The article examines a) Rádl's concept of the responsibility of the intellectual for their society and b) his historical thought. The philosophical activism of this Czech biologist and philosopher (1873-1942), which certainly has something to do with influences from the 'philosophy of life', is put into relation with the traditional role of the writer as the nation's conscience, with the strong impression left by T. G. Masaryk, and of course with the interwar crisis of civilisation. Rádl not only disregards traditional conservative objections to the public engagement of intellectuals, but he directly defines philosophy from the positions of the ethics of responsibility. The conservative social democrat however essentially lacks an outline of historical evolutionary logic. Rádl's concept of history is modern insofar as it is based on the value relationship between the present and the amorphous past, but in the end he shies away from deriving from this conclusion the contingencies of an historical event or the subjectivity of our image of history. The ideas of the past 'provoke our participation'; on the other hand we make sovereign use of them for our own aims. Rather than pragmatism Rádl's concept of history is reminiscent of the neo-Kantian concept of the ordering of empirical material according to the apriori categories of Hermann Cohen.
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