South Slavs, philosophy of

3. Academic philosophy before the Second World War

From their inception, the first South Slav institutions of higher learning have established chairs of philosophy or logic: in 1863, the Beograd Great School (since 1905 the University of Beograd), in 1874 the University of Zagreb, and in 1919 the University of Ljubljana. These, as well as the universities which were founded later, have remained centres of academic philosophy.

The first professor of logic in Beograd, Konstantin Branković, based his handbooks dealing with philosophy and logic on the works of the German academic W.T. Krug. His successor, Alimpije Vasiljević, used J.S. Mill’s Logic for the same purpose. The first philosophy professor at Zagreb, Franjo Marković (a pupil of Herbart) called for the study of Croatian philosophy, arguing that ‘only the people to have acquired a homeland of thought have firmly come to own their real homeland’.

Albert Bazala, Marković’s successor, was the author of Povjest filozofije (A history of philosophy) (1906), one of the first original works in history of philosophy in Serbo-Croat, in which Kant’s work is presented as the highest achievement of modern philosophy. He continued Marković’s research in the history of South Slav as well as Croatian philosophy. In his Metalogički korjen filozofije (The metalogical root of philosophy) Bazala argued that the human mind is not a static faculty but ‘a dynamic-teleological activity’. As a dynamic activity, cognition requires that its object be sustained in time and organically related to a whole; therefore, there are no singular truths about discrete objects. In opposition to this, Bazala’s colleague Pavao Vuk-Pavlović expounded a dualist theory in his Spoznaja i spoznajna teorija (Knowledge and theory of knowledge) (1926), where the truth-value of cognition is found in ‘an experience of the logically evident’ which may constitute singular truths. The relation between cognition and its objects is a subject-matter not of science but of a meta-empirical or metaphysical investigation. In defending his philosophical humanism, Vuk-Pavlović argued against Bazala’s determinism and emphasized the autonomy and creativity of each human being.

France Veber (Franz Weber), the first professor of philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, was also the first academic philosopher to write in Slovene. A pupil of Meinong, his Sistem filozofije (A system of philosophy) developed a theory of mental presentation and of objects. The presentations (Vorstellungen) are the basic ingredients of all experiences, including the sensory ones. Each sensory experience can be evaluated in terms of its function either of ‘attainment’ or ‘presentation’. The attainment is primary in sensory experiences of touch; in consequence, such experiences are closer to ‘encountering reality’ than any others. In visual experiences, presentation is primary, and thus reality is represented, not ‘encountered’. From 1930 onwards, Veber developed a philosophical anthropology and a philosophy of God as well as a new dynamic ontology, eschewing his earlier dichotomy of object–mental presentation. Several of his students developed his earlier theory of presentation, but as the communist regime removed him from his chair in 1945, his work was ignored in Slovenia until 1987.

Branislav Petronijević from Beograd was educated in Germany and inspired by the writings of Lotze and Von Hartmann. In his principal work Prinzipien der Metaphysik (Principles of metaphysics) (1904), he argued that being consists of simple, discrete qualitative points which are mutually related in various ways to form a unity. His metaphysical system was thus conceived as a synthesis of the metaphysics of Spinoza and Leibniz into ‘mono-pluralism’. Our immediate experience not only presents reality as is but is also the source of basic logical and metaphysical axioms (for example, the laws of identity, of contradiction and of excluded middle): all are derived from the data of immediate experience. His eclectic ‘empirio-rationalist’ epistemology was thus based on a rather complex derivation of logical laws from immediate experience.

Ksenija Atanasijević from Beograd was the first recognized woman philosopher among South Slavs and a leader of Beograd’s women’s movement. Educated in Paris, she wrote in French and German, producing studies on the philosophy of Epicurus and of Giordano Bruno as well as on the history of South Slav philosophy. Her principal work Filosofski fragmenti (Philosophical fragments) (1929), attempted to reconcile her metaphysical belief in the inevitability of evil with a justification of her activist, humanist stance.

Until the outbreak of war in 1941, philosophers at Zagreb, Ljubljana and Beograd pursued a wide variety of philosophical interests. In Ljubljana, the Neo-Thomist approach had been developed since the 1860s. Additionally, philosophers in Zagreb had interest in logical positivism, in Marxism and in the contemporary philosophy of education. In Beograd, philosophers had developed interests in Neo-Kantianism, pragmatism and Bergson’s philosophy, as well as in Eastern Orthodox philosophical traditions. Toma Živanović and Đorđe Tasić, Beograd professors of law, wrote in German, French and Italian on the relation of morality and law and on the fundamental grounds of law. Their colleague Slobodan Jovanović critically examined the political philosophy of Plato, Machiavelli, Burke and Marx; his essays, published in the 1930s, are minor classics of Serbian prose. Partly due to this divergence of interests, there was almost no contact or dialogue between these three academic centres during this period.