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Endre Szécsényi

Szécsényi, E.

Endre Szécsényi, born in Kiskunhalas, Hungary, in 1965. Ph.D. from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Associate Professor at the Department of Aesthetics, Janus Pannonius University, Pécs.

Magyar Fellow (1 February 2003 – 30 June 2003)

In my five-month sojourn in NIAS, I sketched the plan for a book entitled “Freedom and Aesthetics: Studies in the History of Critical Thinking”. I worked on three areas in particular. First, the reconstruction of the concept of ‘aesthetic freedom’ in the Augustan age (Lord Shaftesbury, F. Hutcheson, J. Addison, etc.); second an intellectual historical analysis of the alternative notion of freedom in I. Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and third H. Arendt’s interpretation of Kantian reflective judgment as political judgment. These separate studies of intellectual history are all interested in elucidating an alternative conception of freedom that manifests itself in the modern aesthetic experience. This aesthetic concept of freedom is often obscured or overshadowed by moral and political ideas of freedom. I believe that the theoretical opportunities of an aesthetic concept of freedom have been insufficiently explored and deserve attention.