Ivo Urbančič

Ivo Urbančič (12 November 1930 - 8 August 2016) was a Slovenian philosopher. He is considered to be one of the fathers of the phenomenological school in Slovenia. His role in the development of the philosophical thought is comparable to the one of Mihailo Đurić in Serbia or Vanja Sutlić in Croatia.

Biography

He was born as Ivan Urbančič in the village of Robič near Kobarid, in what was then the Italian administrative region of Julian March to a peasant Slovene family. When he was still a child, his family left the region in order to escape Fascist persecution and moved to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. They spent six years in the village of Bistrica in south-west Macedonia, where a colony of Slovene immigrants from the Julian March was established. In 1937, they moved to Slovenia, in the village of Črešnjevec near Slovenska Bistrica. There, the young Ivo met with Jože Pučnik, with whom he established a lifelong friendship.

After finishing the technical high school in Kranj, he attended a one-year course in communication technology in Belgrade. In 1960, the friend Jože Pučnik convinced him to enroll to the University of Ljubljana, where he studied philosophy. In his student years, he became involved with a group of young intellectuals, known as the Critical generation. In 1970, he obtained his PhD at the University of Zagreb. Between 1969-1970, he studied at the University of Vienna, and between 1971-1972 in Cologne where he worked with the philosopher Karl-Heinz Volkmann-Schluck. In 1964, he became a researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana. He developed a critical stance towards the Titoist regime which prevented him from getting a job in the pedagogic process at the University. Nevertheless, Urbančič managed to turn the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy into some sort of refuge for critical intellectuals (among the people brought by Urbančič to the Institute was also the philosopher Slavoj Žižek).

In the late 1980s, he worked as an editor in the prestigious publishing house Slovenska matica, where he supervised the translation and first edition of many major Western thinkers in Slovene language. Among others, he was instrumental in the publishing of the complete works of Nietzsche.

In the early 1980s, he was one of the co-founders of the alternative review Nova revija. In 1987, he was among the authors of the Contributions to the Slovenian National Program, an intellectual manifesto demanding a democratic, pluralistic and independent Slovenia. In 1989. he was among the co-founders of the Slovenian Democratic Union, one of the first democratic political parties opposing the Communist regime in Slovenia. Although he hasn't participated in active politics since the end of the Slovenian Spring in the early 1990s, he has been known as a supporter of the Slovenian Democratic Party and its president Janez Janša. In 2004, Urbančič was among the co-founders of the liberal conservative civic platform Rally for the Republic (Slovene: Zbor za republiko).

He passed away in Ljubljana.

Work

Urbančič was one of the first who introduced the thought of Heidegger to Slovenia. He also wrote several monographies on Nietzsche. He has been interested in questions regarding the issue of political power, the individual existence in the modern and post-modern technological world. He developed an interest in the system theory, namely in the functioning of large social systems in the intersection of culture, politics and technology. He has been preoccupied and fascinated by the issue of modern nihilism which he sees, following Nietzsche, as the essence of modern society.

Urbančič has also written several works on the history of philosophy in the Slovene Lands.