Franjo Marković

Franjo Marković (or Franjo pl. Marković; Križevci, July 26, 1845 – Zagreb, September 15, 1914) was a Croatian philosopher and writer.

He was an academician, the first professor of philosophy at the renovated University of Zagreb in 1874. The defender of the identity of philosophy as a metaphysical discipline, as opposed to scholasticism on one side, and positivism and materialism on the other side.

His greatest philosophical work is the Razvoj i sustav obćenite estetike ("The development and the system of general aesthetics"), which heavily influenced the development of Croatian philosophical thought due to its extensive and all-encompassing overview of the history of aesthetics in Croatian language, and the introduction of new philosophic terms. He is the founder of the research of Croatian philosophic heritage.

As a writer, he is noted for his lyric-reflexive poetry, epic compositions and dramas. He is a characteristic Romanticist ("national-romantic spirit"), and in the poetry he is noted as an ardent follower of Adam Mickiewicz.

Born in a noble family, by father Antun and mother Josipa (b. Šugh). He attended the gymnasium at the Nobility Boarding School in Zagreb. In 1862 he left for a study of classical philology and Slavic studies in Vienna. He graduated in 1865, and the next year he passed his gymnasium professorship exam. He worked as an assistant, and soon became a full professor at gymnasiums in Osijek and Zagreb. In 1870, after one political protest, he left his service and headed for Vienna to study philosophy, and soon to Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin and Paris, receiving his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1872.

In 1874 he was appointed as the first head of the independent department for philosophy in Zagreb and the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy. That year the renovated University of Zagreb was founded, and within it the Faculty of philosophy (then called Mudroslovni fakultet), and on it the Department for Philosophy (Stolica za mudroslovje teoretično i praktično sa povjestnicom). He served as a rector of the University in the academic year 1881/1882. He continued to teach until his retirement in 1909.

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