Божидар Кнежевић : живот и дело

Abstract

Božidar Knežević (1862–1905) was a Serbian philosopher of history. His philosophico-historical system is presented in his two-volume Principles of History (Law of Order [succession] in History, 1898; and Proportion in History, 1901). Knežević was a proponent of Spencerism, the philosophy of the then most popular philosopher, Herbert Spencer. For Knežević, history, as a positive science, is actually the real philosophy, and the true goal of history is the brotherhood of humankind: “it remains for scientific history to bind man to man; history is to bind all peoples and all times, to bring them closer to one another and to reconcile them”. He saw global history as an evolutionary ascent to moral and intellectual unification of humankind. Knežević’s book of aphorisms (on morality, history, religion etc.) The Thoughts (1902) was very popular. He translated writings of Henry Thomas Buckle, Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Babington Macaulay into Serbian. He translated from French, German and Russian as well. Abridged versions of his writings and selected aphorisms are published in English (History, the Anatomy of Time: The Final Phase of Sunlight, translated by George Vid Tomashevich, Sherwood A. Wakeman, Philosophical Library, New York, 1980).