South Slavs, philosophy of

Philosophy as a distinct intellectual activity emerged in the coastal towns of the Adriatic during the Renaissance. Philosophers from this area wrote in Latin and taught philosophy in Italy, Germany and Austria. The first popular philosophical works in the vernacular did not appear until late in the eighteenth century, and it was almost one hundred years later that the first chairs in logic and philosophy were founded in the universities. Academic philosophy, usually derived from German or British models, was thus brought into the intellectual life of South Slavs. Local academic philosophers, mostly educated in Germany, brought home a variety of philosophical approaches, and by the early twentieth century many schools of thought flourished: Neo-Kantianism flourished in Beograd, while Neo-Thomism was particularly strong in Ljubljana and Zagreb (until 1941 the Meinongian phenomenological approach also flourished in Ljubljana). In their quest for originality, local philosophers constructed various eclectic philosophical systems.

The Soviet Marxism-Leninism, imposed in all Yugoslav universities after 1945, was replaced in the late 1950s by a Neo-Marxist approach based on the concept of praxis. This was a concept of a purposeful human activity which, among other things, results in social change (for example, the development of socialism). These Neo-Marxists engaged in vigorous debates on the nature of truth and knowledge, on human freedom, alienation, socialism and humanism as well as on social and political issues. Their work reached an international audience through the international journal Praxis, published in Zagreb, and through their international summer school of philosophy at Korčula. As their support for the Yugoslav communist regime turned into open criticism, the regime halted the publication of Praxis and in 1974 forced the Beograd Neo-Marxists from their teaching posts.

The Neo-Marxist interest in non-Marxist philosophy facilitated the reception of various non-Marxist approaches. From the early 1960s, existentialism, structuralism, hermeneutics and phenomenology – in particular the philosophy of Heidegger – exerted considerable influence on Neo-Marxists as well as on philosophers who had gradually abandoned this approach. In the early 1970s, a younger generation of thinkers in Beograd, Zagreb, Ljubljana and Zadar developed an interest in analytic philosophy. Since that time no approach or trend in philosophy has emerged as the dominant one in any of the academic centres in the countries which were formerly part of Yugoslavia.