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Between September 2nd and 7th, 1934, there took place in Prague the Eighth International Philosophical Congress which differed considerably from all preceding Congresses in that it was devoted primarily to social or even political problems of the current period, and to the trends which transformed the current collective life. This specific tenor of the deliberationsof the Congress was doubtless due to the fact that the Congress took place in the capital of a young republic whose President Thomas Masaryk was a former professor of philosophy and sociology. Just as many others, so also the Czech philosophers not only include sociology within the philosophical sciences, but also consider it obviously to be the most important philosophical science, demand a turn towards practical philosophy and stress the practical obligations of a philosopher with regard to cultural life. This explains the fact that such a subject as "the crisis of contemporary democracy" was the object of deliberations in one of the principal meetings of the Congress. This philosophical attitude of the Congress organizers was also followed by a lively interest in the problem of the philosophy-religion relationship, to which further impulse was given by then current anti-religious slogans, e.g. the well-known Bolshevik definition of religion as opium for the masses, by the crisis affecting Christianity owing to the ruin of the Eastern Church, and by the new slogans in the Protestant world.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-0768-6_6

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