CITIES AS CENTRES OF CREATIVITY IN THE EAST-CENTRAL EUROPEAN NATION BUILDING

Béla Mester

doi:10.3846/cs.2018.5513

Abstract

This paper offers an overview of the philosophical reflections for the change of structure of the scholar public sphere in the 18th and 19th centuries, focussed on the Hungarian examples, with the idea of urbanity in the centre. After the overview of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Kantian and Herderian approaches, it will be discussed the Hungarian case, within and after the controversy on Immanuel Kant (1792–1822). The topic of urbanitas was often touched both as an ideal-typical environment of the philosophical activity, and the real environment of the authors under conditions of an industrialised machinery of the cultural production. The next topic is the specific features of the same turn of the structure of the scholar communication in East-Central Europe, where the change of the languages of the publications has characteristic consequences and the gap between the spheres of the school philosophy and the public philosophy was deeper. The features of the specialities of the philosophies of East-Central Europe in their self-understanding within the new context after the communicational turn is the last topic, focussed on the Hungarian case, especially on the usage of the concept of urbanity in the Hungarian creative discourse about the public philosophy, and national philosophy.

Highlights

This paper offers an overview of the philosophical reflections for the change of structure of the scholar public sphere in the 18th and 19th centuries, focussed on the Hungarian examples, with the idea of urbanity in the centre
Philosophical usage of the terms related to the city and urbanism has a twofold structure
Similar chains of ideas have followed the frequent usage of the terms of politeness, refinement, and taste, sometimes in the core of epistemology, but more often in the political, aesthetical and moral discourses, amongst the authors of the Scottish Enlightenment (SE). It is not an accident event of the history of philosophy that this theoretical reflection has emerged firstly and strongly in Scotland; it can be interpreted as an answer for a turn in the structure of the communication, under conditions of the rising of the modernity, linked with the urbanism, and their consequences for the intellectual sphere, especially for the philosophical life

Summary

Introduction

This paper offers an overview of the philosophical reflections for the change of structure of the scholar public sphere in the 18th and 19th centuries, focussed on the Hungarian examples, with the idea of urbanity in the centre. The change of the dominant languages of the philosophical publications has happened in different epochs in different national cultures, but always relatively quickly (within a generation in the Hungarian case), participants of this change could interpret their positions within the framework of the functionally bilingual communication of the early modernity, applied its term for the actual personal and regional circumstances.

Results

Conclusion