Franjo Marković

Franjo Marković (or Franjo pl. Marković; July 26, 1845 in Križevci – September 15, 1914 in Zagreb) was a Croatian philosopher and writer.

He was an academician, the first professor of philosophy at the renovated University of Zagreb in 1874. The defender of the identity of philosophy as a metaphysical discipline, as opposed to scholasticism on one side, and positivism and materialism on the other side.

His greatest philosophical work is the Razvoj i sustav obćenite estetike ("The development and the system of general aesthetics"), which heavily influenced the development of Croatian philosophical thought due to its extensive and all-encompassing overview of the history of aesthetics in Croatian, and the introduction of new philosophic terms. He is the founder of the research of Croatian philosophic heritage.

As a writer, he is noted for his lyric-reflexive poetry, epic compositions and dramas. He is a characteristic Romanticist ("national-romantic spirit"), and in the poetry he is noted as an ardent follower of Adam Mickiewicz.