Remembering Profa, (Muhamed Filipović, 1929-2020)

A year has passed since the death of academician Muhamed Filipović. We simply called him Profa, and the public used his nickname Tunjo.

For my generation at the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, academician Filipović taught logic, methodology, and philosophy of language. From his lectures, we remember important authors and their books. From Aristotle (Organon), R. Descartes (Discours de la methode), J. Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding), D. Hume (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding), I. Kant (Kritik der reinen Vernunft), G. W. F. Hegel (Wissenschaft der Logik), to G. Frege (Begriffsschrift), R. Carnap (Der logische Aufbau der Welt), A. N. Whitehead (Science and the Modern World), L. Wittgenstein (Tractatus logico-philosophicus / Logische Untersuchungen), M. Horkheimer (Eclipse of Reason), M. Bakhtin (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language) and many other thinkers and their works from European and world history.

As students, in the late 1980s, we shared a pleasant feeling of being students of academician Filipović. We followed his scientific and public engagement in our society. A decade later, after the Bosnian apocalypse, I had the honor and pleasure to publicly promote the books, scientific research papers, and ideas that the professor advocated. In Sarajevo, Zagreb, Tuzla, Brčko, Novi Pazar, Konjic, Dubrovnik, and many other places in Bosnia and the region, academician Filipović was a beloved and respected author. People loved to listen to him and ask him various questions. He always patiently explained "what the matter was" with the voice and conviction of an erudite.

The way he "carried" his thoughts on social phenomena shaped the recognizable phenomenology and social ontology of Bosnian thought. This, unfortunately, provoked a reaction from half-educated apparatchiks, on the one hand, and controversial intellectuals who advocated anti-Bosnian ideology, on the other. Envy, immaturity, arrogance, political "games", misunderstanding, raw power, conservative limitations, and similar "facts" of social reality, in which the life of a thinking man unfolded, represented those bitter days and nights through which he struggled to illuminate with his thoughts the events concerning a large number of people and their uncertain destinies. In this existential predicament, academician Filipović lived his life and intellectual adventure. With a courageous bearing and a clear mind, a supreme gift for thinking, as professor Jelena Berberović used to say, academician Filipović testified to the humanistic thought about the essential phenomena of our epoch. There was no question or problem that he did not address in his works or public appearances and express his opinion.

Today, a void is felt among us, in the public sphere that the professor filled with intelligent and challenging views. He often stood among us as a milestone and at the same time as a lightning rod, on the roads of Bosnia and the preservation of truth about the Bosnian historical experience of life. We still need to reflect on what academician Filipović said, wrote, or publicly advocated. Within the framework of Bosnian studies, master's theses and doctoral dissertations should be written about his work. His work is the source of contemporary Bosnian thought and spirituality. He was one of the most important Bosnian thinkers of the 20th century...

May the Bosnian earth be light on our professor Muhamed Filipović.