Petronijević retired from the university in 1927. He served as secretary of the Serbian Royal Academy from February 1932 to February 1933 and founded the Serbian Philosophical Society in 1938, together with Vladimir Dvorniković, Justin Popović and others. The third volume of his "Principles of Metaphysics" was destroyed in an air raid in April 1941. He held lectures at the German Scientific Institute during the occupation of Yugoslavia. After the war, he traveled to France several times and started writing poetry. Petronijević was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1941 and 1947.