One of the major works of postwar Marxist philosophy, and a particularly important contribution from the Czech Marxist-humanist tradition.

Kosík’s central argument is against both crude empiricism and abstract theorising, arguing that reality is not simply the collection of things immediately available to us. Everyday appearances form what he calls a world of the “pseudo-concrete”: seemingly self-evident facts, institutions and habits whose historical relations and underlying structures have disappeared from view.

From there, Dialectics of the Concrete becomes an inquiry into how thought can recover the world as a structured, historical whole without flattening it into a system. Kosík moves through Marx, Hegel, economics, labour, praxis, science and everyday life, arguing for a dialectical method capable of holding structure and specificity together. The result sits somewhere between Marxist philosophy, phenomenology and social theory, and remains especially useful wherever the question is not merely what reality looks like, but how it came to look inevitable. This was the first English-language edition, translated from the Czech by Karel Kovanda with James Schmidt.

D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland / Boston, 1976. First English edition. Paperback. Synthese Library, Volume 106; Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume LII. Light shelf wear and rubbing to covers, with some edge and corner wear and a small crease to upper front corner. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.