Publication Details

Abstract

The study is devoted to an analysis of basic philosophical problems in Igor Hrušovský's work on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Hrušovský is the most outstanding representative of the scientistically oriented philosophy in Slovakia. By his ample theoretical work, pedagogical as well as cultural-organizing activity, he influenced the Slovak philosophy as nobody else of his predecessors and contemporaries. Hrušovský's philosophical evolution was determined by several groups of interests: first, his interest in scientific-theoretical problems and philosophico-methodological questions as introduced, in particular, by Neo-positivists; secondly, his interest in laws of scientific and philosophical development (in the broader meaning of social-historical evolution) as treated with by the historico-materialistic and structuralistic method; finally, his interest in questions of dialectics and in fundamental philosophical categories, in particular the category of structure and contradiction. All these problems brought by Hrušovský into Slovak environment in a stimulating way, were developed by him on a high theoretical level and in connection with the most progressive world philosophical endeavours. His works from the earlier period, Theory of Science (1941), Evolution of Scientific Thought (1942), Francis Bacon and Prosperity of English Philosophy (1945), Criticism of the Intuitive Realism (1945), Engels as a Philosopher (1945), Problems of Noetics (1948), and the latest works Problems, Portraits, and Retrospectives (1965), and Structuration und Apperzeption des Konkréten, published in German, give a systematic explanation of the problems of scientific cognition, its basis and meaning, its social functionality, and inner specific structuredness. The lastly mentioned works by Hrušovský, at which our attention is focused, represent culmination of his theoretical endeavours to understand reality in a dynamic-structural way, to understand nature from the dynamic standpoint and that of process, as well as of his endeavours at a dynamic-structural scientific system.