Sestavil Robert Krumphanzl

Jiří Němec (1932‒2001) was one of the most prominent figures in cultural and intellectual life from the late 1950s to the first half of the 1980s. He was one of the initiators of the so-called Ecumenical Seminar in Jircháře, which became the first public platform for free religious, philosophical, and cultural dialogue in communist Czechoslovakia. He also participated in the preparations for the so-called Work of Council Renewal, an association striving to implement the ideas of the Second Vatican Council into the everyday life of the Catholic Church. After 1968, he co-created parallel cultural and philosophical activities, whether they were then semi-legal or illegal study or discussion groups, or literary, musical, or artistic events forming the so-called Czech underground. In 1976, he was among the closest circle of initiators and organizers of Charta 77 and was directly involved in formulating its declaration. He was also among the first members of the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS). He authored dozens of studies and articles in the fields of philosophy, literature, and psychology (a collected edition is being prepared). Through his translation and editorial work, he mediated contemporary and previously unknown philosophical and theological works in Czechoslovakia (Blondel, Teilhard de Chardin, Eliade, Foucault, Gadamer, Gebsattel, Heidegger, Tresmontant, and others). The first version of this bibliography, published nearly a quarter of a century ago in the journal Kritický sborník (vol. 18, 1999, no. 4, pp. 63–94), contained a total of 306 items. The current list is more than twice as extensive. A significant portion of the texts listed in the bibliography consists of publications by samizdat publishers, workshops, or editions, private prints, or other “inedita”.