationalities, especially German and Hungarian. We shall not deal with the whole here, but we must bear in mind that it brought the Czech Marxist philosophy into a wider international context that implied by the nationally varied nature of the Czechoslovak state, as well as from the very nature of Marxist philosophy. The Czech "Marxist philosophy", however, often was a shortened form for Marxist-Leninist philosophy, because the study of Lenin's writings, and, later also of Stalin's works, long substantially influenced the contemporary interpretation of Marx's philosophy. In the interwar period, it is necessary to take the very term philosophy with a pinch of salt for it meant rather only a tendency to philosophy, a striving for philosophic explicitness, or an endeavor create a philosophic climate.

From the present viewpoint, the course of the Marxist philosophy in Czech countries during the twentieth century appears to be completed. The frequently quoted Marxist thesis about universal developmental laws can be applied to the very history of the Czech Marxist philosophy--it came into existence, developed, and arrived at an existential crisis.

This dramatic development occurred on an European and worldwide scale, as well; in this country its specific source was shaped by external interventions dividing the whole of Czech Marxist philosophy into several periods. Among the most serious external interventions were the disasters of the First and Second World Wars, which revolutionized the postwar situation in the sphere both of ideas and of political practice. After the First World War the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was established, which took up revolutionary Marxism; in 1948, after the Second World War this party assumed totalitarian power.

THE INTERWAR PERIOD

In the interwar period Czech Marxist philosophy established itself as a relatively autonomous part of Czech Marxism. Its stimuli came, roughly speaking, from three spheres:

1. Politics and ideology. This sphere included problems of political activities, decision-taking, and basic ideological orientation (Bohumír meral, Josef Skalák, Karel Goliat-Gorovský, and others), as well as political-economic analyses (Jaroslav Procházka, Antonín Kamenický). Numerous ideological and political manifestations were connected with the approach to revolution (Kurt Konrad), the conception of class struggle and the problems of nationhood (Jan verma), cultural politics (Karel Teige), creating the anti-Nazi front (Jaroslav Kabe, Pavel Reiman, Jaroslav echáek from the left wing of the Social Democratic Party), and the problems of social revolution and its legal basis (Vladimír Procházka).

2. Ideological and philosophic aspects of culture, especially of literature, the graphic and plastic arts, architecture, theater and music. This sphere also produced the ideological and even philosophic stimuli for the development of proletarian poetry (S.K. Neumann, Josef Hora, Jií Wolker), avant-garde currents (Karel Teige, Vladislav Vanura), as well as a wider conception of Socialist Realism (Bedich Václavek). These stimuli appeared within Marxist criticism in clarifying the relation between traditionalism and avant-gardism. Their effects appeared in the attempts to solve the problems of modern architecture (Jií Kroha, Karel Teige), in the search for the orientation of working-class theatre (Frantiek Spitzer) as well as of professional avant-garde theatre (E.F. Burian, Jindich Honzl), theatre criticism (Jindich Fleischner, Julius Fuik, etc.), and also in individual ideological positions (Josef Hrdina, Ivan Hálek).

3. Ideological and philosophic problems of the sciences: the transition from promoting revolutionary ideas to scientific activities in particular spheres of Marxist philosophy and its history. At this level the specifically cognitive aspects of the Marxist reflection on the world, society, and thought were stressed. The problems dealt with were those of universal and national history, cultural history, historiography of both universal and Czech philosophy, sociology, pedagogy, and lay morality. Complex relations of materialistic dialectics to the development of modern theories of natural science were considered, especially the theory of relativity.⁽¹⁶⁰⁾ This third circle included Alois Adalbert Hoch, Frantiek Albert, Otakar Chlup, Jaroslav Kabe, Závi Kalandra, Arnot Kolman, Kurt Konrad, Zdenk Nejedlý, Ludvík Svoboda, Karel Teige, Eduard Urx, Josef Vagenknecht, Bedich Václavek and Václav edík. Many of them influenced the Marxist-oriented students of philosophy who finished their university studies in Prague, Brno, Olomouc or Bratislava after the Second World War.

Before the seizure of power by the Communist party, i.e., in the period from the `20s to the `40s, Czech Marxist philosophy was of a distinct autodidactic nature. After the seizure of power by the Party (1948), the external conditions for its professionalization and institutionalization were created. One of its currents was oriented towards an anti-totalitarian, creative conception which contributed to the "philosophy of the Prague Spring". August 21, 1968 proved to be a disastrous milestone because, among other things, a substantial number of creative intellectuals, including the philosophical intelligentsia, was deprived by the Brezhnev regime of the possibility of practicing its profession.

The destructive side of the Communist totalitarian regime as regards Czech Marxist philosophy manifested itself in different forms, as when new creations were immediately destroyed or when somebody who had gained personal status was presently fired, illegitimately imprisoned, or even sentenced to death. This annihilating mechanism became a hidden, yet substantial dimension of the development of Czech Marxist philosophy.

Let us begin with some of the personalities whose life and work contributed most to unveiling this mechanism in the first half of the 20th century. These were, above all, such philosophically educated Marxist intellectuals as Karel Goliat-Gorovský, Závi Kalandra and Vladimír Clementis. By assuming critical attitudes which had ideological impact on the history of Marxism and Marxist philosophy in Czechoslovakia. They contributed to the fact that, Czech Marxist philosophy had a history of anti-dogmatic, anti-Stalinist resistance, expressing more or less clearly the need for a structural reform of the Communist system.

Karel Goliat-Gorovský (1901-1985), a lawyer, was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Towards the end of the `20s he opted out of the Party and explained the reasons for his break with despotic Communism in the name of democratic socialism, in the essays "Katastrofa leninismu v Europ" (Disaster of Leninism in Europe, 1927), "Dneni stav KS. Diktatura aparátnik nebo demokracie dlník?" (Present State of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Dictatorship of the Apparatchics or Democracy of the Workers? 1927), and "Zpovd evropského komunisty" (Confession of a European Communist, 1928). In the `30s he retired from public activities, but at the beginning of the Second World War he joined a Czechoslovak military unit, which was then being formed in Poland; after its transfer to the Soviet Union, he was arrested and spent 17 years in prison.⁽¹⁶¹⁾

Závi Kalandra (1902-1950) was a Communist journalist, author of a dissertation on Parmenides, and of the historical studies: "Znamení Lipan" (Lipany Omen, 1934) and "eské pohanstvi" (Czech Preagnism, 1947). He was interested in Surrealism and a critical interpreter of Freudianism in his unpublished work "Skutenost snu" (The Reality of Dream). Above all, he was a critic of the Moscow show-trials. In the treatise "Odhalené tajemstvi moskevského procesu" (Unveiled Secret of the Moscow Trial, 1936), written in cooperation with J. Guttmann. Kalandra saw the purpose of the Moscow trials in Stalin's intention "to terrorize Leninist revolutionaries and to bully all honest Communists throughout the world who could not agree with the anti-Leninist course of the Comintern". His ability to take a critical view of his contemporariness was probably connected with the subject matter to which he was attracted philosophically, i.e., "the problems of the rise, metamorphoses and extinction of ideological systems and anthropological problems. Závi Kalandra survived the Nazi concentration camp in Sachsenhausen, but did not survive the first two years of the Communist government in Czechoslovakia by which he was illegitimately tried and sentenced to death.

Vladimír Clementis (1902-1952), Slovak Communist intellectual, lawyer, diplomat, and political writer, expressed, among other things, this disapproval of the Soviet-German Pact in 1939. After February 1948, as an alleged nationalist and traitor, he was sentenced to death in an illegitimate Communist show-trial.

These personalities understood and experienced Marxism as critical thought. Early on they acknowledged, evidently and verifiably, that if Marxism (despite its bureaucratization) were to renew itself as critical thought, it would have to analyze step by step the reasons for the liquidation of Marxism's basic attribute as critical thought.⁽¹⁶²⁾

The premise for such progress in thought consisted in becoming acquainted with Marx's philosophy and even from the beginning when Czech Marxist philosophers were self-taught they displayed interest in the history of Marxism from its origin to the present day. In this field contributions were made especially by Jaroslav Kabe, Ludvík Svoboda, Pavel Hrubý, and Václav Vlk.

Jaroslav Kabe (1896-1964), the author of many articles on the Hussite revolutionary movement, in 1925 wrote a collection of essays for the magazine, Komunistická revue, the theoretical organ of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which could be summarized under the common title "The Philosophical Development of the Young Marx". In his conception of the class struggle he stressed, much as had Marx, the politico-economic side of Marx's teachings. What was new in Kabe was that he posed the question of the subjective aspects of the origin of Marx's teachings. Approaching Marxism as the work of a certain individual, he interpreted it as the product of a certain current way of thinking reflecting a subjective intellectual development of a person of a certain type. Kabe' collection of essays exceeded Mehring's work on Marx in many ways. Not being satisfied with Marxism, he studied Hegel and the Hegelian Left in order to search for the genesis of the philosophy of Marx and Engels. Kabe declared himself to have "been always an autodidact" and "a rambler on his own course". He became, among other things, a pioneer publisher of the philosophic legacy of a significant Czech philosopher of absurdity and "radical anarchism", Ladislav Klima. Kabe was also an interpreter of the poetry of Otokar Bezina and of the mystical sculptures of Josef Bílek. His interests and personality set him entirely at variance with the common ideology of party officials.

Ludvík Svoboda (1903-1977), originally a grammar school teacher of classical philology, also went beyond the official position to a considerable degree. Of his prewar work, it is especially his Filosofie v SSSR (Philosophy in the Soviet Union, 1936) which deserves attention. On the international level he wrote the first thorough monograph on Soviet philosophy based on a review of the Soviet philosophic writings for many years. He stressed the anti-simplistic significance of the so-called Deborin school in the struggle with mechanistic materialists, and, towards the end of his work, posed the rather disturbing question, whether the so-called struggle on both fronts (against "menshevikizing idealism" and against mechanistic materialism) in the first half of the 1930s, would lead to creative thinking or degenerate into mechanistic and materialistic vulgarizations.

Svoboda introduced Lenin's book, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, to the Czech public (1933); later he also translated Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks (1953). He took for granted that Czech culture should be fully informed about these books and considered that interpretation of Engels, according to which only formal logic and dialectics pertained to philosophy, to be too narrow and too closely linked to positivism. He saw Engels as conceiving dialectics in a broader sense and including all the problems which used to be treated in ontology (metaphysics) and noetics (philosophy of knowledge and epistemology).

In the interwar period Ludvik Svoboda was also a very active reviewer. Besides the literature written in Russian, he regularly reviewed the contemporary Czech philosophic production, especially in the Brno Sociological review. In 1936 he wrote a careful and insightful review of the work of Jan Patoka, Pirozený svt jako filozofický problém (Natural World as a Philosophic Problem).⁽¹⁶³⁾

Pavel Hrubý (1914) and Václav Vlk (1910-1962) were authors of Základy marxistického myleni (Basics of Marxist Thought) 1946. The concept of the book had been initiated back in 1937, when Václav Vlk wrote brief passages on dialectics and Pavel Hrubý, in his lectures, complemented these with gnoselolgical elements based on Svoboda's essays. During the war, Vlk and Hurbý prepared a popular book on dialectical materialism. Its aim was to offer an interpretation of dialectical materialism that would take into account the scientific discoveries of the twentieth century, especially the theory of relativity. For this purpose they studied modern authors: both Czech (e.g. Vladimir Úlehla) and foreign (Albert Einstein, Leopold Infeld). The course of their life was also symptomatic. After expressing their disapproval of the Moscow trials, Vlk was expelled from the Communist Party, and Hrubý from the Communist Student Movement. Both rejoined the Communist Party after the war. Vlk was arrested and sentenced illegitimately three years into the Communist regime in 1951; released from prison in 1960 he was rehabilitated in 1963. Hrubý was arrested illegitimately in 1952, released in 1960 and rehabilitated in 1963. As late as 1974 Pavel Hrubý published Metody ekonomického asu (Methods of Economic Time), in which he made use of the conceptions of Einstein's theory of relativity for making more accurate economic analyses and prognoses.

Though not its sole dimension, an interest in the problems of the history of philosophy was characteristic of Czech Marxist philosophy, even in the period of its professionalization and institutionalization.⁽¹⁶⁴⁾ At that time this dimension assumed the form of a progression from Czech philosophy to world philosophy (from classical times to the present day) and toward contemporary trends in Western philosophy.⁽¹⁶⁵⁾ A similar tendency was displayed also by the relatively extensive work of translation which, even under great obstacles, sought out important elements in the history of Czech and world philosophy.⁽¹⁶⁶⁾ It was in such an intellectual climate, especially following the impetus of the twentieth Convention of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 which criticized the personality cult of Stalin, that the philosophy of the Prague Spring was gradually formed. This included participation by a great number of outstanding philosophers, both Marxist and non-Marxist.⁽¹⁶⁷⁾ In the course of the '60s, many Marxist philosophers transcended the Marxist horizon and elaborated their own, individual philosophic conceptions. After 1970, however, this had to be outside the official Czech philosophic world and also outside their employment from which they were forcibly separated. Let us mention a few names as pars pro toto.

Ivan Dubský (1926) began characteristically from the historiography of Czech philosophy and, at the same time, related to world philosophy. His works appeared to reproduce the "return to Marx" at a professional level, the interest in the genesis of Marx's philosophy which we mentioned in the auto-didactic period. After publishing Raná tvorba K. Marxe a F. Engelse (Early Works of K. Marx and F. Engels, 1958), Hegels Arbeidsbegriff und die idealistische Dialektik (Hegel's Concept of Work and Idealistic Dialectic, 1961), Pronikání marxismu do eských zemi (Penetration of Marxism in the Czech Countries, 1963), he reflected on works by Franz Kafka, Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger and Jan Patoka, which he expressed in writings on the position of man in the world, his homelessness, etc.⁽¹⁶⁸⁾

Karel Kosík (1926), too, began from the problems of the history of Czech philosophy, as indicated in his treatise eská radikální demokracie: pispvek k djinám názorových spor v eské spolenosti 19. století (Czech Radical Democracy: a Contribution to Controversies in 19th Century Czech Society, 1958). In the book Dialektika konkrétního: Studie o problematice lovka a svka (Dialectics of the Concrete. A Study of the Problems of the Man and the World, 1963), he transcended his original Marxist inspiration in the direction of philosophic questioning: on the basis of Marx's philosophical development, he came to terms with contemporary German and French philosophy. He arrived at a view of philosophy as "a necessary activity of humankind", and "a systematic and critical attempt at revealing the structure of the thing, at unveiling the being of existence. In his view "the philosophic problems of the twentieth century, the destruction of pseudoconcreteness and various forms of alienation, became one of the most pressing questions". Individual philosophies "differ in their way of solving problems, but the problems are common both for positivism (Carnap's and Neurath's struggle against real or alleged metaphysics), phenomenology and existentialism". It goes without saying that this is true even for modern materialistic philosophy. Kosik's philosophical questioning shook the certainties of the ordinary conscience in everyday fetishizes, including the police-bureaucratic system, whose authority and "sensibleness" it questioned.⁽¹⁶⁹⁾

Robert Kalivoda (1923-1989), the author of a significant work on the history of philosophy, Hussite Ideology (1961), arrived from the Marxist historiography of Czech philosophy to a general theory of being. He elaborated his own Weltanschauung, which encompassed Marxism in the contexts of modern currents of thoughts, especially Czech Surrealism, Structuralism and Freudianism, as well as the Frankfurt School. The purpose of his work, Moderní duchovní skutenost a marxismus (Modern Spiritual Reality and Marxism, 1968), was to transfer Marxism into an avant-garde horizon. For him, this meant placing it in the value hermetic circle of "poetry, love and freedom", i.e. of structuralism, Freudianism, and liberty, above Marxism, and subordinating class struggles to universal human values. With this redefined avant-garde attitude toward Marxism, Surrealism became the culmination of the avant-garde movements as a special philosophic sphere of a certain species of ontological and noetic problems with its own history and development.⁽¹⁷⁰⁾

Dubský, Kosík, Kalivoda and many others in the field of philosophy were among the great number of philosophers who, in consequence of the "normalization" of 1968, lost the possibility of working in philosophy as professionals and were barred from publishing. The philosophy of the Prague Spring was formed by a large group of other philosophic personalities, not only from Prague, and not only of Marxist orientation. We have mentioned here only a few personalities that illustrated the way of building up individual Weltanschauung as a creative answer to the expansion of the "world outlook of the Soviet Union", and to the aggressive police-bureaucratic ideology of official Marxism-Leninism.

Ideological oppression in the '70s and '80s, as part of the general psycho-terror in the conquered territory, suppressed creative philosophic activities in official Czech philosophical institutions. Even under these conditions, however, some of the philosophers who could continue to work in these institutions after the great purges tried to resist and to go on with free philosophic thinking.

The long epoch of setting up and forming Czech Marxist philosophy ended in the peaceful revolution of November 17, 1989. The controversy between the democratic and antidemocratic interpretations of Marxist philosophy was decided historically on the side of the democratic tendencies. Today, these tendencies could become the source of a new stage of Czech Marxist philosophy in the present transformation of our society. They could contribute to the intellectual formation of a new Left, primarily because they shared in preparing this metamorphosis.

THREE PORTRAITS

To complete the present survey of Czech Marxist philosophy, we add three "portraits" for, in the years following the Second World War, some of the philosophers who had attracted attention before the war also avowed Marxism.

Ladislav Rieger (1890-1958), the prominent expert on Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophy, began from the standpoint of Jacob Fries, Poznání skutenosti (Cognition of Reality, 1930).⁽¹⁷¹⁾ The notion of the instability of the basis of the sciences directed his attention to noetic problems. In his book, Idea filosofie (The Idea of Philosophy, 1939), he "defended philosophy in the struggle for the superiority of spiritual authority". He observed the basic stages of the process of the self-constitution of philosophy and philosophical noetics from the pre-philosophic period up to the present time. He paid special attention to Kant and the more recent forms of transcendentalism, to Husserl's phenomenology, and to Heidegger's hermeneutics of existence, asking how they could help philosophy to achieve "the clearest, deepest, basic and universal orientation". As early as the '30s, there was a growing emphasis in works on the social function of philosophy. In his notes on Rádl's commentary on the German events in 1933, for example, he wrote that self-reflection in philosophy is the presupposition for its becoming the starting point for a program of progressive social reform. The question of human existence during the Second World War led Riger to existentialist philosophy, "to Heidegger as to the problems, to Jaspers as to the result". He thought that in existentialism, philosophy entered a new stage of self-reflection.⁽¹⁷²⁾ The intense social movements from the middle of the '40s, however, led him from existentialism to the study of Marxism where he believed that he found the solution of his noetic problem of perceiving the reality, genesis and nature of human consciousness. In the last years of his life he was engaged, particularly, in cosmologic matters (Prolegomena ke kosmologii [Prolegomena to Cosmology], 1958), with which he had already been concerned in connection with Einstein's theory of relativity. He related in an exemplary manner the problems of science to the basic fields of philosophy: ontology, noetics, and ethics.⁽¹⁷³⁾

Mirko Novák (1901-1980), an aesthetician and philosopher, during the interwar period was one of the Prague left-wing intellectuals who did not conceal their sympathies for the Czech and European avant-garde; whence he drew guidance for his theoretical studies.⁽¹⁷⁴⁾ As a theoretician of the fine arts (he started as a musicologist) he wanted to support the view of "objectivizing scientism": that scientific thought in art should not be liable to any changing artistic programs and tendencies. He understood art to be a specific spiritual value whose origin was in the biophysiological sphere, which developed in the intellectual sphere, and which found its meaning in the social sphere.

At first, he reduced aesthetics to the history of the fine arts; later he defined it as the discipline concerned with "aesthetic reality", or, as the case may be, with "the reality of aesthetic values". In his Marxist-oriented works from the '60s, he strained to clear up some misunderstandings concerning the interpretation of art as the :"reflection of reality"; he stressed the active side of the artist's attitude to reality as "a specific interaction of subject and object". A series of his works focusing on fine arts and aesthetics include "Vznik tvri osobnosti Beethovenovy" ("The Origin of Beethoven's Creative Personality") (1924), "Le Corbusierova prostorová estetika" (Corbusier's Space Esthetics, 1929), Základy vdy o umní se zvlátním zetelem k vdeckému studiu hudby (Basics of the Science of the Arts with Special Regard to the Scientific Study of Music, 1928), Vznik pojmu krásna v ecké filosofii (The Origin of the Concept of the Beautiful in Greek Philosophy, 1932), eská estetika (Czech Esthetics, 1941), Otázky estetiky v pítomnosti a minulosti (Issues of Esthetics Present and Past, 1963), and Od skutenosti k umní (From Reality to Art, 1965). In the field of philosophy Novák was oriented especially towards axiological problems; he worked on questions of historical development and the purpose of history. In 1936 he published a book, Kantv kriticismus a problém hodnoty (Kant's Criticism and the Problem of Value). He collected his studies from the '30s and '40s in the book Hodnoty a djiny (Values and History, 1947); later contributions were published in a miscellany Být národem (To Be a Nation, 1969).

Jiina Popelová-Otáhalová (1904-1985) began her philosophic career with the search for answers in the crisis to which the course of Czech and world philosophy had arrived.⁽¹⁷⁵⁾ She saw an extraphilosophical aspect of this problem in the crisis of society and thus put special emphasis on the analysis of its gnoseological dimension. Popelová did not deny the historical significance of European as well as of Czech positivism (as her 1942 book on Frantiek Kreji witnessed), but she did not agree with its dissolution of philosophy into the sciences and its splitting of the Weltanschauung into fragments of popularized natural science. In contrast to many other critics of positivism, she did not move toward any form of irrationalism or towards religion. She balanced especially the impulses she found in contemporary intellectual literature with those she found in Marx (whom she defended against simplified criticism). In her works she focused on the problems of noetics and on the methodology of the so-called cultural sciences, historical reality, and the purpose of history, values and evaluation: Poznání kulturní skutenosti (Cognition of Cultural Reality, 1936); Djiny a hodnoty (History and Values, 1940); Pravda a jistoty (Truth and Certainties, 1942); Ti studie z filozofie djin (Three Studies from the History of Philosophy, 1947). Her post-war works dealt with some periods of European and Czech philosophy and with ethical matters: Studie o souasné eské filozofii (A study of Contemporary Czech Philosophy, 1947); K filozofické problematice Marxova Kapitálu (On Philosophical Problems in Marx's Das Kapital, 1954); Cesta J.A. Komenského k venáprav (Comenius' Road to Universal Rectification, 1958); Etika (Ethics, 1962); Rozpad klasické filozofie (Break-up of Classical Philosophy, 1968); Zrození filozofie (Birth of Philosophy, 1981); Étos a práce (Ethos and Labour, 1981); Problém norem (The Problem of Norms, 1981); and Filozofia Jana Amosa Komenského (The Philosophy of Comenius, 1986).