Publication Details

Abstract

The present study arose as a lecture given for the Slovak Philosophical Association on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Czechoslovak Republic and of philosophical reflection of another contemporary problems of the Slovak nation. First of all, the author raises the general question of the sense of history, as solved by the philosophy of history conceived dialectically, anthropologically and structurally. She argues with positivism and reduced Marxism in the conception of history. She lays stress upon the theoretical necessity of the philosophy of history also from the standpoint of other disciplines of social sciences — sociology, historiography, social psychology, politics. The practical value of the philosophy of history is seen in its possibility to give mankind and nations orientation in the present as well as future developments. The knowledge of the direction and the developmental hub in the dialectical moving reality is considered as the most basic moment of the so-called conscious aim of history. This direction is formulated as „giving potency to freedom and humanity“ in their polar natural-generic and social sense and dialectically conflictive character. The author is not concerned with a priori models of humanity and freedom and with a providential classification of history as in the speculative philosophy of history, but with a dialectical-historical realization of antropological constants, at which mankind work in the interest of the self-preservative „suum esse conservare“. The universal historical view is completed and confronted with the development of the Slovak nation. The conception of humanitarian sense, born in the specific conditions of a small nation, became a leading motive of the Slovak history from its revival up to the present January renaissance of freedom and humanity in Czechoslovakia.