The Grounds of Concrete Logic (Základové konkretné logiky) is often taken to be a work in which Masaryk attempts to outline, in a methodical way, his conception of philosophy as “a real scientific metaphysics”. Nevertheless, we often hear from the Masaryk’s critics, and even from his followers, that the book appears to be no more than a transcription of Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive. Even if the classification of the
sciences was one of the main philosophical and scientific problems with which Masaryk was engaged throughout his life, in the emphasis on concrete sciences, and in the working out of the relations between particular sciences and categories, Masaryk goes beyond Comte. This point is supported, at the same time, by the many critical notes concerning the inadequacy of Comte’s epistemological grounding, which Masaryk links, above all, to a critique of Comte’s phenomenalism. The specific quality and the critical reference of the book for future generations of Czech philosophers consists in its principled status and realist aim. Concrete logic should bring us to the ultimate ontological points of departure – to things themselves. In his prioritising of the need to seek the sense of things, Masaryk belongs to the modern thinkers who showed to Czech philosophy new possibilities and ways of approach to reality in a strictly scientific spirit.
The "Kopal" glassworks in Mnichovo Hradiště. The growth and fall of a Czech factory "for all kinds of raw materials needed for the Jablonec glass industry".