PHILOSOPHERS from Czechia

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 82.84, 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. He turned down an offer to immigrate to the New England Colonies and take up the presidency of the newly founded Harvard University.

2. Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938)

With an HPI of 80.57, Edmund Husserl is the 2nd most famous Czech Philosopher.  His biography has been translated into 81 different languages.

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (Austrian German: [ˈɛdmʊnd 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 banned from using 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 75.57, Hans Kelsen is the 3rd most famous Czech Philosopher.  His biography has been translated into 47 different languages.

Hans Kelsen (; German: [ˈhans ˈkɛlzən]; October 11, 1881 – April 19, 1973) was an Austrian and later American jurist, legal philosopher and political philosopher. He is known principally for his theory of law, which he named the "pure theory of law (Reine Rechtslehre)", and for his writings on international law and theory of democracy. The "pure theory" provides general foundations for value-independent description of law. As an expert in constitutional law, Kelsen was the principal architect of the 1920 Austrian Constitution, which, with amendments, remains in force. The rise of totalitarianism forced him out of Austria, then to Germany and to Switzerland and in 1940 to the United States. Although in 1934 Roscoe Pound lauded Kelsen as "unquestionably the leading jurist of the time", the pure theory was rarely understood in the United States and Kelsen was never given a permanent position in a law school. He was employed in the department of politics at the University of California, Berkeley from 1942 until official retirement in 1952. He then rewrote his short book of 1934, titled Reine Rechtslehre, into a much enlarged "second edition" published in 1960; it appeared in an English translation in 1967.

4. Bernard Bolzano (1781 - 1848)

With an HPI of 74.68, Bernard Bolzano is the 4th 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.

5. Karl Kautsky (1854 - 1938)

With an HPI of 74.17, Karl Kautsky is the 5th most famous Czech Philosopher.  His biography has been translated into 52 different languages.

Karl Johann Kautsky (; German: [ˈkaʊtski]; 16 October 1854 – 17 October 1938) was a Czech-Austrian Marxist theorist. One of the most authoritative promulgators of orthodox Marxism after the death of Friedrich Engels in 1895, he was for decades the leading theorist of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Second International. His influence was so pervasive that he was often called the "Pope of Marxism", and his views dominated European Marxism until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Born in Prague and educated in Vienna, Kautsky became a Marxist in 1881 through his association with Eduard Bernstein, while in exile in Zurich. He founded the influential journal Die Neue Zeit in 1883 and was its editor for 35 years. From 1885 to 1890, he lived in London, where he became a close friend of Engels. Following the repeal of Germany's Anti-Socialist Laws, he authored the theoretical section of the SPD's 1891 Erfurt Program. His commentary on the program, The Class Struggle, became a popular and widely circulated summary of Marxism. Kautsky's orthodox Marxism advocated a gradualist, evolutionary approach to socialism. He argued that a socialist revolution was inevitable but could not be forced prematurely. The role of a socialist party was to organise the working class, win political reforms, and improve workers' lives through the institutions of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, until material conditions were ripe for the transition to socialism. This "centrist" position, positioned between reformism and revolutionary radicalism, drew him into major conflicts. He defended Marxist orthodoxy against the revisionism of his friend Bernstein, opposed the revolutionary spontaneity advocated by Rosa Luxemburg, and became a lifelong critic of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Kautsky's pre-war influence collapsed after 1914. He opposed the SPD's decision to support the German war effort, which led him to break with the party and co-found the anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) in 1917. After the war, he became a prominent critic of the October Revolution, denouncing it as a premature coup that had established a new form of dictatorship. He argued that the Bolsheviks' methods had betrayed the democratic principles he saw as essential to socialism. He rejoined the SPD in 1922 but his influence steadily declined. He fled to Amsterdam after the 1938 Anschluss of Austria, where he died the same year. Vilified by Leninists as a "renegade", Kautsky is seen by others as a consistent proponent of democratic socialism whose work continued to influence modern currents.

6. Jerome of Prague (1379 - 1416)

With an HPI of 71.47, 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 65.54, Jan Patočka is the 7th most famous Czech Philosopher.  His biography has been translated into 25 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 64.79, Vilém Flusser is the 8th most famous Czech Philosopher.  His biography has been translated into 22 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 logic theory through 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 61.59, Karel Kosík is the 9th most famous Czech Philosopher.  His biography has been translated into 22 different languages.

Karel Kosík (Czech: [ˈkosiːk]; 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. František Tomášek (1899 - 1992)

With an HPI of 61.32, František Tomášek is the 10th most famous Czech Philosopher.  His biography has been translated into 21 different languages.

František Tomášek (30 June 1899, in Studénka, Moravia – 4 August 1992, in Prague, Czechoslovakia) was a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church in Bohemia, the 34th Archbishop of Prague, and a Roman Catholic theologian. His "cautious but resolute opposition to the Czechoslovak communist regime helped to bring about its peaceful demise in the 1989 Velvet Revolution".