Branislav Petronijević (Serbian Cyrillic: Бранислав Петронијевић; also spelled Petronievics; 6 April 1875 – 4 March 1954) was a Serbian philosopher and paleontologist, and a professor at the University of Belgrade. He is regarded as one of the most prominent Serbian philosophers of the first half of the 20th century and played a central role in the institutionalization of academic philosophy in Serbia and Yugoslavia.
Trained in Vienna and Leipzig under figures such as Ludwig Boltzmann, Johannes Volkelt and Wilhelm Wundt, Petronijević developed an original metaphysical system that he called "monopluralism", a synthesis of Spinoza's substance monism and Leibniz's monadological pluralism shaped by the idealist tradition of Hermann Lotze and Eduard von Hartmann. In his self-described "empirio-rationalist" epistemology he held that immediate experience both presents reality as it is and yields the basic logical and metaphysical axioms, including the principle of sufficient reason, from which he sought to derive an "absolute metaphysics". His major systematic works, notably Prinzipien der Metaphysik (Principles of metaphysics, 1904–1911), develop a discrete, finitist conception of space built from simple qualitative points, a "hypermetaphysics" concerned with the most general oppositions of the One and the Many, and a broader program that also encompasses the foundations of mathematics, experimental psychology, aesthetics, and practical philosophy.
Alongside his metaphysical and epistemological writings, Petronijević made contributions to the philosophy of science and to natural history, publishing on universal evolution and proposing an interpretation of Dollo's law as well as what he called the Law of Non-correlative Evolution. In paleontology he was among the early specialists on Archaeopteryx, introducing the genus Archaeornis and several related names. However, later work has generally not adopted these taxonomic arrangements.
A participant in the Serbian army's Great Retreat in World War I, he served as a war correspondent, lectured in Paris and London, and wrote the biographical preface to the 1922 English edition of Roger Joseph Boscovich's A Theory of Natural Philosophy. He was a full member and later secretary of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, co-founded the Serbian Philosophical Society, mentored the philosopher Ksenija Atanasijević, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1941 and 1947.
Biography Early life Branislav Petronijević was born in the small village of Sovljak, near Ub, Serbia, on 6 April (25 March, O.S.) 1875, the son of Marko Jeremić, a theologian.Šešić, B., "Petronijević, Branislav" in Brochert, D. M. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Second Edition, vol. 7 (Thomson Gale, 2006), p. 266-267. The last name Petronijević stems from Branislav's grandfather, Petronije Jeremić, a local priest. His father changed Branislav's last name to reduce pressure at school, as the Jeremić family were prominent supporters of the exiled Karađorđević dynasty.
He studied at the Valjevo Gymnasium and at the Velika škola in Belgrade.
Education and early work In 1894, Petronijević went to Vienna to pursue a degree in medicine, on a scholarship awarded by the Tamnava srez. Petronijević joined the Philosophical Society of the University of Vienna and studied under Ludwig Boltzmann. After three semesters in Vienna he enrolled at the University of Leipzig, where he studied philosophy under Johannes Volkelt, Wilhelm Ostwald, and Ernst Mach. There, he wrote (The ontological proof for the existence of the absolute) in 1897, and successfully defended his thesis (The principle of sufficient reason) in 1898. Having studied during this time under Wilhelm Wundt, Petronijević later published several works in experimental psychology on the observation of the transparent and on the depth and observation of compound colours. In Leipzig, Petronijević received financial help from former bishop Nikanor Ružičić, with whom he practiced the German language.
In 1898 he was given the title of docent at the Belgrade Higher School at the request of professor Ljubomir Nedić. He taught the German language and philosophical propaedeutics at the Third Belgrade Gymnasium. Petronijević was promoted to the post of associate professor in 1899, and then full professor in 1903. Three years later when the school developed into the University of Belgrade, Petronijević was demoted back to associate professor. He was simultaneously elected correspondent member of the Serbian Royal Academy on 3 February 1906. Petronijević found this humiliating, and declined the post, his decision coming into effect in 1910. During this time, Petronijević also taught art theory at Rista and Beta Vukanović's Serbian Art School in Belgrade.
It was during this period that he thought out and developed what is distinctive in his philosophical doctrine. His two major works in metaphysics, Prinzipien der Metaphysik (Principles of metaphysics) and Die typischen Geometrien und das Unendliche (The typical geometries and the infinite), were published during this period.
World War I At the outbreak of World War I he turned to journalism, becoming a war correspondent for the Serbian War Office Press Bureau, induced by Dragutin Dimitrijević "Apis", his childhood friend. In 1915 he joined the Serbian army's retreat through Albania. After reaching Greece, he was sent first to Rome where he stayed for four months. After Rome, Petronijević spent several months in Paris, where he taught two courses at the Sorbonne, on universal evolution and on the value of life.
Finally, he spent the longest part of the war in London with the Serbian Legation, along with politician Nikola Pašić, geographer Jovan Cvijić, professors Bogdan Popović and his brother Pavle Popović. There, Petronijević worked on an English translation of (A Theory of Natural Philosophy) by Roger Joseph Boscovich, together with Čedomilj Mijatović and Nikolaj Velimirović. The 1763 Venetian edition of the book was translated by James Mark Child, and finally published in 1922 by the Open Court Publishing Company, funded in part by the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Petronijević wrote the preface, titled Life of Roger Joseph Boscovich. Parts of it were severely criticized by Vladimir Varićak in 1925 for various factual errors, among other things for asserting Boscovich's exclusively Serbian ethnicity, and listing his birth date inaccurately.
While in London, Petronijević met with Bertrand Russell, who wrote:
Later life After the war he left London and went back to his teaching post at the University of Belgrade, where he was 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 Interbellum, Petronijević was an active participant in European philosophy, and considered himself a worthy philosopher who transcended his "parochial" limitations. He deemed himself one of the 15 "great philosophers" of history, along with Aristotle, Leibniz and Hegel. Beside "great philosophers", Petronijević mentions "significant philosophers" and "philosophic writers".
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. After the war, he traveled to France several times and started writing poetry. Petronijević was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1941 and 1947.
Petronijević died at the Hotel Balkan in Belgrade on 4 March 1954. He was 78. He never married.
Writings Philosophy Petronijević considered himself a "born metaphysician" and devoted his career to constructing a systematic metaphysical doctrine. Although original in its conclusions, his system shows the influence of Hermann Lotze and Eduard von Hartmann. At the level of method, Petronijević employs what has been described as a modified Hegelian dialectic.
In epistemology, Petronijević described his position as "empirio-rationalist". He held that immediate experience not only presents reality as it is, but also provides the basis for fundamental logical laws and metaphysical axioms, including the laws of identity, non-contradiction and excluded middle together with the principle of sufficient reason, all of which he thought could be derived from the structure of what is directly given. In opposition to Immanuel Kant, Petronijević rejected a sharp separation between an "ideal" realm of consciousness and an "absolutely real" world of things-in-themselves, formulating instead a "principle of the absolute reality of consciousness" according to which whatever is present in consciousness is real rather than a merely illusory "mere representation". From the necessity of these basic truths and the reality of experience he inferred an identity of thought and being, and on that basis defended the possibility of an "absolute metaphysics" yielding apodictic knowledge of being itself.
Within this empirio-rationalist framework, Petronijević gave a central role to the principle of sufficient reason at the level of logic. He regarded this principle as the highest principle of knowledge and described it as a "material fundamental law of thought" that expresses the necessary mutual co-belonging of our thoughts. In his account it articulates what he called a "positive contradictory relation", in which a given state is internally tied to the negation of another state. In his early logical treatise (The principle of sufficient reason, 1898) he understood it to mean that everything that exists or can be conceived has an inner sufficient reason for being as it is and not otherwise.
In metaphysics, Petronijević aimed to reconstruct ontology with the help of exact mathematics. On the basis of what he took to be logically necessary facts of experience, together with the basic logical axioms, he held that metaphysics could be established as a science that derives the existence of the external world and its quantitative structure in space, time and motion, as well as its qualitative structure, by means of the concept of the point. He developed this program in his main systematic work (Principles of metaphysics), whose first volume appeared in Heidelberg in 1904. On this basis he developed a "new geometry" in which space is treated as discrete rather than continuous and reality rests on a discrete space composed of a finite number of simple qualitative points that are separated by unreal points understood as "acts of negation". He distinguished between real "central points" () and unreal "intermediate points" (). The world as a manifold is possible, on this view, only because each pair of real points is separated by an unreal point, so that negation acquires a fundamental role in his ontology as a basic structuring principle of reality. Petronijević's metaphysical standpoint combines a plurality of conscious monads with an underlying universal substance, and he characterized it as a synthesis of Spinoza's monism and Leibniz's monadological pluralism, which he called "monopluralism".