Academician Abdulah Šarčević passed away (1929 - 2021)

Preminuo akademik Abdulah Šarčević (1929 – 2021)

The Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina informs the Bosnian public that a prominent philosopher, professor emeritus of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo and a full member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina passed away on November 15, 2021.

Abdulah Šarčević was born in 1929 in Stari Majdan. He studied philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb and graduated in 1952. He was a professor of Philosophy at the Banja Luka Lyceum from 1952 to 1954. At the end of 1954 he was elected assistant professor of History of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy in Skopje. At the end of 1959, he began working at the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo on the subjects of ontologies and theories of cognition. He received his doctorate with the thesis The Crisis of History and Modernity in 1967, and was then elected associate professor of ontology. He was an associate and editor-in-chief of the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo. He introduced the subjects Ontology, Sociology of Culture, Eastern Philosophy and Introduction to Philosophy into the full-time study of philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Sociology. From the beginning of 1955, he led a seminar on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in Skopje and Sarajevo for several semesters. He was the President of the College for Postgraduate Studies in Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, where he was elected full professor. He has taught at Pima Community College in Tucson, USA.

He is a member of the International Parliament of Writers (1992), a member of the Writers' Association of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1971), a member of the editorial board, founder and director of the Center for Philosophical Research (1990).

He dealt with various phenomena of culture and philosophy of East and West, theoretical problems of contemporary philosophical currents, especially in Europe and the United States. Most of his research work is related to his work in the Logos Philosophical Library. He was on the board of the magazine Filozofija (Belgrade), the magazine Praxis (Zagreb). He has participated in numerous philosophical symposia in the country and abroad.

He has published reviews, essays, studies and articles on issues related to the fundamental issues of the history of philosophy and Eastern philosophies, contemporary philosophy from modernism to postmodernism, ontology, philosophical anthropology, philosophy and sociology of culture, philosophy of language and hermeneutics, aesthetics and ethics, sociology and theories of culture, spiritual and cultural sciences. He has published 28 books in the fields of contemporary philosophy, history of philosophy, philosophy of culture, philosophy of art and aesthetics, ontology and hermeneutic philosophy, philosophical ethics, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of technology, philosophy of nature, spiritual sciences, etc. Among the numerous works, it is worth mentioning a series of discussions (monographs) on the philosophy of individual philosophers.

He has published works from various philosophical disciplines. Among them: Origin and meaning; Sphinx of the West; World crisis and truth; Experience and time; De Homine. Opinion and the modern myth of man; Aesthetic theory today. Ideas of Adorno's aesthetic theory; Utopia of meaning and truth of time; Man and the modern world; In the labyrinth of the world; Modern philosophy; Experience time; Philosophy in modernity; The Sphinx of the West in the late 20th century; Mersad Berber/Philosophy of Painting; The audacity of freedom; Political Philosophy and the Multicultural World/Truth about Truth: The World of Modern and Postmodern; Truth and Freedom/Philosophy of Art/Contemporary History in Truth/Europe: Horizons of Spiritual Life and Hope/Towards Aesthetics and Criticism/Neither Space nor Time - Essays/Selected Writings; Modern philosophy/Philosophers and philosophical sciences in the 20th century/Book I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII; Philosophy and Science/Philosophy and Time/European Philosophy and Spiritual Sciences; Phenomenology of the world of life/The experience of thinking/The world as time/On the paths of the unspeakable or the Search for a new beginning/Abdulah Šarčević/Philosophy in the mirror of criticism/Documents.

Since 1949, he collaborated in magazines and professional publications in Sarajevo, Skopje, Zagreb, Belgrade and Ljubljana, and in the United States.

He received the Charter for Outstanding Contributions to the Progress of the Faculty of Philosophy in Skopje in 1963, decorations for work at the University and the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, the Charter of the publishing houses Svjetlost and Veselin Masleša. He was awarded the Sixth April Award of the City of Sarajevo in 1971. He won the 27th July Award of the SRBiH in 1975 and the Republic Award for Science Veselin Masleša in 1981. At the XVIII International Book and School Fair 2006 in Sarajevo, he received the Plaque for Lifetime Achievement. He was nominated for the John W. Kluge Award - Library of Congress, USA (2009) for the International Award of the Government of Catalonia for the Development of Culture, Science, Economy, Arts and Humanity. He was also nominated for the Prof. Luigi Tartufari, awarded by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lince, Roma for 2010-2011 (literature, poetry, art, history, philosophy, socio-economic sciences) on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy. The Ohrid Academy of Humanism awarded him the 2021 World Humanism Award.

He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Department of Social Sciences (later the Department of Humanities) in 1981, and a full member in 1990.

The date and time of the commemoration and funeral of academician Abdulah Šarčević will be announced later.

The Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the University of Sarajevo extend their most sincere and deepest condolences to the family, friends and associates of the respected academician Abdulah Šarčević.