Berislav Žarnić suddenly passed away from a cardiac arrest on the 25 May in Split, Croatia. He was a full time Professor for the field of philosophy in the branch of logic and Vice Dean at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (University of Split). He was also founder and Head of the Research Centre for Logic, Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (http://rcleps.ffst.hr/doku.php).
His interests covered deontic logic, normative and metanormative principles in communication, moods and negation in imperative logic and the logical form of educational philosophy and theory, among other things. (For a list of his publications in English see http://marul.ffst.hr/~berislav/doku.php?id=publications_in_english).
He was a prolific scholar with wide interests that spanned logic, philosophy of science and philosophy of education. This constellation of interests made him unique in the field of educational philosophy. He taught courses in philosophy of education. He was also someone who was committed to editorial projects and to the importance of editorial work, acting as an invited referee for some sixteen journals and sitting on the board of five major philosophy journals in logic and analytic philosophy.
In 2012, he co-founded the acclaimed Physics and Philosophy conference with fellow physicists, at University of Split, paving way for interdisciplinarity (http://mapmf.pmfst.unist.hr/~sokolic/doku.php?id=start).
Professor Žarnić was also an editor and editorial board member of the Encyclopaedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory that he ‘rescued’ and recoded in the early 2000s, an immense labour of scholarship, before the Enycylopedia became a dynamic live reference Springer project in 2016. He was one of the Associated Editors of this reference work, alongside Tina Besley and Andrew Gibbons. With Berislav’s help and dedication the Encyclopedia is to be greatly expanded and to be annually updated.
It is to be released shortly and can be found at https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007%2F978-981-287-532-7. As the Editor of this reference work I would like to dedicate it to Berislav as a mark of his scholarship and his tireless work as an editor.
Last Summer Tina Besley and I had the good fortune to travel to Croatia, a country of astonishing natural beauty and historic olds towns and cities, to be hosted by our good friends in Zagreb at the first conference of the Association of Visual Pedagogy (http://www.avpc2017.aau.dk/). We took the opportunity to travel to Split to see Berislav and we met with his assistant Gabriela Bašić and his colleagues. We also experienced his hospitality. He was a generous man, a beloved and admired teacher and colleague, and will be sadly missed not only by family and friends but also his international colleagues. My personal thanks to Gabriela who at a very distressing time for herself, let us know of Berislav’s passing and provided some necessary details of biography.
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