The paper offers an examination of the patterns of philosophizing in Slovakia. In the author’s view, its predominating feature is its receptivity, i.e. accepting the particular streams and conceptions of European philosophy. However, not all forms of receptivity are to be judged as mere imitativeness or plagiarism. In spite of its receptiveness the philosophizing in Slovakia very often included creative reinterpretations, modifications and applications.

The leitmotif of the article is an analysis and interpretation of disputes about the nature of Slovak philosophy in the contexts of the formation of individual philosophical generations from the middle of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century. In the content core of the article, the dispute is about the nature of Slovak philosophy in the first generation of its representatives, which was represented by the followers of the so-called “Štúr School”. As a follow-up to this dispute, (...) the article analyzes the ideological confrontations of followers of religious and secular philosophical thought in Slovakia during the first Czechoslovak republic. It is a dispute between followers of classical (European) positivism and, partly, Masarykism with the representatives of contemporary religious philosophy in Slovakia. At the end of the paper, the trend of disputes about the nature of Slovak philosophy is outlined even in the period after the Stalinist, and, later, the so-called normalization indoctrination of Slovak philosophy. (shrink)