Being Oneself: Encountering Ágnes Heller and the Budapest School

• Authors: Murphy Peter
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The Budapest School of philosophers and sociologists formed around the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács in the 1960s and dissipated when many of its members went into exile from Hungary in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A number went to Australia, and the last collective works of the Budapest School were produced there just as the cooperative intellectual impetus of the group dissolved. One of the Budapest School philosophers, Ágnes Heller, took up a lecturing post at La Trobe University where she supervised the PhD of the author of this paper, Peter Murphy. The paper explores Heller’s trajectory out of group philosophy into an existential view of philosophy as a “truth for me,” and Murphy’s philosophical relationship with Heller, with the idea of a school of philosophy, and with the notion of a personal philosophy.

Keywords

EN

Budapest School; Ágnes Heller; Georg Lukács; communism; Hungary; freedom; life; beauty; Renaissance; irony; paradox; pendulum; equilibrium; dissatisfaction; happiness; Australia

• Publisher: University of Warsaw, Institute of Philosophy
• Journal: Edukacja Filozoficzna
• Year: 2022
• Issue: 74
• Pages: 271-280

Contributors

author

Murphy Peter

References

• Hegedus A., Heller A., Markus M., Vajda M., The Humanisation of Socialism: Writings of the Budapest School, Allison and Busby, London 1976.
• Heller A., An Ethics of Personality, Basil Blackwell, Cambridge 1996.
• Heller A., Immortal Comedy: The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature, and Life, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2005.
• Heller A., Marxist Ethics and Eastern Europe, “Telos” 1978–79, Vol. 38, pp. 153–174.
• Heller A., A Philosophy of History in Fragments, Basil Blackwell, Cambridge 1993.
• Heller A., The Power of Shame: A Rationalist Perspective, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1985.
• Heller A., Renaissance Man, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London–Boston, MA–Henley 1978 [1966].
• Heller A., A Short History of My Philosophy, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2011.
• Heller A., A Theory of History, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1982.
• Heller A., A Theory of Modernity, Wiley-Blackwell, Cambridge, MA, 1999.
• Heller A., The Time Is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2000.
• Heller A., Fehér F., Eastern Left, Western Left: Freedom, Totalitarianism, Democracy, Polity Press, Oxford 1987.
• Heller A., Fehér F., Márkus G., Dictatorship Over Needs, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1983.
• Márkus G., Language and Production: A Critique of the Paradigms, Reidel, Dordrecht 1986.
• Márkus G., Marxism and Anthropology: The Concept of Human Essence in the Philosophy of Marx, Van Gorcum, Assen 1978.
• Murphy P., Auto-Industrialism, Sage, London 2017.
• Murphy P., The Collective Imagination, Ashgate, Farnham 2012.
• Murphy P., Civic Justice: From Ancient Greece to the Modern World, Humanity Books, Amherst, NY, 2001.
• Murphy P., Communication, Law and Democracy, PhD thesis, La Trobe University, 1985.
• Murphy P., Freedom and Happiness: The Pathos of Modernity in Agnes Heller, “Thesis Eleven” 1987, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 40–55.
• Murphy P., Limited Government, Routledge, London 2019.
• Murphy P., The Political Economy of Prosperity, Routledge, London 2020.
• Murphy P., Postmodern Perspectives and Justice, “Thesis Eleven” 1991, Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 117–132.
• Murphy P., Radicalism and the Spheres of Value, “Thesis Eleven” 1990, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 39–58.
• Murphy P., Universities and Innovation Economies, Routledge, London 2016 [2015].
• Murphy P., Marginson S., Peters M., Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy, Peter Lang, New York 2009.
• Murphy P., Marginson S., Peters M., Global Creation, Peter Lang, New York 2010.
• Murphy P., Marginson S., Peters M., Imagination, Peter Lang, New York 2010.
• Murphy P., Roberts D., Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism, Continuum, London 2004.
• Vadja M., Fascism as a Mass Movement, St. Martins Press, New York 1976.
• Vadja M., The State and Socialism, St. Martins Press, New York 1981.