Abstract

The arguments concerning modernity of Slovak thinking manifested themselves in the course of the 20th century in confrontations of two streams: traditionalistic and modernistic ones. The Hegelianism as the intellectual source of the national philosophy was rejected, while the conservatives criticized severly modern philosophy for its secularization tendencies. Against Kant Thomas Aquinas and neothomism were picked up; the philosophical synthesis should have been grounded in metaphysical principles. The divergence of incommensurable positions of transcendence and immanence manifested itself in full size in conflicts between the representatives of Catholic modernity and the avantgarde theoreticians and surrealist poets. The same applies to the philosophical disagreements concerning the nature of knowledge between the adherents of intuitive realism on one side and critical realism on the other side. In Slovak milieu the enforcing of modernity always had to face the opposition or even an open negation of modernism