This article is designed to explore ideas in the recent sociology of morality about the conjunction of ethics and embodiment in everyday life. While it draws on an interpretation of the ethical encounter as a relation of moral proximity, it extends this conception of ethics beyond the dyad to include a discussion of gift giving and generosity in the present context. This is done in order to analyse a concrete empirical event in terms of the web of moral and social (...) codes that inform it. The event in question is a well-known New Zealand breastfeeding case in which a woman breastfed another woman's baby `without her consent'. As well as drawing attention to the ethical risks in encounters between strangers and others in contemporary social life, this particular breastfeeding case also brings to the fore the invisibility of breastfeeding as an embodied ethical practice. (shrink)

The article tracks the development of Agnes Heller”s political philosophy as it evolves through the Marxism and reform communism of her years as a dissent Hungarian intellectual, followed by the period of her encounters with the Western Left and with the currents of postmodern liberalism.

According to Ágnes Heller’s plans in 1989 and 1990, the last volume of her moral trilogy should have been entitled A Theory of Proper Conduct. In 1996 the third volume finally appeared with the title An Ethics of Personality. Its content: a series of philosophical dialogues between many dramatis personæ. The change in style and methodology of the third volume led to many criticisms, amongst them Mihály Vajda’s questioning of the whole project’s consistency. The present paper aims to engage these (...) criticisms by retracing the presence in An Ethics of Personality of the themes that, according to Heller’s previous intentions, should have informed the last part of her moral theory. The contribution analyses Heller’s definitions of modern paideia and moral wisdom, the issue of the possibility of happiness for modern people, and the philosophically problematic concept of moral aesthetics. In conclusion, the ‘literary’ methodology of the book is put in relationship with the non-prescriptive aspect of ethics. (shrink)

This was the address given on the occasion of the award of the Goethe Institute’s Goethe Medal to the Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller in 2010. Other recipients of the Medal have included Bruno Bettelheim, György Ligeti, Ernst Gombrich, Karl Popper, and Lars Gustafsson.

In this essay, I reconstruct Heller’s philosophy of history, arguing both that Heller’s position presents a serious intervention into modern theorizing about historical patternicity and that Heller’s position should be understood as a valuable hybrid, uniting her existential, ethical, and pragmatic bodies of work. For Heller, history is implicated indissolubly in the personal and ethical decision-making of individual actors. I conclude that Heller undermines postmodern claims about the relativism of history and scientific progress, notwithstanding initial appearances to the contrary.

The paper aims to investigate the meaning of historicity in the light of Ágnes Heller’s interpretation of history as ‘being-in-common’. By touching on the problem of the modern world’s axiological pluralism, the issue of the legitimation of moral theories and the dilemma of morals, the paper analyses Heller’s conception of human goodness as an incontrovertible, inexplicable and mysterious ‘fact’ that is able to illuminate the path of human life and determine the opening of the individual onto the world with the (...) same wonder that marks the beginning of any philosophical attitude. (shrink)

Presenting a contemporary interpretation of stoicism, the essay draws on Agnes Heller's philosophy of existential choice in order to outline a reconstructed stoic theory of happiness and a pneumatic ethics addressing the context and dynamics of cybernetically structured societies in which vocational (professional) ethics play a declining role.