Josef Šafařík’s philosophising reflects an important stage in our nation’s cultural development. The article seeks to trace the distinctive trait of his reflections, his positing of contrasting polarities. Such polarities present not only the motivational contrasts of human behaviour but also the possibility of application to the chronology of history. It is precisely this context of historical interpretation – presented most fully in Šafařík’s life-work, On the Way to the Last – which may in retrospect offer an in¬sight into the very nature of the polar articulation of Šafařík’s thought.
Blaženka Despot (1930–2001) was a Yugoslav philosopher who applied a critical reading of Marxism to the philosophy of technology and, after the mid-1970s, proposed a form of Marxist feminism that took into account the context of Yugoslav self-managing socialism. In the short text “Women and Self-Management,” Despot summarises the ideas she developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially her Marxist-feminist critiques of socialist women’s emancipation in Yugoslavia. She calls for re-focusing on women and revisiting Marx’s concept of nature through a reading of Hegel. While doing so, she raises the issue of violence against women as a key matter of women’s equality. Zsófi a Lóránd, in her introduction, discusses the text in light of Despot’s broader oeuvre and in light of the history of feminism in Yugoslavia.