Towards a New Research Era. A Global Comparison of Research Distortions

0572004 - FLÚ 2024 RIV NL eng M - Monography Chapter
Svoboda, Jan
The Relevance of Humanities in Masaryk’s System of Sciences.
Towards a New Research Era. A Global Comparison of Research Distortions. Leiden: Brill, 2023 - (Hrubec, M.; Višňovský, E.), s. 156-170. ISBN 978-90-04-54493-2
Grant - others:AV ČR(CZ) StrategieAV21/15
Program: StrategieAV
Institutional support: RVO:67985955
Keywords : T. G. Masaryk * classification of sciences * humanities * scientific metaphysics * ethics * David Hume * Auguste Comte * John Stuart Mill * Franz Brentano
OECD category: Philosophy, History and Philosophy of science and technology
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004546035_012

This contribution is dedicated to the intellectual legacy of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first Czechoslovak president. It focuses on a system of sciences Masaryk developed in the 1880s. Within this classification, humanities occupy a special position. It is also in this area, specifically in psychology and sociology, that he feels best qualified to offer a theoretical foundation. Masaryk views psychology along the lines outlined by John Stuart Mill and his own Viennese teacher, Franz Brentano, as an autonomous science that deals with a specific type of phenomena. As the starting point of Masaryk’s system of sciences, psychology has an integral metaphysical dimension, which affects Masaryk’s concept of ethics and ultimately also of religion. In particular, Masaryk incorporates ethics into a broader framework of psychological subjects. The most essential task of sociology is then to support ethics against the background of a narrowly conceived dynamics of social practice into which any person, being a zoon politicon, is inherently integrated. Humanities, that is, sciences about humans and their morally conducted social lives, cannot be reduced to, or even quantitatively compared with, mathematics or sciences that deal with living or non-living nature. Although humanities do use objective findings of the exact sciences where necessary, their focus, given by these sciences’ specific nature, is on phenomena sui generis. According to Masaryk, the main importance of humanities is ultimately, in their practical consequences, value-oriented, ethical, and when assessing and evaluating humanities, one cannot disregard this aspect of their nature or quantitatively neutralise it.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0343104