A student of Husserl and Heidegger, Patocka was interested in the relationship between the mode of human consciousness and the surrounding ‘life-world’. He collaborated with V. Havel and J. Hájek in the dissident movement Charter 77, and died at the hands of the police. Translated works include Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology (1996), Heretical Essays in the History of Philosophy (1996), and Body, Community, Language, World (1998).