Materna was introduced to philosophy and logic by his father, Miloš Materna, a member of a group of interwar and postwar Czech logicians propagating and popularizing neopositivism in Czechoslovakia. In 1949, he enrolled at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University to study philosophy and psychology. He graduated in 1953, and in 1957 he completed his postgraduate studies by defending a dissertation called Zu einigen Fragen der modernen Definitionslehre, published in 1959. In 1965, he became an Assistant Professor and a year later an Associate Professor at Masaryk University, which he was forced to leave in 1976 due to a number of oppressive restrictions imposed on him by the communist authorities. He could return to teach and carry out research at the university only after the fall of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. In 1991, he was promoted to the rank of Full Professor of Masaryk University. Pavel Materna's most significant contributions to logic are in the fields of semantics and logical analysis of natural languages. A close friend of the logician Pavel Tichý, he is a keen follower and developer of Tichý's transparent intensional logic :
"... Based on the procedural semantics of TIL, I developed a new and original theory of concepts, where concept is a closed TIL construction. This is a realistic, anti-contextualist and compositional remarkable adjustment of Frege's notion of concept. My theory of concepts is thus closer to Bolzano's significant ideas, and in many aspects also to Church's conception."
Materna's scholarly activities have always extended beyond teaching, research and editorial work, and also include many translations and numerous textbooks for university students and general public.
Materna, Pavel "". Logic and Logical Philosophy23 : 47–55. ISSN 2300-9802. Duží, Marie, Bjørn Jespersen & Pavel Materna Procedural Semantics for Hyperintensional Logic – Foundations and Applications of Transparent Intensional Logic. Dordrecht: Springer.. Materna, Pavel "". Organon F17 : 3–20. ISSN 1335-0668. Materna, Pavel "Concepts and Recipes". Acta Analytica24 : 69–90. ISSN 0353-5150. Materna, Pavel "". ProFil5 : 1–14. ISSN 1212-9097. Materna, Pavel Conceptual Systems. Berlin: Logos Verlag.. Materna, Pavel Concepts and Objects. Helsinki: The Philosophical Society of Finland.. Materna, Pavel & Petr Kolář "On the Nature of Facts" IN Philosophie und Logik. Perspectives in Analytical Philosophy. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 77–96.. Materna, Pavel, Eva Hajičová & Petr Sgall "Redundant answers and topic-focus articulation". Linguistics and Philosophy10 : 101–113. ISSN 0165-0157. Svoboda, Aleš & Pavel Materna "Functional sentence perspective and intensional logic" IN Functionalism in Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 191–205.. Materna, Pavel "“Linguistic constructions” in the transparent intensional logic". Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics43: 5–24. ISSN 0032-6585. Svoboda, Aleš, Pavel Materna & Karel Pala "". Brno Studies in English13: 119–165. ISSN 0524-6881. Svoboda, Aleš, Pavel Materna & Karel Pala "". Brno Studies in English12: 159–186. ISSN 0524-6881.
