General courses offered for all programs is subject to change annually, depending on the specific interests and needs of the student cohort.

 

The following select courses illustrate the scope of general, or program specific courses.

The notion of “world” in phenomenology and existentialism (Prof. Dezső Csejtei)

The course discusses developments that prepared the way for these two major 20th century philosophical trends to criticize the so-called “natural notion of the world” and to articulate a notion that is fundamentally different from that of natural science. Major authors discussed are Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty and Ortega.

World order (kosmos) and the Copernican Revolution (dr. habil. Tamás Pavlovits)

 

The Copernican revolution brought about the most fundamental change of our conception of the world in Western culture. The course examines the most important aspects, the origins and consequences of this conception from two fundamental perspectives. On the one hand, the new conception of the post-Copernican world is studied in the context of philosophies of nature, as articulated in the works of Copernicus himself, Brache, Kepler, Galileo and Newton; on the other hand, in the context of metaphysics and anthropology, in the work of Bruno, Montaigne, Descartes and Pascal. The former context affords a study of the transition from a closed cosmic system to an infinite universe, the latter that of its influence on the individual, ethics and politics.

 

Philosophical problems of quantum mechanics (dr. Tibor Sutyák)

 

The purpose of the course is to discuss the philosophical problems and theoretical challenges entailed by quantum physics. The end of the classic (Newtonian) paradigm of the physical world gave rise to insights and theses of particle theory that, from a mathematical and physical point of view, are formally coherent, experimentally supported and technologically effective, and yet are difficult to reconcile with our intuitive, everyday notion of the world. The course provides an overview of various interpretations of quantum mechanics (Coppenhagen interpretation, participatory universe, multiple world theory, etc.), of responses formulated by philosophers of science and mind, and discusses a phenomenological response that renders the issue void, as a consequence of the objectivizing mind.

 

The challenge of Occult philosophy to mainstream philosophy (Prof. Endre Szőnyi-György)

 

Until the turn of the 16^th and 17^th centuries the occult-magical world view had been an integral part of the system of sciences and philosophy (astrology, alchemy, divination, hermetism, kabbala, etc.). In the course of the 17^th century, the scientific world view underwent a major change, which rendered occult philosophy obsolete. At the end of the century, however, it enjoyed a revival as a counter-culture and has been around ever since, flourishing not only as a religion or religion supplement, but as a coherent philosophical acount of the world. Although these accounts are put aside by mainstream modern philosophy as inadequate and suspect, they are worthwhile considering as a challenge to our common view of the world and to its philosophical accounts. The course covers ancient and medieval preliminaries (Plato, Neoplatonism, hermetic philosophy), the great “magi” of the Renaissance (Johannes Reuchlin, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, John Dee), transitory figures (Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton), and major representatives of counter-culture since the 17^th-18^th centuries (Swedenborg, William Blake, Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, Béla Hamvas, Solovyov, etc.).

 

The existentialist turn of ontology (Prof. Zoltán Gyenge)

 

The problem of the relation of the general and the particular had been a major issue since Aristotle through the debates about universals in the Middle Ages to German idealism. The fundamental character of an ontology is determined by whether it gives priority to universals or particulars, or the other way round. What is called “existentialism” in the 20^th century is not without preliminaries. It might be traced back as far as Schelling, although its fundamentals were laid down by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Both of them give priority to the particular in their ontologies, while opposing the tradition. The course explores further parallels between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche along these lines, and traces the roots of existentialism in this context further back in the history of philosophy than customary.

 

Heidegger’s early fundamental ontology and late mysticism of being (dr. habil. Sándor Krémer)

 

In Heidegger’s oeuvre, for various reasons, two distinct periods are distinguished. However different, the early period marked by Being and Time (1919-1932) and the late period (1947-1976) are connected by Heidegger’s concern with being. Although as existential analytics, Being and Time is complete, as fundamental ontology meant to go beyond the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl, it remained incomplete. Conceding, in part, this failure, after the Kehre Heidegger turned away from existential analytics and renounced his program of a systematic elaboration of the question of being through a fundamental ontology, and his main concern was poetry as “the saying of being”, rather than systematic metaphysics. The course studies the relation of these two periods in Heidegger’s oeuvre, not only from the viewpoint of the development of his thought, but also from that of uncovering the philosophical issues lying behind his “turn”.

 

Objective reality in Duns Scotus, Suárez, Descartes and Kant (dr. habil. József Simon)

 

In the vocabulary of European philosophy, the term realitas was coined as a mistaken translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in the Middle Ages. The purpose of the course is to study the medieval and early modern philosophical usages of realitas. Topics to be discussed include the ontological commitment behind objective thinkability in the modal ontology of Duns Scotus; the non tantum nihil ontological status of objective ideas in Descartes’ Third Meditation; and the possible objective relevance of the Kantian a priori in terms of experience in his critique of metaphysics. The epistemological aspects of these issues is taken into consideration throughout. Knowledge of Latin, English and German is recommended.

 

Gadamer’s hermeneutics (dr. habil Sándor Kérmer)

 

Gadamer’s hermeneutics relies on several precursors, but without two major sources, it cannot adequately be interpreted. Traditional hermeneutics and phenomenology underwent a radical reformation already in Heidegger in the 1920’s, but the hermeneutical turn of philosophy was only accomplished by Gadamer. In Truth and method, he sets out from phenomenology as reformed by Heidegger, and exposing the unspoken philosophical assumptions of traditional hermeneutics, on the one hand, and the unspoken hermeneutical assumptions of philosophy, on the other, he elaborated a novel self-definition of philosophy, notably, hermeneutic philosophy. The course studies the conception of philosophy as hermeneutics in Gadamer’s texts and discusses its theoretical motivations and imports.

 

Continuity and discontinuity in the history of science (dr. Tibor Sutyák)

 

A classic issue in the philosophy of science was the so-called “demarcation problem”, that is, the question of differentiating between scientific cognition and other forms of human knowledge and usage of language. Representatives of the debate over criteria of verification vs. falsification, however, largely ignored the cumulative nature of the history of science, that is to say, the idea that science accumulates a body of knowledge passed on from one generation to the other, hence, its workings are progressive. This conception was challenged by scholars who analyzed science from the viewpoints of discontinuity, incommensurability, institutional and sociological conditions, and synchronically, rather than diachronically. The course studies major works relevant to the philosophy of science from this perspective, and discusses not only classics, such as Kuhn and Feyerabend, but also the French school of the history of science (Koyré, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault).

 

 

Ethics in German idealism (Kant and Schelling) (Prof. Zoltán Gyenge)

 

Kant’s laying of the foundation (Grundlegung) of ethics and his critique of pure practical reason had a fundamental influence on German idealism, including the thought of Schelling. As it is clear from many of his essays and his correspondence with Hegel, Schelling envisaged developing the Kantian paradigm basically from a practical perspective. The problem of the Grundsatz determined the direction of practical philosophy from Reinhold on. Since Kant, the notions of freedom and obligation underwent change and the scope of the categorical imperative was transposed into the domain of natural justice. The course discusses similarities and differences between Kant and Schelling with regard to their conceptions of the state of justice and the order of law in history. With regard to freedom, it analyzes the Philosophical Investigations, devoted to the essence of human freedom: it discusses the relation of divine and human freedom and the so-called “Spinozism debate”, an influential controversy of the time.

 

Plato’s Ethics and its Aristotelian critique (dr. habil. Emese Mogyoródi)

 

Plato’s ethical tenets are closely related to his social theory and critique of Sophistic relativism. Central to Plato’s ethics is the so-called “Socratic twin paradox”, which consists of two theses: 1) noone does wrong voluntarily, and 2) virtue is knowledge. These tenets raise a number of problems that are objected to Plato by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle’s objections are not motivated by logic, but are related to his theory of action, conception of the soul and, ultimately, social theory, which are fundamentally different from the relevant tenets of Plato. How are these aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy related from the point of view of his critique of the Socratic heritage of Plato, and how do they clarify the fundamental difference in outlook of their ethical theories? The contrast of these different ethical paradigms might be used to illuminate some current ethical and political issues.

 

Moral Philosophy in Renaissance and Baroque Court Culture (Prof. Éva Vígh)

 

For modern intellectuals, educated in the five disciplines of the studia humanitatis, the issue of the social application of ancient ethics and concepts appears primarily in the court treatise literature. Aristotle provided the basis of morals to which the humanists appealed, and particularly authors of tracts in the 16^th century (Castiglione, Machiavelli, Della Casa, Guazzo, Tasso) and later the great moralists all through Europe studied him with the aim of giving guidance in the complicated system of interpersonal relationships through their ethics and etiquettes (“small ethics”). They elaborated thereby general guidelines for morals and behaviour that have had a lasting impact to date. The purpose of the course is to study the obsolete looking, nonetheless, in part, very much alive, theories of morals formulated by and for, people of the court in the court culture of Italy, Spain and France.

 

 

Intersubjectivity (Prof. Dezső Csejtei)

 

The course discusses the process that, in around the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, led to the collapse of the philosophical position that took for granted the Cartesian isolated subject. Preliminaries include classical German idealism (Fichte, Hegel and, in part, Feuerbach); then we discuss the contribution of phenomenology (Scheler and Husserl) and that of existentialism, the issue of co-existence in particular (in the work of Heidegger and Sartre, on the one hand, and Jaspers, Marcel, Berdyaev, and Ortega, on the other). Finally, the process of the collapse of the isolated subject is studied in dialogue philosophy (Buber, Rosenzweig, Ebner), dialogical hermeneutics (Gadamer) and Levinas’ philosophy.

 

Game theory and human behaviour (dr. habil Tóth János)

 

The course surveys the basic concepts, ideas and problems of game theory, discusses specific issues, such as the prisoner’s dilemma, chicken dilemma, free riding, tragedy of commons, and the ever widening application of this field of knowledge. When game theroy was first formulated, it seemed that it can only be used in the analysis of competitive situations, where participants have a clash of interests. It has since been made clear that it can equally well be applied to cooperative situations. Robert Axelrod provided analyses of multiple stage (extending in time) games, and his suggestions have had great impact on evolutionary etology as well. Meanwhile, the conception of the behavioural actor has undergone a significant change: beside companies, political parties, nation states and multinational companies, the latest approaches consider even non-human individuals and genes to be players in a game. Hence, the field of application of game theory is constantly widening and thus, game theory can provide an account of behaviour from ever refined perspectives. Methodological issues related to game theory are also discussed in the course.

 

Bioethics (Prof. Magdolna Szente)

 

The course outlines the cultural, social and political background behind the rise of bioethics as an independent discipline and discusses the social debates that it has generated from its beginnings. Issues discussed include the definitons of life and death, euthanasia, abortion, experiments on humans and their misuse, the novel medico-biological techniques, common medical practices and the rights of patients, ecology and enviroment protection, gene manipulations and biotechnology, stem cell research, demography and behaviour manipulation, reproductive medicine, organ transplantation, cloning, experiments on animals, and many others.

 

Radical ecology (dr. habil. János Tóth)

 

Michael Zimmerman, the great American ecologist and philosopher of enviroment employs the term “radical ecology” to integrate deep ecology, ecofeminism and social ecology. The common denominators among these disciplines are that they conceive of ethical issues as secondary, and consider the ecological crisis the gravest problem, which could only be resolved through a radical (revolutionary) transformation of Western thought and values. The various existing trends of radical ecology considerably differ in their explanations of the causes of the ecological crisis and their suggestions for the direction and nature of solutions. These differences gave rise to severe debates among these trends. The purpose of the course is to discuss these debates and their relevance to the most urgent ecological issues of our era.

 

 

Critical theories of film (Prof. Ferenc Odorics)

 

According to the latest view in film theory, film is not a self-contained system of signs, since all productions are embedded in a given social and political context and are distributed (circulated, marketed, contextualized) by a given insitution, which is not exempt from economic and political interests. The course goes beyond a close reading of film narratives and studies it as a cultural product or consumer item. How does the movie work as an insitute in the larger context of culture? What criteria determine value judgements in film industry? What objectives and interests do they serve? Answers might be provided by critical theories (psychoanalytical critique, Marxism, feminism, ideology critiques) and the purpose of the course is to discuss these and apply them to seminal examples taken from the movie.

 

Semiotics and iconology of artistic expression (Prof. Endre Szőnyi-György)

 

The course aims at discussing and answering the following questions through the help of various schools of philosophy of art and iconology/iconography: What is a text? What is an image? What is an artistic image? Authors and periods discussed include selected thinkers of antiquity and the Renaissance (as precursors), theories at around the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries (Peirce, Saussure, Cassirer, Warburg, Panofsky), classical structuralism (Jakobson, Eco), postmodern iconology and the “pictorial turn” (Belting, Baudrillard, Danto, Goodman, Mitchell). Theoretical currents discussed include essentialism, historicism, formalism, structuralism and poststructuralism. These currents represent a paradigm shift from the linguistic turn through the pragmatic turn to the pictorial turn.

 

 

Intercultural theatre: a response to globalization (Prof. Katalin Kürtösi)

 

In the introduction to the main topic, the course clarifies notions employed to characterize “the other”, such as “barbaric”, “primitive”, related notions such as “centre” and “periphery”, and trends to characterize culture, such as multi-culturalism, inter-culturalism, cross-culturalism, or trans-culturalism. It also discussess theories and practice of theatre employed by modernism and avant-garde in the work of A. Artaud, with its receptiveness to exotic or “primitive” cultures. In the second part of the course, we analyze the work of the most important directors of intercultural theatre, such as P. Brook, A. Mnouchkine, R. Schechner, E. Barba, Robert Wilson, and Robert Lepage, on the basis of their theoretical work and productions (on video, if available). The third part of the course deals with a special forum of intercultural theatre, theatre festivals, using examples from Hungary and abroad. The theoretical background of the course is the work of contemporary critics of theatre (e.g. P. Pavis, E. Fischer-Lichte, and Eli Rozik).

 

 

Alterity and identity in multicultural societies (dr. Katalin Demcsák)

 

The course discusses the philosophical and cultural anthropological theories of alterity or “otherness” and sets up a theoretical dialogue between these different approaches in order to make progress in the analysis of various multicultural societies. Authors and cultural disciplines discussed include Husserl, Böhme, Dilthey, Gadamer, contemporary cultural anthropology and sociology, and theories proposed by Anglo-American cultural studies. Research areas to be discussed include literary texts, images, performances produced by European, American, Canadian and Australian migrants on the issue of identity, with special regard to the suggestion of M. Leiris, that a non-violent presentation of alterity and otherness might be produced by artistic representation.

 

Configurations of literature and fine art in 20^th century theories of art (dr. Emőke Varga)

 

Research areas on the relation of text and image from the pre-modern paradigm to the postmodern are represented by various schools of theories of literature and fine art, such as schools of the history of ideas and formalism, structuralisms, phenomenology, postmodern hermeneutics and deconstructivism. Depending on the general principles and theoretical insights behind these discourses, they put the relation of text and image in focus (e.g. structuralisms), or discuss it somewhat marginally (e.g. deconstructivism). The course studies these various approaches with special regard to the following issues: comparison of image perception with the process of reading, construction of meaning in decoding elements of images vs. those of words, the substantial determination of pictorial entities and their theoretical distinguishability from linguistic entities.

 

 

Existentialism and religion: Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodoxy, Judaism (Prof. Dezső Csejtei)

 

The purpose of the course is twofold: on the one hand, it examines issues of religion in the classic authors of existentialism, with special regard to religious denomination, in the work of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, Unamuno, Berdyaev, Sestov and Buber. On the other hand, it studies the influence of these thinkers on theology in the oeuvre of Rahner, Barth, Bultmann and others.

 

 

The emotional fundament of religious faith (Prof. Zoltán Gyenge)

 

Theological rational religion, as Werner Jaeger has called it, seeks to connect reason and faith and set up a parallelism between them. According to Jacobi, the faiths of reason and of the heart are one and the same, and similar ideas can even be found in Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift. It was in the 18th and 19th centuries that European theories about religion explicitly formulated the need for a new religon, or rather, a novel form of Christianity in order to reform religion. This might be a rational religion, but some believed that it might also be faith fuelled by passion, that subverts religion (or rather, the Church) in its fundament and secure position.

 

 

Paradigms of theories of religion from secularization to pluralism (Prof. András Máté-Tóth)

 

The course discusses contemporary paradigms of theories of religion, setting out from the influential theory of secularization proposed in the 1960’s. The theory applies the paradigm of modernity to the religious dimensions of society and comprises three main theses about the process of secularization: religion becomes a social sub-system; individual decision gains priority over religious institutions and normative regulations; the position of religious institutions is weakened in terms of regulating and influencing social life. Since its formulation, the theory has been persistently criticized, both from a theoretical point of view, and that of results based on Central Estern European and third world research data. Although the theory has kept some of its theoretical relevance, for various (perhaps not even predominantly professional) reasons, it is no longer the prevailing paradigm today, especially with regard to European social and cultural transformations. It has been replaced by pluralist theories, which can better accomodate different cultural contexts, on the one hand, and variegated parallels of individual and communal attitudes, on the other, in their intepretations of the religious field.

 

 

Network based and ecological approaches to the study of religious communities (dr. Gábor Dániel Nagy)

 

Networking science is an innovative field of research, which has recently been applied to religion and opened up new perspectives for religious studies. The course consists of an introductory part, which discusses basic notions of networking science, and a core part, which surveys the latest developments within the sociology of religion that employs the tools and accomodates the results of this new science. Topics of the introductory part includes mathematical theories describing the mechanisms of networks; layers of complex networks and their functioning; interactions among networks: natural, economic, social and religiousl networks; network as a regulative system. The core part discusses the following topics: special networks, their characteristics and functioning; network connections, solidarity, density, and homophilia. In the concluding sections, the course aims at formulating the unique characteristics of religious networks, and the nature of their relation to other networks.

 

 

Anti-essentialism in the Buddha and Karl Popper (dr. Tibor Porció)

 

It is a natural human strive to search for the essence of things, constants or absolutes in the ever changing world of experience. In (mono-)theistic religions this is (the one, or supreme) God. Brahmanic and Upanishadic literature in the era of the Buddha sought for the essence of things, including humans, sacrifice, and the universe. The ancient Greek philosophers’ theories were also preeminently concerned with constants behind the phenomenaal world. The Buddha himself sought the same, but did not find it; and after his enlightenment, he concluded that nothing in the sensible world could aspire to be absolute or truly existent. On the contrary, perhaps the greatest obstacle to enlightenment was for him the belief, humans are prone to, that phenomenal entities are independent realities. Interestingly, Karl Popper, the great modern philosopher of science, similarly criticized a view he called “essentialism”. The parallel was pointed out by the contemporary indologist, Richard Gombrich, a friend of Popper, who suggested that the Buddha and Popper were both anti-essentialist, that is to say, “nominalists”. The course discusses the plausibility of this suggestion through studying the relevant tenets of Buddhism and Popper’s philosophy.

 

 

Pilgrimage and tourism: allegorical interpretations of modernity in the context of travelling in search of authenticity (dr. Bertalan Pusztai)

 

The purpose of the course is to study discourses on the relation of modernity and late modernity that employ some historically developed form of mobility as an instrument of interpretation. Setting our from the motivations of pilgrims to seek the sacred and the semiotics of Christian sacrality, the course analyzes the desire for authenticity in modernity, the feeling of its loss and responses this has called forth. The clarification of these issues assumes the semiotics of tourism and theories about the sacralization of space. From these perspectives, pilgrimage and tourism are primarily methods or procedures serving an organization of identity, which provide a good model for analyzing the relationship of individual and community in modern and late modern societies. In their background, however, changes of actual cultural practice and meaning constitution might be observed, which are also discussed in the course.

 

 

Religion, construction of nation, and nationalism (dr. Réka Szilárdi)

 

The course studies some vital aspects of theories of nationalism that have religious relevance. It examines a paradigm shift in the 18^th century that concerned the transposition of identification with some religion to identification with the nation; religious tropes in theories of nationalism; and phenomena of religious import in contemporary construction of national identity in Central and Central-Eastern Europe. The theoretical background is provided by religious studies, political theory, sociology, social psychology and their interface.

 

 

Modern mythologies (dr. István Povedák)

 

The mythological dimensions of religion have attracted the attention of folcloristic research in the past two centuries. Narratives in vernacular religion were mainly connected to Christianity in the 19^th century in Central Eastern Europe, but the first decades of the 20^th century gave rise to myths that related to the nation, some ethnic group, spiritual movements, the environment, or some imaginary world. “Modern mythologies” (a term coined by Barthes) in most cases are transposed to the transcendent and function as religions. The course studies modern mythologies (with their narratives, rites, symbols) and seeks to answer the following questions: How far and in what sense are modern myths myths? What distinguishes them from ancient myths, and what are their special characteristics?