Abstrakt
The article focuses on Swiss zoologist and professor of University of Basel Adolf Portmann (1897 - 1982) whose work became especially influential among Czech natural philosophers. Portmann was studying an aesthetical di- mension of living creatures, which he conceived not as an epiphenomenon of physiological and biological processes, but as a very subject of knowledge.
He postulated that "self-expression of inwardness" (Selbstdarstellung der In- nerlichkeit) is the integral part of everything living and manifest itself through display (eigentliche Erscheinung). This article aim to present a more complex picture of the thinker and his significance in Czech philosophical environment to Slovak reader.