Kosík’s Concept of „Concrete Totality“ and Its Criticism

e-mail: bartosvit@seznam.cz

The paper introduces ontological and epistemological principles that Karel Kosík employs in his seminal work Dialectics of the Concrete.  It will be concerned particularly with methodologically fundamental part of the book called “Dialectics of the Concrete Totality”. Kosík states that the concept of “concrete totality” may provide better alternative to the terms “system” and “structure” as they are used in the context of modern naturalistic approach. This belief is further confirmed and developed by the implicit criticism of the naive holism. It is also expressed in a critique of the “fact” as it is postulated in logical atomism. In the presented paper, Kosík’s concept of the “Dialectics of the Concrete Totality” will be confronted with structuralist’s theory of “structure”,  especially with the genetic epistemology of Jean Piaget s. The paper aims to show that fundamental concepts and principles of Piaget’s genetic structuralism and of the modern system theory provide more general and more useful conceptual framework for understanding the nature of a transformation and evolution as well as of dialectics of particular processes in their totality.