Being Oneself: Encountering Ágnes Heller and the Budapest School

The Budapest School of philosophers and sociologists formed around the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács in the 1960s and dissipated when many of its members went into exile from Hungary in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A number went to Australia, and the last collective works of the Budapest School were produced there just as the cooperative intellectual impetus of the group dissolved. One of the Budapest School philosophers, Ágnes Heller, took up a lecturing post at La Trobe University where she supervised the PhD of the author of this paper, Peter Murphy. The paper explores Heller’s trajectory out of group philosophy into an existential view of philosophy as a “truth for me,” and Murphy’s philosophical relationship with Heller, with the idea of a school of philosophy, and with the notion of a personal philosophy.