Philosophy and the Sciences

Abstract

In all these and other definitions of philosophy, no matter how varied, I find a basic assumption explicitly or at least implicity expressed, namely, that philosophy is, in a word, human pansophy or omniscience. Philosophy is essentially a scientia generalis or universalis, as Descartes and Leibniz put it, or, as it is called nowadays, a unified world-view.

This is another passage from The Foundations of Concrete Logic. The work can be viewed as the expression of Masaryk’s belief in great unifying forces of human spirit. In this book Masaryk undertook the attempt at a ‘classification and organisation of the sciences’ in which he saw a precondition for the advancement of human thought toward a ‘unifed’world-view. The secondary purpose of the work was to provide the students of the Prague University with a Czech-language handbook for Masaryk’s lectures. The position and role of philosophy are discussed in the chapter Die Philosophie und die Wissenschaften. The following text is the translation of Part B of that chapter, dealing with philosophy as the all-embracing scientia generalis.