Patrick Flack
Senior Researcher
Department of Philosophy
Rue Criblet 13
1700 Fribourg
Hours of reception
Biography
Senior Lecturer in history of ideas of Central and Eastern Europe at the University of Fribourg since 2021. He studied Russian, philosophy and history in Geneva, Berlin and Moscow, before obtaining a PhD from Charles University in Prague (2011). He was then a SNF post-doc researcher at the Central-European Institute of Philosophy (Prague), the Peter-Szondi Institute (Berlin) and the Husserl Archives (Leuven). In 2012, he founded sdvig press, an open access digital publishing platform, which runs the international project Open Commons of Phenomenology
Research and publications
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Publications
15 publications
Inner Form and the Development of the Concept of Expression in Structuralism and Phenomenology (Špet, Jakobson, Merleau-Ponty)
Patrick Flack, Histoire Épistémologie Langage (2023) | Journal articlePhenomenology as an Abortive Science of Art: Two Contexts of Early Phenomenological Aesthetics ( Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft and GAChN )
Patrick Flack, Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology (2023) | Journal articleReview of: Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov, Die Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (1906–1943): Idee – Institution – Kontext, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft Sonderheft 20, 2021. 389 pages. Paperback: ISBN 978-3-7873-3648-7, € 138,00; PDF: ISBN 978-3-7873-3649-4, € 104,99
Patrick Flack, Studies in East European Thought (2023) | Journal articleHendrik Pos, la conscience linguistique et la phénoménologie du langage
Patrick Flack, Signifiances (Signifying) (2021) | Journal articleReview of Goldsmith & Laks (2019): Battle in the Mind Fields
Patrick Flack, Historiographia Linguistica (2020) | Journal articleTranslator's note to Giovanni Piana, "The idea of a phenomenological structuralism"
Giovanni Piana, Phenomenological Reviews (2020) | Journal articleLe « sens du réel » et l’indication chez Trần Đức Thảo. Une comparaison critique avec Hendrik Pos
Patrick Flack, Histoire Epistémologie Langage (2020) | Journal articleFrom Šklovskij's modernist aesthetics to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology
Patrick Flack, Acta Structuralica (2019) | Journal articleIdée, expression, vécu: la question du sens entre phénoménologie et structuralisme
Patrick Flack (Hermann, 2018), ISBN: 9782705695514 | BookPrinciples of structural phenomenology
Simone Aurora and Patrick Flack, Acta Structuralica (2018) | Journal article -
Research projects
Communities of Dialogue: Russian & Ukrainian Émigrés in Modernist Prague
Status: OngoingStart 01.10.2023 End 30.09.2027 Funding SNSF Open project sheet A major centre of European modernism that witnessed the creation of now canonical literary and artistic works (by Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Seiffert, Toyen, Alfons Mucha, etc.) and that contributed to the rise of influential new methods in the human sciences (Gestalt psychology, phenomenology, structuralism), Prague is known as a multi-cultural city that was profoundly shaped by the polemical relations of its Czech, German, and Jewish communities. Omitted from this standard account of Prague as a “Tripolis”, a city of three cultures, is the presence there, during the interwar period, of strong Russian and Ukrainian diasporas, which were invited directly by the Czechoslovak president Tomáš Masaryk after the Russian Civil War in 1921 and featured outstanding figures (Marina Cvetaeva, Petr Struve, Sergej Bulgakov, Roman Jakobson; Dmytro Cyževs'kyj). Given the complex, networked organisation of modernist Prague into “national” or “political” communities, moreover, Russian and Ukrainian émigrés not only partook significantly in its scientific and artistic life, for instance through the Prague Linguistic Circle, but contributed to dynamise and reconfigure its entire intercultural communicative structures. The present project explores the concrete intellectual entanglements of the Russian and Ukrainian émigré communities in Prague and clarifies the modalities of their participation in both Prague modernism and the European human sciences. Specifically, it investigates the forms of institutional and personal cooperation through which Russian and Ukrainian émigrés organised their own communities and shaped modernist Prague, focussing on the collaborative activities of key mediating figures such as the philosophers Boris Jakovenko (1884-1949), Sergej Gessen (1887-1950), and Nikolaj Alekseev (1879-1964), the literary scholars Al'fred Bem (1886-1945), Dmytro Cyževs'kyj (1894-1977) and Leonid Bilet'skij (1882-1955), the art historian Dmytro Antonovyc (1877-1945), as well as their main Czech interlocutors, Tomáš Masaryk (1850-1937) and Jan Patocka (1907-1977). The project is organised into three research modules highlighting interrelated aspects of the collective intellectual activities of Prague’s émigrés : A) Discourses on Titanism explores a central literary and philosophical motive of interwar Czechoslovakia’s interrogation of cultural and political identity ; B) Dialogues of Value discusses the intermingled development of concepts of value in phenomenology, structuralism, Neo-Kantianism, and Brentanian psychology ; C) Ukrainian Prague questions Ukrainian efforts to establish a specific national intellectual culture in light of the European scope of modernist Prague. Further, a documentation module structures and preserves in digital form the information collected through archival research and in the research modules. Finally, a contextual module provides a forum to assess Prague’s émigré communities within the phenomena of Russian and Ukrainian emigration, Prague modernism, European human sciences, as well as their relevance to the tension between national and universalist intellectual cultures in interwar Europe. The project delivers a new picture of interwar Prague, correcting its tripartite division and redefining the role of intercultural dialogue between specific traditions in its development as a European centre of modernism and human sciences. It provides a major contribution to research on Russian emigration in one of its least studied centres, as well as a new study of the intellectual impact of Ukrainian émigrés in Prague. It also explores comparatively the links between exile, political identity and intellectual cultures in the interwar period. Further, the project specifically highlights how the Russian and Ukrainian presence in Prague contributed to a unique concentration of methods or traditions (formalist aesthetics and literary studies, religious philosophy, Brentanian psychology, Neo-Kantianism) whose interplay led to a fundamental expansion of the concept of value.