Abstract

The main goal of my inquiry is to lay out the proximity between Patočka’s and Ricœur’s readings of Husserl’s Krisis and to stress the role played by the concept of the life-world in the unfolding of their original philosophical undertakings. In the first part, I show the importance both Patočka and Ricœur assigned to the Husserlian project of an “ontology of the life-world”. In the second part, I expose the criticism these two authors addressed to Husserl’s understanding of the life-world and, more precisely, to the idea that the exploration of the life-world is merely another way of gaining access to transcendental subjectivity. In the last part, I show how the concrete descriptions of the life-world given by Patočka and Ricœur depart massively from the Husserlian perspective.