Agnes Heller
Renowned philosopher of the New School University (New York), Holocaust survivor and pupil of György Lukács, Agnes Heller was one of the most prestigious and influential philosophers in the ‘philosophy of culture.’
Programme
THE WORLD / OUR WORLD
May 30th to June 3rd, 2005
- The world
- Embodiment in the Western Tradition
- Everyday life yesterday and today
- The phaenomenon of shame
- Biopolitics versus freedom
- European master narratives about freedom
- The structural change of public life and the joke culture
- The role of emotions in the reception of artworks
- The two pillars of modern ethics
- What is postmodern - twenty five years after
Final session: Questions and Answers
Click here to download the pdf programme.
Invited specialists
By indication of Agnes Heller, the below mentioned were also invited to participate: John Grumley (Sidney University) and Katie Terezakis (Rochester Institute of Technology), who gave the following lectures:
Monday, May 30th, 12.00h.
Heller On the Ancients
Katie Terezakis
Tuesday, May 31th, 12.00h.
Between the Normative and The Empirical: Heller on the Concept of Culture
John Grumley
Wednesday, June 1st, 12.00h.
Heller On the Ethics of Personality
Katie Terezakis
Thursday, June 1st, 12.00h.
Agnes Heller and the Question of Humanism
John Grumley
Publication
Prof. Heller’s lectures were published in Arcàdia Editorial, in 2020. On Tuesday, September 15, 2020, at the Ateneu Barcelonès, the event The Worlds of Agnes Heller was organized, where this new expanded edition of the book was presented. The event was attended by Eudald Espluga, journalist and PhD student in Philosophy, Jordi Jiménez, philosophy speaker at the Ateneu Barcelonès and Joan Vergés Gifra, director of the Ferrater Mora Chair. See here the press dossier,
They are almost a compendium of the many and diverse philosophical interests that this thinker had: from tradition to the everyday; art and music; metaphysics and ideologies; emotions and imagination; justice, inequalities, laws; and a special way of understanding our place in the world, our world.
His reflections then, from an explicit ideological left, now reach us and are enormously topical. Concerned about the effects of the pandemic, reading Heller on biopolitics, that is, the political use of bodies, and on how power feeds fear and makes the fundamental tool for sacrificing freedom, is enlightening.
Agnes Heller was a woman fighter who lived intensely the vicissitudes of the twentieth century with lucidity and without fainting. As an epilogue - in fact, a tribute to her - we have added a final text to this book, an autobiographical account in which she concludes that our true task, in this world, is to save ourselves from ourselves, courageously assuming the weight of responsibility.
A first edition of the lessons was published by Documenta Universitaria in 2008.
Others activities
Agnes Heller also gave a talk at La Mercè Cultural Center, entitled “On Felicity”, May 31th, 2005, at 8 p.m.
Press releases
Click here to read the press dossier of the lectures given by Agnes Heller at the Ferrater Mora Chair.
Pictures
