As Kevin Mulligan, more than anyone else, has demonstrated, there is a distinction within the philosophy of the German-speaking world between two principal currents: of idealism / transcendentalism, characteristic of Northern Germany; and of realism / objectivism, characteristic of Austria and the South. We explore some of the implications of this distinction with reference to the influence of Austrian (and German) philosophy on philosophical developments in Hungary, focusing on the work of Ákos von Pauler, and especially on Pauler’s (...) reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. (shrink)

In this introductory paper I sketch the tradition, several early aspects of which are discussed in the following essays and reviews. I introduce the main figures whose work initiated and maintained the sociological orientation in Hungarian philosophy thereby tracing its evolution. I suggest that its sociological outlook, if taken to be a characteristic tendency that gives Hungarian philosophy its distinctive flavour, provides us with the framework of a possible narrative about the history of Hungarian (...) class='Hi'>philosophy in the broader context of Central European philosophy. This narrative, in turn, suggests a way of integrating the latter into the history of Western philosophy rather than restricting its scope to a handful of canonical works only. (shrink)

Sind Heidegger und Adorno nun durch Wittgenstein "uberholt"? Auch er definiert nicht durch sein Werk allein das, was philosophisch an der Zeit ist: Ohne die durch Heidegger und Adorno eroffneten Fragehorizonte fehlt ihm gewissermassen die 3. Dimension, und es droht dann, zu einer blossen Linguistik mit schwachen wissenschaftlichen Anspruchen zusammenzuschrumpfen, in der man z B die Sprachregeln der Kommunikation unter Autofahrern untersuchen und das dann auch noch fur Philosophie halten kann. Der sprachanalytische Wittgenstein ist nicht der ganze Wittgenstein, und das (...) wird uns nur dort klar, wo wir ihn in eine dialogische Beziehung zu den gedanklichen Motiven Heideggers und Adornos zu setzen versuchen; sonst erscheint er als Linguist, so wie Heidegger als Germanist oder Adorno als Feuilletonist. (edited). (shrink)

This paper is a background study. It gives an overview of the institutions, decisive trends and major achievements of Hungarian philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century. Thus light is shed on the philosophical scenery which forms the background to the Lukács Circle. The paper discusses the relation of the Lukács Circle at the turn of the century to "official" Hungarian philosophy. First, the introduction portrays the various phases of the evolution of Hungarian institutions (...) of philosophy. Then it sketches the institutional scene at the turn of the century. Thirdly, it attempts to determine the relation of the Lukács Circle to the official academic philosophy, and also sketches some of its aspects after 1919-1920. (shrink)

This paper is a background study. It gives an overview of the institutions, decisive trends and major achievements of Hungarian philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century. Thus light is shed on the philosophical scenery which forms the background to the Lukács Circle. The paper discusses the relation of the Lukács Circle at the turn of the century to "official" Hungarian philosophy. First, the introduction portrays the various phases of the evolution of Hungarian institutions (...) of philosophy. Then it sketches the institutional scene at the turn of the century. Thirdly, it attempts to determine the relation of the Lukács Circle to the official academic philosophy, and also sketches some of its aspects after 1919-1920. (shrink)

William T. Scott’s and Martin X Moleski’s biography, Michael Polanyi, Scientist and Philosopher helps to show how Polanyi throughout his life developed toward his theory of knowledge that is a heuristic philosophy and leads to a heuristic philosophy of religion.

In spite of being a very public intellectual, the philosopher Imre Lakatos (who died in 1974) was little understood. His Hungarian background seemed irrelevant to his career at the London School of Economics as the colleague and then successor to Sir Karl Popper. In Imre Lakatos and The Guises of Reason, John Kadvany demonstrates the overwhelming importance of Lakatos's Hungarian background, and thereby also explains and illuminates Lakatos's philosophy. His study also demonstrates the power of Hegel's thought (...) as the background to any genuinely historical approach to philosophy, even of science and mathematics. He also provides a glimpse of the nightmare world of Stalinist Hungary, as a contribution to an explanation of Lakatos's personal and intellectual style. Kadvany's exposition does much to clarify and explain Lakatos's philosophy, thereby enhancing his reputation and also making his work, much of it still of vital significance, more accessible to a new public. (shrink)

John Cunningham _Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to Multiplex_ London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2004 ISBN 1-903364-79-5 xiii + 258pp.

The paper deals with neo-Kantianism and the value theory in Hungarian philosophy on the threshold of the 20th century. It shows how neo-Kantianism contributed to the Hungarian philosophy’s being professionalized as well as the transformations of neo-Kantianism in the works of its leading representatives. It also offers a detailed analysis of the value theory of K Böhm, who created the first original Hungarian philosophical system.

The paper describes that period of the Hungarian philosophy, in which it became professionalized, namely the Kant argument, which was the first step the Hungarian philosophy took towards its being public. The question has to be answered whether Kant’s thought could become a part of it. Due to political developments as well as the pressure of the church the turn of the century witnessed the shift from epistemology to the issues of moral philosophy and theology. (...) Thus the conditions for the reception of Kantianism and post-Kantian philosophy in the 19th century have been created. The fundaments for the development of axiology were laid as well. The paper covers the main phases of the debate with their leading representatives. (shrink)

There are three elements in this paper. One is what we shall call ‘the Hungarian project’. This is the collected work of Andréka, Madarász, Németi, Székely and others. The second is Molinini’s philosophical work on the nature of mathematical explanations in science. The third is my pluralist approach to mathematics. The theses of this paper are that the Hungarian project gives genuine mathematical explanations for physical phenomena. A pluralist account of mathematical explanation can help us with appreciating the (...) significance of the Hungarian project. The significance consists in the fruitfulness and spread of the project. The spread is wide because the explanations are written in the very familiar language of first-order logic with identity. For this reason, the explanation is understandable to many mathematicians. Because of the methodology adopted in the Hungarian project, the explanations are fruitful in another sense. In the Hungarian project certain questions are asked that would not be asked with a more usual methodology. The Hungarians are distinguished from other scientists in asking logical and mathematical questions, and these both deepen our understanding of the physical theories and induce further spread to mathematics and philosophy. (shrink)

This paper is a background study. It gives an overview of the institutions, decisive trends and major achievements of Hungarian philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century. Thus light is shed on the philosophical scenery which forms the background to the Lukács Circle. The paper discusses the relation of the Lukács Circle at the turn of the century to “official” Hungarian philosophy. First, the introduction portrays the various phases of the evolution of Hungarian institutions (...) of philosophy. Then it sketches the institutional scene at the turn of the century. Thirdly, it attempts to determine the relation of the Lukács Circle to the official academic philosophy, and also sketches some of its aspects after 1919–1920. (shrink)

Mérleg is an interesting quarterly selection of articles of general interest translated from the major Western languages into Hungarian. It is a Catholic publication for a general intellectual public and it contains besides the longer studies review articles, reviews, interviews and also short summaries. The most important articles of the two issues we are reviewing: A. Greeley, "The Sacred and the Psychedelic"; A. Plé, "The affective life of the consecrated celibate"; K. Franke, "Apology for the protection of the unborn (...) life"; "Basic issues of the Abortion Problem"; "Catechesis according to the Council"; R. Schnackenburg, "The birth of Christ without legends and Myths"; P. Caspers, "The role of the Church in Asia"; C. Aguiar, "Latin-American Catholicism"; "The Memory of Mauriac." The very difficulty of publishing in Hungarian a theologically orientated digest makes this selection dramatically sparing and it seems to give us a more coherent and more essential view of the "happenings" of the West than many of the reviews of America, France or Germany.--M. J. V. (shrink)

One bi-lingual - hungarian-ENGLISH - meditation and research about the Illness and the Living Being. Concentrated, of course, to the specific HUMAN reporting to them. The book investigates philosophically the issue of human illness and its organic pertinence to the meaning of human life starting from the recognition that the dangerous encounter with the experience of illness is an unavoidable – and as such crucial – experience of the life of any living being. As for us humans, there is (...) probably no mortal man who has never suffered of some – any! – kind of disease from his birth to the end of his life… Illness is therefore an experience or outright a danger of existence and its possibility, as well as a way of being that nobody has ever been and will ever be ontological or existentially exempted from. So, it may well be “arbitrary” or “accidental” which disease affects which being or person, when and to what degree, in what way, etc., but it is factually unavoidable that in the course of one’s entire life – from its very beginning to its very end – one would never fall ill in some respect. The paper discusses this issue by the ontological investigation of possibility. Together with the analyses about of the origins and history of the MEDICINE. -/- The english CONTENTS -/- Illness – A Possibility of the Living Being Prolegomena to the Philosophy of Human Illness ............................................. 127 -/- Excursus Sketchy considerations regarding the problems of Christian medicine and Christian healing ...................................................... 135 -/- A dialogue-attempt with Aristotle: Dynamis, energeia, entelecheia, and steresis ...................................................... 147 . (shrink)

Imre Lakatos gained fame in the English-speaking world as a follower and critic of philosopher of science Karl Popper. However, Lakatos’ background involved other philosophical and scientific sources from his native Hungary. Lakatos surreptitiously used Hegelian Marxism in his works on philosophy of science and mathematics, disguising it with the rhetoric of the Popper school. He also less surreptitiously incorporated, particularly in his treatment of mathematics, work of the strong tradition of heuristics in twentieth century Hungary. Both his Marxism (...) and his emphasis on heuristics contained a view of science and mathematics that contrasted with the mainstream of Anglo-American philosophy of science. Both involved a dynamic view of science, whether historical or psychological, and an emphasis on practice as opposed to static, formal representations of scientific theories. (shrink)

This paper outlines the history of Hungarian ethnography and anthropology and their role in the construction of the nation and Hungarian liberalism in the Dualist period . Affected by the specific socio-political conditions of this ethnically most diverse country of contemporary Europe, the disciplinary trajectories of Hungarian ethnography and anthropology diverge considerably from the models offered by the historiography in the British, French and German contexts. The paper argues that the pluralistic, cultural and strongly integrative ethnographic tradition (...) that prevailed in Hungary in the last decades of the nineteenth century did not notably wane and shift towards a biological, hierarchical and racialist thinking by the end of the First World War. Furthermore, Hungarian liberalism did not simply provide the milieu for these disciplines to flourish, but was itself partly the result of these disciplines’ attempts to formulate the very concepts of ethnicity and race. (shrink)

Some central issues of fin-de-siècle Hungarian philosophy and intellectual tradition can be retrieved from the writings of József Eötvös and his mid-nineteenth century contemporaries. An ambiguous attitude towards metaphysics, emphasis on sociological issues as well as a regional perspective are apparent in his texts prior to the emergence of the great fin-de-siècle generation of Hungarian intellectuals. They survived the Habsburg Empire thanks to the post-Monarchical literary tradition and Péter Esterházy’s works; they provided an adequate vocabulary for the (...) Central European experience following the Soviet Era. (shrink)

(1994). Annex: The survey questionnaires. World Futures: Vol. 39, The Evolution of European Identity: Surveys of the Growing Edge A Report by the European Culture Impact Research Consortium (EUROCIRCON), pp. 161-164.

Some central issues offin-de-siècle Hungarian philosophy and intellectual tradition can be retrieved from the writings of József Eötvös and his mid-nineteenth century contemporaries. An ambiguous attitude towards metaphysics, emphasis on sociological issues as well as a regional perspective are apparent in his texts prior to the emergence of the great fin-de-siècle generation of Hungarian intellectuals. They survived the Habsburg Empire thanks to the post-Monarchical literary tradition and Péter Esterházy's works; they provided an adequate vocabulary for the Central (...) European experience following the Soviet Era. (shrink)

This paper examines the planning process and architecture of two public psychiatric institutions built around 1900 in Trieste and Lower Austria. From 1864, the building of new asylums was the responsibility of Crown land governments, which by the end of the nineteenth century had emerged as sites of power and self-presentation by minority groups and new political parties. At the same time, the area of asylum planning was establishing itself as a branch of asylum psychiatry and promoting the idea of (...) the asylum as model settlement, contributing to social reform. I analyse the interaction of psychiatrists, architects and government officials involved in planning the two institutions in the context of Crown land governments’ self-positioning within the empire and internationally . The Trieste asylum planners were working for a government controlled by Italian nationalists, but their desire for a ‘modern’ asylum turned them towards German models. The Christian Social government in Lower Austria sought to supplant Germany as the leader in this branch of science. The spatial arrangement and visual articulation of the two asylums is interpreted in the context of the interaction of psychiatry and the politics of regional autonomy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 334-345 [Access article in PDF] Philosophy After Joyce:Derrida and Davidson Reed Way Dasenbrock A GOOD DEAL OF ATTENTION has been paid to James Joyce's influence on literature. Few novelists in the twentieth century have escaped Joyce's influence one way or another, and Robert Martin Adams has even dedicated a book, AfterJoyce, 1 to the proposition that the history of prose fiction is (...) most properly divided into two eras, before and after Joyce. One suspects that Joyce would have appreciated Adams's quasi-blasphemous periodizing.My focus here is Joyce's influence on a different intellectual and cultural realm, philosophy. Joyce's impact on philosophy clearly has not been of the same magnitude. Joyce is not one of those rare figures who have spanned fields or been as important an influence in another field as in his own, unlike Nietzsche, say, or a figure of concern to us here, Jacques Derrida. Joyce's impact on philosophy, thus, is not epoch-changing or field-changing in the way his impact on literature is. Wittgenstein and Heidegger are the two philosophers in the twentieth century whose work have comparably been assessed as epoch-changing. It is worth noting that both men are close contemporaries of Joyce: Wittgenstein, in particular, with his multilingual, Austro-Hungarian, and pan-European character, orientation towards the arts, defiance of so many philosophical conventions, and self-awareness of language, offers a fascinating parallel with Joyce, a parallel already explored to [End Page 334] some extent in the literature. If Joyce, Stravinsky, Picasso, and Le Corbusier, for example, can be said to exemplify modernist literature, music, painting, and architecture, then Wittgenstein is the exemplification of modernist philosophy. But Modernism, or at least so we are told, is out of fashion and out of date, yet Joyce remains our contemporary in ways many of his fellow modernists may not. Nowhere is this more clearly shown than in his continuing presence in contemporary philosophy.The conventional way of writing the history of philosophy in the twentieth century is to divide it into two camps, one oriented towards mathematics, science and logical analysis, a school of philosophy called the analytic or Anglo-American school, the other oriented towards literature and culture and an engagement with the history of philosophy, called the Continental school. That there are a number of problems with this way of mapping the field is by now widely accepted, but no one has successfully replaced this division with anything generally seen to be more adequate, so we continue to use the terms, if as Derrida might say "under erasure." If contemporary analytic philosophy has a single leading figure, I would assign that position to Donald Davidson; continental philosophy has distinct German and French variants, but clearly foremost on the French side is Jacques Derrida. One of the factors leading to our awareness that this bipolar model of the history of twentieth-century philosophy doesn't work very well has been a body of work pointing out a number of similarities between the work of these two philosophers. 2 But what hasn't been pointed out is that both philosophers are interested in Joyce. Thus, the work of Joyce is one of the places the two currents of philosophy merge or at least come into contact. In my opinion, neither Derrida nor Davidson is or deserves to be a crucial figure in Joyce criticism, but looking at their interest in Joyce allows us to trace a neglected chapter in Joyce's influence on the culture and thought of our time and to assess the similarities and differences between the work of these two philosophers.Derrida's work on Joyce includes two essays on Joyce, one an address to the 1984 Joyce Symposium in Frankfurt, "Ulysses Gramophone: Hear say yes in Joyce," 3 an essay which Margot Norris included in A Companion to James Joyce's Ulysses (in abridged form) as one of five exemplary or representative pieces of theoretical approaches to Ulysses (representing deconstruction, of course), and an earlier essay on Finnegans Wake, "Two Words for Joyce... (shrink)

In his book The Austrian Mind (1972) W. M. Johnston observes that between 1861 and 1938 a striking number of Austrian intellectuals committed uicide. He also remarks that prior to 1920 suicide was relatively rare among Hungarian intellectuals, and as a possible explanation he refers to their more intensive political activity. The present paper investigates relations between a society's intellectual life and its general suicidal tendencies. In so doing it takes up a central theme of T. G. Masaryk's Suicide (...) as a Social Mass Phenomenon of Modern Civilization, published in Vienna in 1881. (shrink)

Welt und Unendlichkeit sind nicht nur Grundbegriffe der Philosophiegeschichte, sondern stehen auch im Zentrum gegenwartiger Debatten um die Moglichkeit und Grenzen von Metaphysik uberhaupt. Versteht man unter Welt die Gesamtheit dessen, was ist, dann stellt sich die Frage nach dem ontologischen Status dieser Seinstotalitat selbst. Wie, wenn uberhaupt, kann die Existenz der Welt sinnvoll gedacht werden? Der Begriff der Unendlichkeit konturiert und verscharft diese ontologische Frage dadurch, dass wir die Ganzheit namens Welt als unendlich erfahren, d. h. so, dass sie (...) unsere in epistemischer Hinsicht endlichen Weltbezuge grundsatzlich ubersteigt. Mit Welt und Unendlichkeit ist daher ein begrifflicher Spannungsraum eroffnet, bei dem es im wortlichen Sinne ums Ganze geht. Einen der bedenkenswertesten Gegenwartsbeitrage zu dieser durch die Begriffe Welt und Unendlichkeit abgesteckten Grundfrage der Philosophie hat Laszlo Tengelyi (1954-2014) geleistet. Der vorliegende Band versammelt insgesamt elf im Andenken an Laszlo Tengelyi und in Anlehnung an sein letztes Buch Welt und Unendlichkeit. Zum Problem phanomenologischer Metaphysik (2014, 32015) verfasste Beitrage deutscher und ungarischer Philosophinnen und Philosophen. Mit Beitragen von Bianka Boros, Gabor Boros, Michael N. Forster, Markus Gabriel, Anton Friedrich Koch, Csaba Olay, Sebastian Ostritsch, Inga Romer, Sandor Sajo, Andras Schuller und Tamas Ullmann. (shrink)

Without attempting to cover all the philosophical questions posed by modern mathematics, provides a glimpse of a broad vision of the subject. Covering general philosophical perspectives, foundational approaches, the applicability of mathematics, and history, treats selected topics from a variety of perspectives to demonstrate the range of practices in the discipline. Among them are moderate mathematical fictionism, categorical foundations of the protean character of mathematics, the mathematical overdetermination of physics, and Hungarian traditions and the philosophy of non-classical logic. (...) The 21 papers were presented at a meeting of the International Academy of Philosophy of Science, held in Budapest in May 1993. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

The Hungarian-born author, who is both an original and a prolific thinker, has written on various figures of the history of philosophy and on particular philosophic problems, his first published work having been his Grundlegung der Philosophie, followed by studies in metaphysics,; esthetics, psychology, and philosophic anthropology. However, the major work containing his own system is the Aufbau des Seins. To know and under stand Brandenstein's philosophy, one ought to study this work, a task made difficult by (...) its coined terms, its complicated, Ciceronian style, the relative novelty of its thought, and its extreme systematization. (shrink)

The report gives a survey of the Hungarian philosophy of science after 1973. The report throws some light on the history of Hungarian philosophy in the context of the political circumstances of the late sixties and seventies. It starts with the not so well-known history of 'persecution of philosophers' in 1973. Then it treats the emergence of the philosophy of science focussing on the most significant representatives of this branch of philosophy, which was up (...) to that time almost unknown in Hungary. Due to the fact that the important results in Hungarian philosophy of science run parallel with the reception and translation of the significant products of Western philosophy, such as Wittgenstein's, Popper's, Kuhn's, or Polanyi's works, the report gives relatively significant room to treat these achievements. The last part of the report presents a survey of the younger generation of the philosophers of science, concentrating on the most important insights. (shrink)

This book is a translation of the original Hungarian edition published in 1971. It belongs in the tradition of Hegel, Marx, and Lukacs, and would be of interest to those appreciative of that tradition. The book begins with a discussion of the general distinction between appearance and reality. According to the author, the distinction has at most a rudimentary application to nature below the social level, but is crucial for understanding society. So the book is primarily concerned with social (...) appearances, where the notion of "being-forothers" has a clear application and accounts for the fact that appearances can have objectivity, a quasi-reality, and play a role in the process of historical development. The author "hazards" the thesis that "the individual person in the present of every age necessarily orientates himself in 'false', illusory bodies of thought". He criticizes the "bourgeois" phenomenological and neo-positivist notions of appearance as subjectivistic abstractions, divorced from social praxis. "Man encounters first the individual mass of things rather than phenomena. These data become phenomena only through practical work, when, by the aid of practice, science and technological progress, a systematic division is achieved in which we can discern what is 'behind' the thing immediately in front of us, i.e. essence". (shrink)

The article tracks the development of Agnes Heller”s political philosophy as it evolves through the Marxism and reform communism of her years as a dissent Hungarian intellectual, followed by the period of her encounters with the Western Left and with the currents of postmodern liberalism.

Otto Bauer has emerged once more in the thought of Western Marxists. The dominant theoretical voice of the Austrian Social Democrats in the late Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the First Austrian Republic, Bauer was re-examined in the 1970s and ’80s as ‘the third way’ was being explored in European politics by Eurocommunists. Bauer again is being discussed in the twenty-first century as not only a European ‘third way’, but as a model for nations across the globe. Bauer’s vision theoretically as (...) well as tactically between 1919 and 1934, when Austrian fascism ended the political efforts of Austrian Social Democracy, was of a pluralist parliamentary governance that sought through party coalitions and the influence of social experiment a developing societal praxis whose socialist principles would realise eventually Marx’s understanding of a classless society. A gradualism in long-range strategy and tactics would lead democratically to greater collective coexistence embracing differing cultures within and beyond separate nations. Reviewed here are five publications between 2005 and 2011 which are either thoughtfully supportive or critically dismissive of Bauer’s multi-cultural models for the socialist coexistence of communities and nations. Two conference collections and three books on Bauer’s thought and political life enable the contemporary mind to evaluate the seminal promise of Bauer’s Marxist understanding, where for him Marxism was a social-scientific instrument to guide societal development. (shrink)

The changing conditions for the accumulation and transmission of knowledge in the age of multimedia networks make it inevitable that old philosophical problems become formulated in a new light. Above all, the problem of the unity of knowledge is once again a topical issue. The situation-dependent acquisition of knowledge that is made possible by mobile learning transcends the boundaries of traditional disciplines, linking the domains of text, diagram, and picture. Database integration and multimedia search become central problems in the epistemology (...) of the 21st century, while handheld devices are emerging as vital technologies for supporting collaborative learning. -- Kristóf Nyíri has published widely on Wittgenstein, Austrian intellectual history, and the philosophy of communication. He directs the interdisciplinary research program COMMUNICATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY, conducted jointly by the Institute for Philosophical Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Westel Mobile Telecommunications, Budapest. (shrink)

After the rule of the canonized Marxism has come to an end, the present situation of philosophy in Hungary might be characterized as pluralistic and colourful. The academic, educational and institutional structure of philosophy, as well as the situation concerning the publication of journals and books has changed equally. In general, each of the relevant philosophical trends has gained its representation, significant individual and collective achievements have been reached, and we have also witnessed the rise of a new (...) philosophical generation. Though not as dominanting, philosophy has been integrated into Hungarian intellectual and public life. By now it is not regarded an isolated domain of knowledge as it was before. (shrink)