South Slavs, philosophy of

4. Philosophy after 1945

With the communist takeover in 1945, Soviet Marxism-Leninism became the official philosophy in Yugoslavia. Non-Marxist academic philosophers were faced with conversion to the official philosophy or dismissal. After the expulsion of the Yugoslav Communist Party from the Soviet-dominated international communist organization in 1948, Yugoslav Marxists were called upon to revise the official philosophy. Responding to this call, the post-war generation of Yugoslav philosophers developed a Neo-Marxist approach based on Marx’s concept of praxis (mentioned in his early writings) and inspired by the writings of the Frankfurt School members as well as French existentialists (see Existentialism; Frankfurt School). The concept of praxis was chosen partly because it symbolized the Marxist commitment to bringing about social change through purposeful action.

By 1960 the orthodox historical and dialectical materialism was replaced at all Yugoslav universities by this less rigid approach. From then until the early 1980s, Yugoslav philosophers vigorously debated the nature and scope of praxis, of knowledge and truth, of freedom, alienation, socialism and humanism as well as a variety of social and political issues. These debates were carried out not only in the newly founded philosophical journals (Filozofija in Beograd, Pregled in Sarajevo, Perspektive in Ljubljana) but also in the mass media. During these debates the concept of praxis came to be interpreted in the following distinct but ultimately compatible ways: (1) as a free and creative activity which defines a specifically human existence – this primarily anthropological interpretation was first advocated by Gajo Petrović in Zagreb; (2) as an object-directed activity firmly anchored in human history, providing an ontological ground not only for the human universe but also for the world of nature (Milan Kangrga, Zagreb); (3) as a source and criterion of human knowledge from which one could further derive the concepts of a subject and an object (Mihailo Marković, Beograd); (4) as a social activity, aiming at abolishing and transcending the limitations of the present social reality (this axiological interpretation was advocated both by Marković and Petrović).

Yugoslav Neo-Marxists organized an international summer school of philosophy on the island of Korčula and, from 1964, published the international journal Praxis in Zagreb. By the late 1960s, they had changed from ardent supporters to open critics of the Yugoslav communist regime; as a result, Praxis was forced to cease publication and Beograd Neo-Marxists were forced out of their teaching posts in 1975. This ended the Neo-Marxist domination of Yugoslav philosophy. The dialogue which they had initiated between Yugoslav philosophers from different academic centres – the first such sustained dialogue – ended in 1983 with a quarrel between Neo-Marxists from Zagreb and Beograd concerning the publication abroad of Praxis International (this journal ceased in 1994).

As Praxis-Neo-Marxists cultivated interests and contacts outside Marxist philosophy, Yugoslav academic philosophers became acquainted with various non-Marxist approaches to philosophy. Among the first to promote Heidegger’s approach to philosophy was Vanja Sutlić from Zagreb. In his principal work Bit i suvremenost (Essence and contemporaneity) (1967) he endeavoured to reinterpret the concept of praxis in Heideggerian terms: praxis was presented as the production of Sein from Dasein (see Heidegger, M. §4). Abdulah Šarčević from Sarajevo engaged in a multifaceted critique of bourgeois society and of modernity. His De Homine (1986) rejected the domination of Western technology-laden thought over non-Western (such as Islamic) approaches to philosophy, and pointed out how, with its own narrow boundaries, scientific and technological progress has failed to humanize our society and has failed to humanize nature. Ivan Foht from Sarajevo developed an aesthetics in which our understanding as well as the ontological status of a work of art depends primarily on its form and not on its content. Art, he argued in his Savremena estetika muzike (Contemporary aesthetics of music) (1980) is a highly autonomous human activity; music, in particular, has an atemporal validity. Foht’s search for an ontological definition of art, inspired in part by Ingarden, is unique in post-1945 Yugoslav philosophy.

Equally unique is the philosophical development of Mihailo Đurić from Beograd. His work in philosophy started in the early 1950s with studies in Ancient Greek philosophy and the early Wittgenstein. In the 1960s he published in Serbo-Croat a selection of Max Weber’s writings, which was highly influential. In the 1970s he repudiated attempts to develop Marxist sociology or economics, arguing that Marx was neither a philosopher nor a scientist but a visionary and a critic of the inhumanity of bourgeois society. About the same time he developed an interest in Heidegger and his thesis on the crisis and the end of European metaphysics. Since the 1980s he has concentrated on the contemporary relevance of Nietzsche’s philosophy: as an open workshop of thought, Nietzsche’s philosophy points the way out of the crisis of metaphysics and of Western philosophy in general (see Nietzsche, F.).

In the late 1970s, Slavoj Žižek from Ljubljana developed a unique Lacanian psychoanalytic critique of totalitarian ideology and thought (see Lacan, J.). In his later writings, published in French and English, he applied this Lacanian approach to other ideologies, including the liberal-democratic one, and to popular culture and film. In his Looking Awry (1991) he advocated the maxim of psychoanalytic ethic ‘avoid as much as possible any violation of the fantasy space of the other’, and argued that nationalism is the way subjects of a given nation organize their collective enjoyment through national myths.

Interest in logical positivism and the analytic approach to philosophy developed in the 1920s in Zagreb and in Beograd. Zvonko Richtman and Rikard Podhorski from Zagreb defended a logical positivist approach to science (see Analytical philosophy; Logical positivism). In Beograd, Dragiša M. Đurić developed a highly reductive phenomenalism (which reduced the concept of time to the phenomenon of now), while Kajica Milanov discussed Frege’s and the logical positivists’ analyses of meaning (see Phenomenalism). In the early 1960s, Yugoslav Neo-Marxists revived interest in the analytic philosophy of meaning and meta-ethics within their Neo-Marxist framework, while Jovan Ćulum from Beograd in his Filozofske beleške (Philosophical notes) (1967) used analytic techniques to criticize the Hegelian and Marxist approach to philosophy. At the same time, Svetlana Knjazev-Adamović and Staniša Novaković wrote about analytic philosophy of knowledge and of science, while Aleksandar Kron started his work in symbolic logic outside any Marxist framework. In his later Hipoteze i znanje (Hypotheses and knowledge) (1984) Novaković argued against the view that the acceptance or rejection of hypotheses in modern science is based exclusively on empirical evidence.

In the early 1970s, analytic philosophers in Beograd engaged in a polemic concerning the analysis of moral terms. Igor Primorac forcefully defended a deontological theory. His arguments, appealing to our moral intuitions and ordinary usage of moral terms, were criticized by Knjazev-Adamović and others. In the early 1990s, she and Jovan Babić extended the debate in the journal Theoria to issues in normative ethics, including that of pacifism in times of war. A similar debate concerning scepticism and knowledge was sparked in 1974 by a series of articles by Neven Sesardić from Zagreb. Sesardić rejected both the argument from the evil demon and from illusion as invalid. In response, Aleksandar Pavković in his Razlozi za sumnju (Reasons for doubt) (1988) argued that, suitably reconstructed, these sceptical arguments could be rendered valid (see Perception, epistemic issues in). Živan Lazović from Beograd argued for the contextualism of principles in O prirodi epistemičkog opravdanja (On the nature of epistemic justification), an alternative to both foundationalism and coherentism which emphasizes the constitutive role of the established epistemic principles, techniques and procedures (see Justification, epistemic).

In his Fizikalizam (Physicalism) (1984), the first examination of contemporary materialism in Serbo-Croat, Sesardić defended the mind–body identity thesis, arguing that the replacement of intentional terms by descriptions of behavioural dispositions will facilitate scientific discovery of the relations between behavioural dispositions and structural states of the brain (see Mind, Identity theory of). In contrast, in his Materija, svest, saznanje (Matter, mind and knowledge) (1990) Nikola Grahek from Beograd argued that a materialist view of the mind such as Sesardić’s, faces serious problems in explaining introspection of the subject’s own mental states. The debate concerning materialism and functionalism, which started in 1980s in the philosophical journals in Beograd, Zagreb and Ljubljana, appears to be continuing (see Materialism in the philosophy of mind).

Writing on the philosophy of language, Nenad Miščević (formerly from Zadar, now at Maribor) shares Sesardić’s scientific naturalism. Cognitive science and linguistics, he argued in his 1987 work Od misli do jezika (From thought to language), would provide the best basis for a comprehensive theory of language. Matijaž Potrč from Ljubljana has also extensively discussed current analytic approaches to the philosophy of language. Miloš Arsenijević, in his unique treatment of Zeno’s paradoxes and contemporary philosophy of space and time, Prostor, vreme, Zenon (Space, time, Zeno) (1986), has attempted to solve the paradoxes by arguing that Zeno’s premises are tenable each on their own but are not cotenable.

The break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991 has, perhaps temporarily, put an end to the debates among philosophers from Zagreb, Beograd, Ljubljana and Sarajevo. Many of them, however, continue to participate in philosophical debate outside their newly established states.