The History of Notions and Ideas in the Works of Emanuel Rádl
Roman Pazderský
Roman Pazderský (*1988) is a PhD student at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Charles University in Prague , pazderskyroman@seznam.cz Other contributions by the same author
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The text is a collection of several brief observations and considerations which
deal with Emanuel Rádl (1873–1942), an important Czech philosopher, and his
contribution to Czech scholarship in the area of history of ideas. The text opens
with a brief contextualisation of Radl’s work within the general milieu of Czech
intellectual life of the first half of the twentieth century. Then the author traces
Radl’s role in highlighting the importance of terminology in contemporary
Czech interdisciplinary discourse, especially in the so-called ‘struggle for the
meaning of Czech history’, where Radl’s views are compared, among others, to
those of Mendl, Slavík, and Pekař.
In the second part of the contribution, the author analyses Radl’s original
approach to the history of ideas using the example of his two most important
works, which focus on the history of thought in natural science (Dějiny
vývojových teorií v biologii [The History of Evolutionary Theories], Prague
1909) and in social science (Dějiny filosofi e [A History of Philosophy], Prague
1932–1933). This analysis demonstrates that though Radl’s link to this, at that
time nascent and not yet fully established, scientific field was only implicit, this
philosopher ought to be seen as one of the foremost pioneers of the history
ideas and history of thought in the Czech intellectual environment. The
conclusion offers some brief thoughts on the relevance of Radl’s intellectual
legacy especially in the still hotly debated field of possible theoretical and
methodological links between natural science and humanities, especially the
historical science.