| Region: | Western philosophy |
| Era: | 20th-century philosophy |
| Milič Čapek | |
| Birth Date: | 26 January 1909 |
| Birth Place: | Třebechovice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary |
| Death Place: | Little Rock, Arkansas, United States |
| School Tradition: | Process philosophy |
| Main Interests: | Metaphysics, Modern physics, Philosophy of space and time |
| Influences: | James, Peirce, Bergson, Whitehead |
| Influenced: | Gilles Deleuze, Isabelle Stengers, William Lane Craig, Rupert Sheldrake |
| Notable Ideas: | Process philosophy |
Milič Čapek, (26 January 1909 – 17 November 1997) was a Czech–American philosopher. Čapek was strongly influenced by the process philosophy of Henri Bergson and to a lesser degree by Alfred North Whitehead. Much of his work was devoted to the relation of philosophy and modern physics, especially the philosophy of space and time and metaphysics.
Čapek was born in the municipality of Třebechovice in present-day Czech Republic (then part of Austria-Hungary).[1]
He was married to Stephanie Čapek (born Štěpánka Řežábková), who was a school teacher in Czechoslovakia and later a housewife, and died on July 14, 1998 (aged 82), in Little Rock, Arkansas.[2] Together they have a daughter, Dr. Stella M. Čapek from Conway, Arkansas.[3]
In 1935 Čapek received his Ph.D. in philosophy at Charles University in Prague. Following the German occupation, he escaped from Czechoslovakia and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he also directed Czech-language broadcasts back to his homeland. Ten days before the Nazi invasion, Čapek left Paris and went to America after an odyssey via Dakar, Casablanca and a Vichy concentration camp in Morocco. During the war he taught physics in the Army Specialized Training Program at the University of Iowa, the V-12 Navy College Training Program at Doan College, and at the University of Nebraska. After the war he returned to Czechoslovakia, where he taught briefly at the Palacký University of Olomouc. One month before the 1948 communist coup d'état he was fleeing once again, to take up permanent residence and citizenship in the United States.[1]
In 1948 joined the Carleton College philosophy faculty. In 1962 he accepted a position as professor of philosophy at Boston University, where he served with distinction until his retirement in 1974. His visiting professorships included the Davis Campus of the University of California, Emory University, University of North Texas, Yale University, and, again, Carleton, as the Donald J. Cowling Distinguished Visiting professor of philosophy. In 1983 Čapek was honored by Carleton with a Doctor of Letters degree.[1]
Čapek was the author of numerous articles in scholarly journals[4] [5] as well as of several books. Milič Čapek made major contributions to the understanding of the philosophical implications of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, and to the philosophy of time.[1] He supported a dynamic view of time with real flow and genuine becoming, as opposed to the common block universe view with its static interpretation of time.[6] Čapek stated that the reason why we think of time and space as "space-time" and rather than "time-space" is because we give priority to the spatial aspect in our effort to geometrize events and moments, or to render them "space-like", as Einstein said.[7]