Branislav Petronijević

Branislav "Brana" Petronijević (sometimes styled as Petronievics) (

His major work is the two-volume Prinzipien der Metaphysik (Principles of Metaphysics, Heidelberg, 1904–1911), in which he outlines his original metaphysical system – a synthesis of Baruch Spinoza's monism and Gottfried Leibniz's monadological pluralism into what he called "monopluralism". Influenced by George Berkeley and G.W.F. Hegel, Petronijević held that our immediate experience is the source of basic logical and metaphysical axioms – what he called "empirio-rationalist" epistemology.^[1]

In the field of palaeontology, Petronijević was the first to distinguish between the genera Archaeopteryx and Archaeornis.^[2] However, most of his taxonomic interpretations were later abandoned.^[3][4][5] He also discovered new characteristics of the genera Tritylodon and Moeritherium.

Biography

Early life

Branislav Petronijević was born in the small village of

He studied at the Valjevo Gymnasium and the Grande école in Belgrade (the Belgrade Higher School).

Education and early work

In 1894, Petronijević went to

While in London, Petronijević met with Bertrand Russell, who wrote:

A man who impressed me, not so much by his ability as by his resolute absorption in philosophy even under the most arduous circumstances, was the only Yugoslav philosopher of our time, whose name was Branislav Petroniević. I met him only once, in the year 1917. The only language we both knew was German and so we had to use it, although it caused people in the streets to look at us with suspicion. The Serbs had recently carried out their heroic retreat before the German invaders, and I was anxious to get a first-hand account of this retreat from him, but he only wanted to expound his doctrine that the number of points in space is finite and can be estimated by considerations derived from the theory of numbers. The consequence of this difference in our interests was a somewhat curious conversation. I said, "Were you in the great retreat?" and he replied, "Yes, but you see the way to calculate the number of points in space is." I said, "Were you on foot?" and he said, "Yes, you see the number must be a prime." I said, "Did you not try to get a horse?" and he said, "I started on a horse, but I fell off, and it should not be difficult to find out what prime." In spite of all my efforts, I could get nothing further from him about anything so trivial as the Great War. I admired his capacity for intellectual detachment from the accidents of his corporeal existence, in which I felt that few ancient Stoics could have rivalled him. After the First War he was employed by the Yugoslav Government to bring out a magnificent edition of the eighteenth-century Yugoslav philosopher Boscovich, but what happened to him after that I do not know.

— Bertrand Russell^[10]

Later life

After the war he left London and went back to his teaching post at the University of Belgrade, where he was appointed again appointed full professor in 1919. On 16 February 1920, he was elected into the Serbian Royal Academy.

From 1918 to 1922, Petronijević notably mentored Ksenija Atanasijević, later a prominent Serbian female intellectual and early Serbian feminist writer.

During the

Petronijević retired from the university in 1927. He served as secretary of the Serbian Royal Academy from February 1932 to February 1933 and founded the Serbian Philosophical Society in 1938, together with Vladimir Dvorniković, Justin Popović and others. The third volume of his Principles of Metaphysics was destroyed in an air raid in April 1941. He held lectures at the German Scientific Institute during the occupation of Yugoslavia.^[12] After the war, he traveled to France several times and started writing poetry.^[11] Petronijević was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1941 and 1947.^[13]

Petronijević died in a Belgrade's Hotel Balkan on 4 March 1954. He was 78. He never married.

Writings

Philosophy

Petronijević considered himself a "born metaphysician" and devoted himself to constructing his own metaphysical system. Although original, his system grew out of the nineteenth-century empirical metaphysics of

The motto of Petronijević's principal work Prinzipien der Metaphysik (Principles of Metaphysics, 1904), reads: "Exact mathematical notions are a key to the solution of the world's enigma".[14] In it, he constructed a new geometry in which time and space are discrete, not continuous. Petronijević argued that being consists of simple, discrete qualitative points which are mutually related in various ways to form a unity. He outlined two types of these simple points – real "central points" (Mittelpunkte) and unreal "intermediate points" (Zwischenpunkte). The world as a manifold is possible only because each pair of real points of being is separated by an unreal point constituting an "act of negation", without which being would be absolutely homogeneous.^[15][6] Petronijević regarded the principle of negation as "the absolute principle of the world". His metaphysical system was thus conceived as a synthesis of Baruch Spinoza's monism and Gottfried Leibniz's monadological pluralism into what he called "monopluralism".^[1]

He claimed that the basic task of metaphysics was to explain the structure of the "world of multitude, diversity, and change" as the "pre-evidence" of the directly given empirical and transcendental reality. Petronijević's view was essentially idealistic, since he held that absolutely unconscious atoms are impossible and that the immortal soul is a conscious monad. He argued that the universe was evolving from a condition of instability towards one of absolute stability, in which there would be equilibrium in the relation between particular elements or monads and the universal substance which underlies them. This last is the subject of a special division of philosophy, beyond metaphysics, which Petronijević called "hypermetaphysics".^[16]

His original "empirio-rationalist" epistemology was based on a rather complex derivation of logical laws from immediate experience. For Petronijević, our immediate experience not only presents reality as is, but is also the source of basic logical and metaphysical axioms – all are derived from the data of immediate experience.^[1] Petronijević rejected Immanuel Kant’s phenomenalism and denied the distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal. He held that the all contents of the mind are real and thus denied the existence of pure representation, claiming that all representations are in fact real. For Petronijević, thought and being are identical, and apodictic knowledge of being itself is possible. He considered the principle of sufficient reason the fundamental law of true knowledge.

Petronijević upheld an ethical theory of transcendental optimism and

From 1917, Petronijević analyzed the Berlin specimen of the Archaeopteryx.

In 1921, discovered the pelvis of the Berlin specimen was markedly different from that of the London specimen. Namely, the Berlin specimen entirely lacked a pubic symphysis. Petronijević erected the genus Archaeornis and was in favor of assigning a new species to the Berlin specimen, Archaeornis siemensii, after the fossil's generous donor Werner von Siemens.^[2] Gavin de Beer, however, disputed this difference, claiming it could be entirely accounted for by deformation of the specimens during preservation, a conclusion generally accepted by later paleontologists.^[3]

In 1925, Petronijević attempted to reconstruct the sternum as being keeled. The sternum identified in the London specimen, by contrast, appeared unkeeled and this discrepancy, too, led Petronijević to classify the Berlin specimen as a different genus, Archaeornis. Wellnhofer (1993) and Tischlinger & Unwin (2004) identified the triangular structure as indeed part of the sternum, albeit minimally ossified (mostly cartilagenous). This supported the idea that the Berlin Archaeopteryx was not a full-grown individual at the time of its death, and instead represents an immature animal.^[4][5]

After the extensive examination of five newly discovered early bird specimens all of his taxonomic interpretations were abandoned, and only his discoveries of the Archaeopteryx skeleton parts remained.

In 1923, Petronijević added a new species, M. ancestrale to the genus Moeritherium, excluding a skull and a mandible from those attributed to M. lyonsi on the basis of some cranial characters observed on the palatine and occipital. In his revision of the genus, Heinz Tobien [de] considered the skull differences mentioned by Petronijević as intraspecific and sex-related variations and synonymised M. gracile, M. lyonsi and M. ancestrale, keeping only one species for the Qasr el Sagha Formation under the name M. lyonsi.^[17]

Petronijević's contributions to the philosophy of

Among his most notable contributions to the logical foundations of mathematics are his work on typical geometries, on the problem of the infinitude of space, the three-body problem, on difference quotients, and on mathematical induction. In psychology, he developed theories about the observation of the transparent and on the depth and observation of compound colours.

Legacy

In 1957, the Department of Natural Science of the

According to Miodrag Cekić, Petronijević's works in philosophy may have influenced Boltzmann's late system of philosophical classification.^[19] His theory of multi-dimensions as well as the theory of mathematical discontinuity also seems to have interested both Boltzmann and Mach.^[20]

Bibliography

Works by Petronijević in English:

• Life of Roger Joseph Boscovich (preface to A Theory of Natural Philosophy by Roger Joseph Boscovich), Open Court Publishing Company, 1922.

Works by Petronijević in German:

• Der ontologische Beweis für das Dasein des Absoluten. Versuch einer Neubegründung mit besonderer Rücksicht auf das erkenntnistheoretische Grundproblem Leipzig : H. Haacke, 1897. (The Ontological Proof for the Existence of the Absolute. Attempt at a New Foundation with Special Regard to the Basic Problem of Epistemology)
• Der Satz vom Grunde. eine logische Untersuchung. Belgrade : Staatsdruckerei, 1898. (The Principle of Reason. A Logical Investigation)
• Prinzipien der Erkenntnislehre. Prolegomena zur absoluten Metaphysik. Berlin : Ernst Hoffmann & Co, 1900. (Principles of Epistemology. Prolegomena to Absolute Metaphysics)
• Prinzipien der Metaphysik. 2 vols. Heidelberg : Carl Winter's Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1904–1911. (Principles of Metaphysics)
• Die typischen Geometrien und das Unendliche. Heidelberg : C. Winter, 1907. (The Typical Geometries and the Infinite)
• Über den Begriff der zusammengesetzten Farbe. Leipzig : Barth, 1908. (On the Concept of Compound Colors)
• Über Herbarts Lehre von intelligiblem Raume. Berlin : Leonhard Simion, 1914. (On Herbart's Theory of Intelligible Spaces)
• Über das Becken, den Schultergürtel und einige andere Teile der Londoner Archaeopteryx. Genf : George, 1921. (On the Pelvis, the Shoulder Girdle and Some Other Parts of the London Archaeopteryx)

Works by Petronijević in French:

• L'évolution universelle. Exposé des preuves et des lois de l`évolution mondiale et des évolutions particulières (inorganique, organique, intellectuelle et sociale). Paris : F. Alcan, 1921. (Universal Evolution. Presentation of the Evidence and Laws of Global Evolution and Particular Developments (Inorganic, Organic, Intellectual and Social))
• Sur la valeur de la vie. Paris : F. Alcan, 1925. (On the Value of Life)
• Résumé des travaux philosophiques et scientifiques de Branislav Petroniević. Academie Royal Serbe, Bulletin de l'Academie des Lettres, No. 2. Belgrade, 1937.

Works by Petronijević in Serbian on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Spencer, and Hegel.

• Спиритизам. Београд, 1900. стр. 74
• Фридрих Ниче. Н. Сад, 1902. стр. 99
• О слободи воље, моралној и кривичној одговорности. Београд, 1906. стр. 178+1
• Едуард Хартман. Живот и филозофија. Београд, 1907. стр. 43
• Филозофија у „Горском Вијенцу“ Н. Сад, 1908. стр. 60
• Основи емпириске психологије. Београд, 1910. стр. 318
• Чланци и студије. Књ. -{I-III}-. Београд, 1913-22.
• Шопенхауер, Ниче и Спенсер. Београд, 1922. стр. 316
• Историја новије филозофије. -{I}- део од Ренесансе до Канта. Београд, 1922. стр. 389
• Основи емпириске психологије. -{II}- изд. Књ. -{I-III}-. Београд, 1923-6. стр. 12+172
• Основи теорије сазнања са 19 сл. у тексту. Београд, 1923. стр. 187
• Хегел и Хартман. Београд, 1924. стр. 151
• Чланци и студије. Нова серија. Београд, 1932. стр. 1932
• Принципи метафизике - I, II, Београд, 1998.

See also

• Ljubomir Nedić
• Ksenija Atanasijević
• Milan Kujundžić Aberdar
• Petar II Petrović Njegoš

References