Abstract

The interest in the philosophical past in the frame of the national cultures arose in Hungary at the beginning of the 19th century. The paper examines mainly the theoretical background of the elaboration of this tradition in Hungarian and Slovak historiographies. The key question is, whether there is any foundation of the basic concepts of these historiographies and what is the nature of these concepts in that case? In the author’s view the original problems of the historiography of the so called national philosophies, e. g. the concept of “national philosophy” itself are ambiguous. The paper tries to reveal various interpretations, which make the understanding of this problematic difficult, contributing also to the conflicts within the international, in this case Hungarian-Slovak, discussions of the shared subject: the history of philosophy in the former Upper Hungary. The paper focuses on the articulation of this problem in Hungarian philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries