Czech philosophy, has often eschewed "pure" speculative philosophy, emerging rather in the course of intellectual debates in the fields of education (e.g. Jan Amos Komenský), art (e.g. Karel Teige

Karel Teige

Karel Teige was the major figure of the Czech avant-garde movement Devětsil in the 1920s, a graphic artist, photographer, and typographer...

), literature (e.g. Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera , born 1 April 1929, is a writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. Kundera has written in...

), and especially politics (e.g. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk

Tomáš Masaryk

Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk , sometimes called Thomas Masaryk in English, was an Austro-Hungarian and Czechoslovak politician, sociologist and philosopher, who as an eager advocate of Czechoslovak independence during World War I became the founder and first President of Czechoslovakia, also was...

, Karel Kosík

Karel Kosík

Karel Kosík was a Czech Neomarxist philosopher. In his most famous philosophical work Dialectics of the Concrete Kosík presents an original synthesis of Martin Heidegger's version of phenomenology and the ideas of Young Marx...

, Ivan Sviták

Ivan Sviták

Ivan Sviták was a Czech philosopher, critic, and poet who ranked among Europe's most prominent proponents of Marxist humanism. In a vast oeuvre of essays, Sviták addressed questions of democracy and socialism, of art in bureaucratic and consumer societies, and of the "unbearable burden" of...

, Václav Havel

Václav Havel

Václav Havel is a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic . He has written over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally...

). Czech philosophers have also played a central role in the development of phenomenology, whose German-speaking founder Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...

 was born in the Czech Lands

Czech lands

Czech lands is an auxiliary term used mainly to describe the combination of Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia. Today, those three historic provinces compose the Czech Republic. The Czech lands had been settled by the Celts , then later by various Germanic tribes until the beginning of 7th...

. Czechs Jan Patočka

Jan Patocka

Jan Patočka is considered one of the most important contributors to Czech philosophical phenomenology, as well as one of the most influential central European philosophers of the 20th century...

 and Václav Bělohradský

Václav Belohradský

Václav Bělohradský is one of the most famous contemporary Czech philosophers and sociologists. A graduate in philosophy and Czech from Charles University, Prague, he has lived in Italy since 1970, where he is currently Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Trieste. He is said to be...

would later make important contributions to phenomenological thought.