At the end of the summer semester of 1972, Jan Patočka was forced to end his lecturing activities at the Faculty of Arts. In the autumn of the same year, he complied with the request of his former students and, in connection with the discussion that took place among them over the then current text by M. Heidegger, The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thought, he gave a private lecture in which he discussed the topic of the demise of philosophy from a different, complementary perspective. He repeated his lecture in a new form at the beginning of 1973 and prepared its final form on the basis of a tape recording. The publication of the lecture could not, of course, have taken place during the author's lifetime, and it was only published in the samizdat Archival Collection of Jan Patočka's Works. From there the lecture was reprinted in 1987 in the exile magazine Proměny in New York. While Heidegger's point was to indicate why his thought sought to transcend the tradition of European philosophy from which it emerged in a radical way, Patočka goes through the history of this tradition in a grand arc, giving an account of how this transcendence was prepared within the tradition itself. The separate publication of this lecture complements the publication of the Czech translation of Heidegger's volume The Thing of Thought, which contains his lecture on the end of philosophy.
Czech edition