Karel Kosík and Dialectics of the Concrete

In 1963 Karel Kosík, a Czech neomarixt philosopher, published his trailblazing book, Dialectics of the Concrete. Both Marxist and non-Marxist thinkers were impacted in Czechoslovakia and throughout the world. The Institute of Philosophy hosted an international conference to explore Kosik’s seminal work in breadth and depth. In his book, Kosík strove to re-think the basic concepts of the Marxist philosophical tradition and to employ them in analyzing social reality. The wide array of issues he explored are still relevant today. Included are mystification of the "pseudo-concrete"; the social role of art; the conception of reality as a concrete totality; the conception of the human being as an onto-formative being (i.e., one that forms human and extra-human reality in its totality); the systematic connection between labor and temporality; the relationship between praxis and labour and the explanatory power of the dialectical method.
This conference took place July 4–6, 2014 at Villa Lanna.