NDA@SZTAKI

Új adalékok a korai fenomenológia és a magyar filozófia kapcsolattörténetéhez (Pauler Ákos, Alexander Bernát, Révész Géza és Enyvvári Jenő vonatkozásában).

Varga, Péter András

Mester, Béla

Gondolat

2016

BD352 Phenomenalism / fenomenológia

For the contemporaries, the Hungarian reception of Early Phenomenology was
embodied by Akos Pauler (Pauler Ákos), whose engagement with the doctrines
of Brentano and his School was believed to have been initiated by a personal
encounter between Pauler and Brentano. According to modern scholarship,
however, Pauler’s preoccupation with the basic tenets of the School of Brentano
antedated his encounter with Brentano in 1910, and I point to the early reviews
written by Pauler that might have constituted one possible source of his
knowledge of Brentano. In fact, Brentano himself told in an unpublished letter
written to a Hungarian correspondence partner in 1913 that Pauler had
appeared to him well versed in his ideas when they first met. This hitherto
unnoticed statement, at the same time, exemplifies the possibility of direct
personal encounters between Early Phenomenology and contemporaneous
Hungarian philosophy, to which the present paper is dedicated.
First, I rely on unpublished sources at the Archives of the University of Vienna to
investigate the Hungarian students who were attending Brentano’s classes
during his professorship in Vienna. While there was a steady flow of Hungarian
students to Vienna during this period, those interested in philosophy appear to
have missed Brentano’s classes. This regrettable pattern is epitomized by
Bernat Alexander (Alexander Bernát), one of the most influential late nineteenth
century philosophers in Hungary. As archival records demonstrate, he had
stayed in Vienna for several semesters, studying under Robert Zimmermann,
but he left just in time to miss Brentano’s inaugural lecture in April 1874.
What makes Geza Revesz (Révész Géza) promising are not only his studies in
Munich, Berlin, and Göttingen, during which he is believed to have attended
classes by Stumpf and Husserl, but, foremost, his extensive correspondence
with Brentano that commenced in 1912 and lasted until Brentano’s death (he
also met Brentano at several times during this period). Based on Revesz’ literary
estate, I reconstruct the details of his studies in Germany between 1900 and
1905. I provide a detailed presentation and assessment of his unpublished
correspondence with Brentano, which allows a glimpse into the structure of the
orthodox wing of the School of Brentano and also reveals Brentano’s attempts
at securing an appointment for Revesz in Innsbruck (as a successor of Franz
Hillebrand) or Prague (under the guidance of Anton Marty). The nascent
academic alliance between Brentano and his young Hungarian disciple was,
however, strained by the Great War that intensified the tension between Revesz’
narrow focus on experimental psychology and Brentano’s more encompassing
of philosophy that had a pronounced theistic outlook.
It was already known that Eugen Enyvvári (Enyvvári Jenő) had studied in
Göttingen and published extensively on Husserlian phenomenology in Hungary.
He is, however, mostly perceived by the historiography of Hungarian philosophy
as someone who closely adopted Husserl’s ideas without any original
contribution. This view is epitomized by the disparate assessments of Enyvvari’s
counter-critique of the critique of Husserl written in 1902 by another Hungarian,
Melchior Palagyi (Palágyi Menyhért). Based on the survey of these
assessments, it seems to me that it is Enyvvari who represents the most
promising instance of the Hungarian reception of Early Phenomenology and
thus his case deserves more scholarly attention.
I also believe that my investigation exemplifies a different optional approach to
the history of Hungarian philosophy, i.e. an approach that is not focused on the
perceived degree of originality or the supposed differentia specifica of
Hungarian philosophers, but rather their actual position in the networks of the
contemporaneous international currents of philosophy.

angol

Book Section

PeerReviewed

info:eu-repo/semantics/bookPart

text

http://real.mtak.hu/34808/1/Varga_2016_Uj_adalekok_OA.pdf

Varga, Péter András (2016) Új adalékok a korai fenomenológia és a magyar filozófia kapcsolattörténetéhez (Pauler Ákos, Alexander Bernát, Révész Géza és Enyvvári Jenő vonatkozásában). In: Régiók, határok, identitások. Közép-Európa mint hívószó a (magyar) filozófiatörténetben. ergo . Gondolat, Budapest, pp. 1-31.

http://real.mtak.hu/34808/

MTMT:3051086