Originally published in Common Knowledge 11, no. 2 (Fall 2005), this essay is reprinted in 2022 as the prelude to the first installment of a project titled “Antipolitics” and dedicated to the author's memory. “To really know” what a writer “is like,” Konrád writes here, “he would have to look back on his biography from after death” — and in this piece he hauntingly does so. Explaining that he composed his first autobiography upon being expelled from university in Hungary after (...) Stalin's death in 1953, he defines the process as “the main event in the ritual of political detention.” In an overview of the writer's life, he describes any act of writing as like scratching one's initials “into the brick of a prison wall” in an effort “to avoid dying completely.” The editors of Common Knowledge, of whose editorial board Konrád was a founding member, chose to reprint this statement at the head of a symposium whose purpose is, in no small part, to help secure his posthumous existence. (shrink)

In this autobiographical essay, written in 2018 and previously unpublished, the late György Konrád intertwines his memories as a child during World War II with more theoretical reflections (and unanswered questions) on the war, its repercussions, its lessons. Written in Hungarian not long before his death in 2019, Konrád goes back in this essay to the period following the arrest of his parents after the German invasion of Hungary. Aged eleven, he was able to escape the small town where he (...) was born—and hence the fate of its entire Jewish community. “The others had been turned to ash,” in Konrád's chilling words. Seventy years later, he proceeds from these events to reflect on guilt and contrition, on sympathy and empathetic suffering, on how friends can become enemies during war, as well as on the Jewish heritage underlying Christian culture. (shrink)

In this piece, the editor of Common Knowledge introduces a long-term project titled “Antipolitics: Symposium in Memory of György Konrád.” Konrád, who died in 2019, was a founding member of the Common Knowledge editorial board, and the symposium is meant to find present-day applications for the arguments of his book Antipolitics, published in 1982 in Hungarian. Although written under Cold War conditions and to that extent dated, the book is directed against politics and politicians as such: “What Machiavelli's Prince is (...) to would-be rulers, Antipolitics should be for those resistant to being ruled — a treasury of axioms and apothegms,” which this editorial collects, updates, and analyzes. Given that democratic systems and constitutions are “open and subject to further development,” Konrád urges us to devise and run experiments in governance that apply “creative imagination” to problems that, in better times, we might leave to politicians to resolve. “The crisis for democracy today,” Perl argues, “is that bad government (as Konrád, Václav Havel, and Adam Michnik defined it in the 1980s) appears to be what various electorates crave and therefore choose.” Realizing that elections produce, as Aristotle said, oligarchy rather than democracy, we should rethink majority rule and experiment with sortition as a counterpolitical means of self-government. (shrink)

Much of the debates in this book revolves around Milan Kundera and his 1984 essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe.” Kundera wrote his polemical text when the world was pregnant with imminent social and political change, yet that world was still far from realizing that we would enter the last decade of the twentieth century with the Soviet empire and its network of satellite states missing from the political map. Kundera was challenged by Joseph Brodsky and György Konrád for allegedly (...) excluding Russia from the symbolic space of Europe, something the great author deeply believes he never did. To what extent was Kundera right in assuming that, if to exist means to be present in the eyes of those we love, then Central Europe does not exist anymore, just as Western Europe as we knew it has stopped existing? What were the mental, cultural, and intellectual realities that lay beneath or behind his beautiful and graceful metaphors? Are we justified in rehabilitating political optimism at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Are we able to reconcile the divided memories of Eastern or Central Europe and Western Europe regarding what happened to the world in 1968? And where is Central Europe now? (shrink)

This article analyzes how five leading Hungarian postdissident liberal thinkers conceptually constructed their view of liberalism in the early years of postcommunism. Studying Beszélő, the most signi cant liberal journal during the early years of representative democracy, it shows how they did so through references to political “threats” and the idea of a “liberal minimum” (János Kis), local liberal and democratic traditions and “progressive patriotism” (Miklós Szabó), the ongoing “liberal-conservative revolution” and the creation of a “new political community” (Gáspár Miklós (...) Tamás), antipolitics and “expertise” (György Konrád), and the “complete catalog of human rights” and the agenda of “modernization” (István Eörsi), respectively. Next to its conceptual analysis of heavily influential individual thinkers, the article discusses the ambition of postdissident Hungarian liberals to harmonize liberal and democratic tenets. Last but not least, it elaborates on the left-wing origins of many of their central concepts that, as suggested here, ultimately hindered liberalism's assumption of a central position in the new political system. (shrink)

The global spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) or coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) has led to the imposition of severely restrictive measures by governments in the Western hemisphere. We feel a contrast between these measures and our freedom. This contrast, we argue, is a false perception. It only appears to us because we look at the issue through our contemporary moral philosophy of utilitarianism and an understanding of freedom as absence of constraints. Both these views can be (...) substituted with more sophisticated alternatives, namely an ethics of virtue and a notion of freedom of the will. These offer a fuller picture of morality and enable us to cooperate with the current restrictions by consciously choosing to adhere to them instead of perceiving them as draconian and immoral. We ask whether we should collaborate with the restrictions and argue that considerations of virtue will lead to an affirmative answer. More broadly, virtue ethics permits to deal with the practical concerns about how an individual should behave during this pandemic, given the current lockdown measures or lack thereof. -/- In section 1, we present how utilitarianism and a notion of freedom as negative liberty support the opposition to restrictive measures. In section 2, we outline an alternative based on an ethics of virtue and a more elaborated notion of free will. In the concluding section 3, we argue that considerations of virtue should guide the individual and public response to the emergency. (shrink)

The regulatory NodD proteins of Rhizobium bacteria mediate the activation of a gene set responsible for symbiotic nodule formation by plant signal molecules. Here we discuss the signal recognition and gene activation properties of NodD and present a model summarizing the current knowledge on NodD action.

The aim of this study was to check whether an online n-back task conducted in the uncontrolled environment of the Internet can yield valid and reliable data. For this purpose, 169 participants completed an online n-back task with n1, n2 and n3 blocks on their home computers. The results have shown acceptable reliability for overall accuracy and reaction time indices across n1, n2, n3 blocks, as well as for reaction time indices for each n block. Unacceptable reliability has been found (...) for separate n levels accuracy indices and for response bias indices. Confirmatory factor analysis has revealed that, among 8 proposed measurement models, the best fit for the data collected is a model with two uncorrelated factors: accuracy consisting of n1, n2, n3 indices and reaction time consisting of n2, n3 indices. The results of this study have demonstrated for the first time that a reliable administration of online n-back task is possible and may therefore give rise to new opportunities for working memory research. (shrink)

Sellars’ argument against The Given has set the scene for much of the discussion of the role of experience in justification. Susan Haack tries to avoid the objection presented by Sellars and to give experience a role in the justification of beliefs. Her approach is to put forward a double aspect theory of justification consisting of a logical/evaluative aspect and a causal aspect. Like other double aspect theories, her approach is led astray by the possibility of deviant causal chains. Her (...) argument’s shortcomings, however, only help to underscore the false assumption behind Sellars’ original argument – that justification is purely logical in character. But, rather than arguing that justification is logical and causal, we are led toward to a view that the character of justification, while essentially normative, is much richer than can be modelled by logic. (shrink)

Communication is an essentially cooperative activity. However, cooperation only makes sense in a particular kind of environment – one in which cooperation leads to shared benefits. This can be seen once we take Grice’s Cooperative Principle and consider its implications in the general context of game theory. The effect is that something like metaphysical realism underpins normal human discourse, such discourse becoming impossible without that presumption.

How is it possible that works of art exist? How do we become receptive aesthetic subjects? The Specificity of the Aesthetic extends these fundamental ontological and phenomenological questions around which Georg Lukács's theory of art was organised. This late work of aesthetics seeks to solve a puzzle that neither philosophy nor socialist politics was able to: the fundamental ethical question of what individuals and humanity as a whole ought to do. Art offers Lukács the already-existing means through which the damaged (...) edifice of Marxism might be reconstructed on a durable basis on which to rest the philosophy, politics, and ethics of a non-Soviet-style Marxism. Erik M. Bachman, Ph.D. (2011), University of California at Santa Cruz, is a Lecturer at that university. Author of Literary Obscenities: U.S. Case Law and Naturalism after Modernism (2018), he has also published numerous essays on modernism, film, and Lukács. Tyrus Miller, Ph.D. (1994), Stanford University, is the Dean of the School of Humanities at the University of California at Irvine. He has published and edited many notable monographs and essays on modernism, critical theory, and the avant-garde. (shrink)

Environmental issues are rarely present in mainstream bioethics; the situation is somewhat better with feminist bioethics. The problem, then, is allowing a feminist perspective into mainstream bioe...

We examine second order intuitionistic propositional logic, IPC². Let $F_\exists $ be the set of formulas with no universal quantification. We prove Glivenko's theorem for formulas in $F_\exists $ that is, for φ € $F_\exists $ φ is a classical tautology if and only if ¬¬φ is a tautology of IPC². We show that for each sentence φ € $F_\exists $ (without free variables), φ is a classical tautology if and only if φ is an intuitionistic tautology. As a corollary (...) we obtain a semantic argument that the quantifier V is not definable in IPC² from ⊥, V, ^, →. (shrink)

Climate change poses a challenge to bioethics due to overpopulation and a declining quality of life, among other factors. In this article, we discuss four scenarios of possible human development in the near future. Two of them are horrible scenarios. One of them assumes that living conditions will significantly deteriorate and people will live in great poverty. The second of the horrible scenarios is one in which a large part of humanity will die. Two other, non-horrible scenarios offer more optimism, (...) either because of faith in technological capabilities, or because of faith in the development of human solidarity and social justice. In this article, we show why rational calculation suggests considering the horrible scenarios as the most realistic. (shrink)