Background
Roretz, Karl was born on July 24, 1881 in Horn. Lower-Austria.
Critical positivist hctionalist
Roretz, Karl was born on July 24, 1881 in Horn. Lower-Austria.
Jurisprudence, Philosophy and Medicine, University of Vienna. Doctoral thesis, ‘Das Einfühlungsproblem in der modernen Ästhetik’, i 906.
1922-1951, Privatdozent for recent history of philosophy. University of Vienna. From i 930, Extraordinary Professor.
Although Roretz belonged to the positivistic h'adition, he is at the same time influenced by neo-Kantianism. As an epistemologist he took an anti-dogmatic and scientific standpoint and vehemently criticized metaphysical doctrines: nietaphysical concepts are inconsistent fictions •fictions in the sense of Hans Vaihinger). In his ntajor work An den Quellen unseres Denkens [Sources of our thought] (1937), Roretz analyses *he so-called ‘ Vitalbegriffe' which have their origin in volitive or evaluative attitudes. As a philosopher and psychologist of culture he was concerned with the inner dynamics of cultural products and the analysis of mass phenomena in religion, politics and art. As a historian of philosophy he played a decisive role as a contributor to Rudolf Eisler's Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe; in 1924 Roretz edited Geschichte der neueren Philosophie from the posthumous manuscripts of his teacher Friedrich Jodi. Within a greater philosophical audience Roretz is rather unknown.