Jan Patocka is now considered to have been one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. He was a student of both Husserl and Heidegger. He lived most of his adult life in Communist Czechoslovakia, where he was at times banned from publishing his work and from holding academic positions. Having written his Heretical Essays, Patocka defied the Communist regime as one of the spokespersons associated with Charta 77. He died in 1977, following two months of police interrogation.

Patocka's celebrated Introduction, here made available in English for the first time, is not an introduction in the ordinary sense of the term. Patocka ranges over the whole of Husserl's output, from The Philosophy of Arithmetic to The Crisis of the European Sciences, and traces the evolution of all the central issues of Husserlian phenomenology - intentionality, categorial intuition, temporality, the subject-body; the concrete a priori, and transcendental subjectivity. But rather than attempting to give a tour of Husserl's workshop, Patocka is himself hard at work on Husserl's problems.