Mihály Vajda

Mihály Vajda

György Mihály Vajda (* 1935 in Budapest ) is a Hungarian philosopher and Germanist. Until his retirement he was Professor of Philosophy at the Kossuth Lajos University in Debrecen and is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences .

Life

Mihály Vajda, who lives in Budapest, was nine years old when German troops occupied Hungary in March 1944 during World War II . While almost four hundred thousand Jews were rounded up in all of Hungary in the course of 1944 , transported to Auschwitz and murdered there, the majority of Budapest's Jews survived the Holocaust : they could no longer be deported because of the encirclement of Budapest by the Russian army .

Mihály Vajda joined the communist movement as a teenager . After initially studying chemistry, he switched to studying Marxism and - when he had his first doubts a year after Stalin's death († 1953) - philosophy. Here he found good philosophical teachers who, as convinced Marxists, stood in opposition to the state ideology. From this point of view, the young Vajda also understood the Hungarian revolution of 1956 as an attempt at liberation towards true socialism. After their suppression, he only joined the Budapest school around Georg Lukács . Only after the liberalization in the 1960s did Vajda get a research position at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences , and he was able to concentrate on his dissertation on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl . The work was published in 1968.

In 1973 the members of the Budapest School lost their jobs as ideological deviants and were banned from publishing. Some members of the group - including Mihály Vajda - left Hungary. Vajda changed universities several times as a visiting professor: first he taught at the University of Bremen , then at the New School for Social Research in New York and at Trent University in Peterborough in Canada and finally at the University of Siegen . It was not until 1989 that Mihály Vajda was officially rehabilitated in Hungary and appointed to the chair of philosophy at the Kossuth Lajos University in Debrecen . Here he was director of the Institute of Philosophy from 1996 to 2000, and he was appointed a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2004 Vajda accepted the Franz Rosenzweig visiting professorship at the University of Kassel .

The University of Debrecen awarded Vajda an honorary doctorate in 2007. In 2017 he returned the title because the university had awarded Russian President Vladimir Putin .

Fonts (selection)

• Science “in brackets”. On the critique of the scientific conception of Husserl's phenomenology . (Hungarian), Budapest 1968
• Fascism as a mass movement . London and New York 1976. (translated into French 1979)
• Sistemi sociali oltre Marx. Società civile e stato burocratico all'Esti . Milan 1980.
• The State and Socialism. Political essays . London and New York 1981.
• Russian socialism in Central Europe . (Hungarian Budapest 1989, German, Vienna 1992)
• Freely based on Marx, or Why am I no longer a Marxist? . (Hungarian), Budapest 1990.
• The philosopher and politics. About Heidegger and Lukács , in: Kommune. Forum for Politics, Economy, Culture, 9th vol., No. 8 (August) 1991, pp. 6-11.
• The postmodern Heidegger . (Hungarian), Budapest 1993.
• The crisis of cultural criticism . Vienna 1996.
• The Budapest School. Studies on György Lukács . (Hungarian), Budapest 1997.
• In the mirror and that's not a disease, it's health . In: Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik (Ed.): Confrontations with the destroyed Jewish heritage. Franz Rosenzweig guest lectures 1990–2005 . Kassel 2004.
• Migration of the message . In: Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik (ed.): Franz Rosenzweig's “new thinking”. International Congress Kassel 2004 . 2 volumes, Freiburg and Munich 2006.
• Ethics and Heritage. Essays on the philosophy of Agnes Heller . Published jointly with János Boros . Brambauer, Pécs 2007.
• My ghosts. Essays on contemporary history. Edited by Peter Engelmann . Passagen Verlag, Vienna 2016.

Secondary literature

• Confrontations with the destroyed Jewish heritage. Franz Rosenzweig guest lectures 1990–2005 . Published by Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, Kassel 2004, p. 167ff.

Web links

• International Rosenzweig Society / visiting professor

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Compact: Features section compact. In: welt.de . September 5, 2017, accessed October 7, 2018 .