Jan Janko:
What Can we Really Say about Science? Reflections on Book of Jan Horský

Abstract

The author shares the opinion of Jan Horský, the Czech historian, in his book Historiography between Science and Narration that only theory can bring together the researched past and the lived present in the history of science. He believes that narrative without science is blind and history without narrative is blank. Further, he believes that our discipline suffers from backwardness because it supports the “history of ideas” only very little. The history of institutions or prosopography dominates the history of science almost entirely. Nevertheless, our idealists – among them E. Rádl – knew well that ideas are the forerunners of institutions, which is the same conception as that proposed later by the Starnberg group, which was influenced by Marxism and externalism in its conception of finalization of science.