Gustav Strandberg & Hugo Strandberg 
Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death 

This volume contains for the first time in English, Jan Patočka’s seminal essay “The Phenomenology of Afterlife”, as well as contributions surrounding and analyzing this text. In his essay, Patočka reflects on our relation to the dead and on how the departure of a loved one affects our continued existence. The premise of Patočka’s investigation is that our existence always takes place by and through an originary and reciprocal “being for others”.






The contributors in the volume extend the field of inquiry into the wider phenomenological and post-phenomenological discussion of death by being cognizant of how works of literature can broaden our understanding of the care of death, grief, forgiveness and non-reciprocal love. Also included are reflections on issues of philosophical anthropology, community, collective memory, and the ecstatic nature of life – issues that can all be related back to Patočka’s initial reflections, but which nonetheless radiate intoa myriad of directions. This volume appeals to students and researchers in the field.

Table of Content

1. Gustav Strandberg and Hugo Strandberg: Introduction.- 2. Jan Patočka: The Phenomenology of Afterlife.- 3. Jan Frei: To Live after Death: Where? Patočka’s “Phenomenology of Afterlife” and Its Contexts.- 4. Gustav Strandberg: Dying with the Other: Death as the Manifestation of Community.- 5. Nicolas de Warren: The Intimacy of Disappearance.- 6. Hugo Strandberg: Forgiveness and the Dead.- 7. Tomáš Hejduk: Postmortal Openness to Meaning.- 8. Ondřej Beran: The Other Modern Séances.- 9. Erin Plunkett: What Does It Mean to Love the Dead?.- 10. Lovisa Andén: Between Memory and History: Retracing Historical Knowledge through a Phenomenology of Afterlife.- 11. Antony Fredriksson: Drawing a Line or Blurring the Contour between Animate and Inanimate with Clarice Lispector and Jan Patočka.- 12. Niklas Forsberg: “Unresting Death, a Whole Day Nearer Now”: Parfit and Patočka on Death and False Consolations.

About the author

Gustav Strandberg is a philosopher and translator, based at Södertörn University, Stockholm. He is the author of a monograph on Patočka, entitled Politikens omskakning: negativitet, samexistens och frihet i Jan Patočkas tänkande (The Tremor of Politics: Negativity, Co-existence, and Freedom in the Thought of Jan Patočka) and the editor of a forthcoming volume entitled Populism and the People in Contemporary Critical Thought, published by Bloomsbury in 2023.
Hugo Strandberg is associate professor of philosophy at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. He is the author of several monographs, the two most recent being Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception and Forgiveness and Moral Understanding, both published by Palgrave (in 2015 and 2021).