Comments of Patočka's lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

The aim of this diploma thesis is to offer a comprehensive commentary of Patočka's unpublished lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, which he gave at the Charles University during the summer semester of 1949. These lectures remain unfinished and the exposition of the Phenomenology of Spirit ends before the chapter on morality. Patočka is influenced, to a considerable degree, by the unorthodox reading of Hegel that Kojéve presents in his Inroduction à la lecture de Hegel (1947) and also by a somewhat more conservative commentary by Jean Hyppolite, published in 1946 under the title Genese et structure de la Phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel. This thesis follows their influence on Patočka's commentary, in an attempt to discover Patočka's own interpretative stance. Patočka places the Phenomenology of Spirit into a wide context and tries to illustrate its genesis. Following Kojéve, Patočka's interpretation remains nested within an anthropological perspective, considering the master-slave dialectic to be the centerpiece of Hegel's philosophy