Milan Kangrga - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Milan Kangrga was a Croatia

Croatia

Croatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...

n and Yugoslav

Yugoslavs

Yugoslavs is a national designation used by a minority of South Slavs across the countries of the former Yugoslavia and in the diaspora...

philosopher who was one of the leading thinkers in the Praxis school

Praxis School

The Praxis school was a Marxist humanist philosophical movement. It originated in Zagreb and Belgrade in the SFR Yugoslavia, during the 1960s.Prominent figures among the school's founders include Gajo Petrović and Milan Kangrga of Zagreb and Mihailo Marković of Belgrade...

of thought which originated in the 1960s in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was the Yugoslav state that existed from the abolition of the Yugoslav monarchy until it was dissolved in 1992 amid the Yugoslav Wars. It was a socialist state and a federation made up of six socialist republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia,...

.

Kangrga was born in Zagreb

Zagreb

Zagreb is the capital and the largest city of the Republic of Croatia. It is in the northwest of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the Medvednica mountain. Zagreb lies at an elevation of approximately above sea level. According to the last official census, Zagreb's city...

, where he attended elementary and grammar school. In 1950, he graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, where he commenced his work as a teaching assistant working in the fields of ethics

Ethics

Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...

and aesthetics

Aesthetics

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

. Between 1962 and 1964, he studied in Heidelberg

Heidelberg

-Early history:Between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago, "Heidelberg Man" died at nearby Mauer. His jaw bone was discovered in 1907; with scientific dating, his remains were determined to be the earliest evidence of human life in Europe. In the 5th century BC, a Celtic fortress of refuge and place of...

, Germany. He became a tenured professor in 1972 and he held this position until his retirement in 1993.

Kangrga started his confrontation with the Yugoslav communist leadership during his undergraduate studies in February 1948, before the clash of Joseph Broz Tito with Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...

. Then, he published his first philosophical article entitled On Ethics in Studentski list (Zagreb), which the League of Communists of Yugoslavia

League of Communists of Yugoslavia

League of Communists of Yugoslavia , before 1952 the Communist Party of Yugoslavia League of Communists of Yugoslavia (Serbo-Croatian: Savez komunista Jugoslavije/Савез комуниста Југославије, Slovene: Zveza komunistov Jugoslavije, Macedonian: Сојуз на комунистите на Југославија, Sojuz na...

bureaucrats found provoking. In 1953, Kangrga became a member of the LCY but in 1954 he was expelled from the party because he announced that he was inspired to become a communist by the works of Miroslav Krleža

Miroslav Krleža

Miroslav Krleža was a leading Croatian and Yugoslav writer and the dominant figure in cultural life of both Yugoslav states, the Kingdom and the Republic . He has often been proclaimed the greatest Croatian writer of the 20th century.-Biography:Miroslav Krleža was born in Zagreb, modern-day...

, who still wasn't wholly rehabilitated by the regime.

In 1964, Kangrga was one of the founders of the journal Praxis. Together with Rudi Supek

Rudi Supek

Rudi Supek was a Croatian sociologist and a member of the Praxis School of Marxism.Supek studied philosophy in Zagreb and graduated in 1937. He went to study clinical psychology in Paris, where he was when World War II erupted...

, he has established the Korčula Summer School, which was a unique meeting place for philosophers from the East and the West between 1964 and 1974. It is around these two institutions that the Praxis school took shape. The defining features of the school were: 1) emphasis on the writings of young Marx

Young Marx

Some theorists consider Karl Marx's thought to be divided into a "young" period and a "mature" one. There is disagreement to when Marx's thought began to mature, and the problem of the idea of a "Young Marx" is the problem of tracking the development of Marx's works and of its possible unity...

; and 2) call for freedom of speech in both East and West based upon Marx's insistence on ruthless critique of everything existent. Milan Kangrga emphasized creativity as well, but also the understanding of human beings as producers humanizing nature.

While he was critical of the Communist party in Yugoslavia, mainly for not implementing self-management socialism, he rejected non-Socialist reactions against SFR Yugoslavia, the most notable one being the Croatian Spring

Croatian Spring

The Croatian Spring was a political movement from the early 1970s that called for greater rights for Croatia which was then part of Yugoslavia as well as democratic and economic reforms.-History:...

.

Milan Kangrga has lectured in Bonn

Bonn

Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....

, Münich

Munich

Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...

, Prague

Prague

Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...

, Budapest

Budapest

Budapest is the capital of Hungary. As the largest city of Hungary, it is the country's principal political, cultural, commercial, industrial, and transportation centre. In 2011, Budapest had 1,733,685 inhabitants, down from its 1989 peak of 2,113,645 due to suburbanization. The Budapest Commuter...

, Moscow

Moscow

Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

, and Kiev

Kiev

Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....

among other cities. His articles have been published in Germany, Italy, the United States, France, Spain, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Mexico.

Major works

Kangrga has published 15 books in Croatian. The most important are:

The Ethical Problem in Karl Marx's Works (1963)
Ethics and Liberty (1966)
The Meaning of the Historical (1970)
The Man and the World (1975)
Ethics or Revolution (1983)
Praxis-Time-World (1984)
Hegel-Marx: some basic problems of Marxism (1988)
The Meaning and the Reality (1989)
Smugglers of Own Life (2001)
Nationalism or Democracy (2002)
Ethics: the basic problems and tendencies (2004)
Classical German Idealism (2008)

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.