The Social Philosophy Of Agnes Heller

In this book, Lucy Jane Ward argues that although contemporary scholarship tends to divide Agnes Heller's work chronologically in terms of her “Marxist” and subsequent “post-Marxist” periods, a closer reading reveals her work as a continuing engagement both with and against Marx's idea of the human being rich in need.

This collection of essays examines the life and thought of Agnes Heller, who rose to international acclaim as a Marxist dissident in Eastern Europe, then went on to develop one of the most comprehensive oeuvres in contemporary philosophy, putting forward a distinctive ethical theory and analyses of a vast range of topics covering most every philosophical area. Here, philosophers, sociologists, journalists, and political scientists contextualize, compare and assess different elements of Heller's work; the collection as a whole highlights relevant shifts within that work as well as its intrinsic consistency. Essays in the collection address the relationship between philosophy, political practice and everyday life, Heller's theory of modernity and her ethical theory, her recent scholarship on comedy and the Biblical book of Genesis, her theories of radical needs and radical politics, her aesthetic theory, and questions about her relationship to feminist theory. The collection includes Heller's reflections on the collected essays, as well as an early essay on her mentor LukOcs that exposes her own steadfast engagement with certain practical and philosophical issues throughout her life's work.

Concise student introduction to political philosopher Agnes Heller that covers the development of her thinking over several decades.

This book details the history of the concept of the beautiful, starting with a distinction between the 'warm' metaphysics of beauty and the 'cold' one modeled on Plato's Janus-faced relationship to beauty, and ending with a fragmented yet hopeful vision propagated by the likes of Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Adorno. The most important intellectual figures to write about beauty in Western metaphysics and in the post-metaphysical age are examined in this book.

A Short History of My Philosophy is an autobiographic account of Agnes Heller's intellectual and academic career. While the narration mainly traces the development of ideas, we also learn how they occurred in the context of challenging life circumstances. Agnes Heller presents the life of her ideas is four stages: the first, 'years of apprenticeship,' details both the pre- and post-Hungarian revolution period during which she studied under György Lukács; the second, 'years of dialogue,' describes the relationships of the 'Budapest school' in terms of their shared work and contributions; the third, 'years of building and intervention,' gives insight into important works written while living in Australia, along with Agnes Heller's political engagements during this period; and finally, the fourth, 'years of wandering,' describes the various projects Agnes Heller has undertaken as a world-traveler at conferences since the departure of her late husband, Ferenc Fehér.

This book reconstructs, through texts by Ágnes Heller and international scholars, a timely conversation between Hannah Arendt and Heller on the malaises of modernity. This valuable work will be appreciated both by academics and students interested in social and political philosophy, in addition to the wider public curious of intellectual history. Both Arendt and Heller are great thinkers with the ability to enlighten the great moral and political problems of our time. Although these two great figures belong to different generations, the dialogue reconstructed here provides a fuller picture of the demise of the great totalitarian forces of the twentieth century. Both Arendt and Heller, in a sense, accepted the burden of understanding the evils of their age. It is, however, Heller, by addressing the perennial problems of modernity posed by Arendt, who makes this conversation possible, illuminating the problems of this century.