Jaroslav Kříž
work as:
scientist
writer
philosopher
E-mail:
j.kriz25351@iex.cz
In spite of his scientific success, he was expelled from the Institute in 1973 because of his political activities during the Prague Spring (1968) and afterwards.
From 1973 to 1990, he worked in industrial research. During this time, he started activities in philosophy, psychology and literature. He published a number of philosophical studies and essays in underground editions. After the Velvet Revolution, he also published in some respected periodicals. He also wrote short stories in Czech and English and published some of them under various pseudonyms. Some of his English short stories were also broadcasted. One of them, The Late Spring, was considered by BBC to be the best story written by a foreigner in five years. In 1990, he returned to the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic where he works ever since. In 2000, he resumed publication of literary and philosophical works.
Science:
He is Chief Science Fellow of the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry, Prague (where he acquired his PhD in 1968 and DSc in 2002). His field is the structure and dynamics of macromolecular and model systems. His main interest in the recent years has been the cooperativity of the non-covalent bonds between macromolecules in their forming of supramolecular functional systems (Award of the Learned Society in 2003). The main tools of his research are nuclear magnetic resonance and quantum-mechanical calculations. He published over 160 original scientific articles in leading journals, in the last decade mostly in the Journal of Physical Chemistry.
Literature:
From 1999 to 2007 he wrote 8 books, all in Czech. Only 4 of the have been published, namely literary-philosophical essays Postavy a světy (Characters and Worlds, 2000), a novella Doteky ve tmě (Touches in the Dark, 2002), a novel Kruhy na vodě (Circles on Water, 2004), and a novella Sestra Mneme (Sister Mneme, 2007). the remaining novels Dwindling Time, The Laws of Contrast and Limits of Adaptation, have not found a publisher yet.
Philosophy:
Besides a number of works in epistemology, ontology and axiology, he mainly formulated his original Philosophy of Definiteness (originally published as Generative Theses to the Philosophy of Definiteness in an underground Czech edition)
