Interview: Is Logic Ever Foundational?

Abstract

The interview of Andrew Schumann, the managing editor of Studia Humana with András Máté, the head of Dept. of Logic, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Eötvös University Budapest, Hungary. Andrew Schumann: Der Wiener Kreis is one of the most legendary schools of logic and analytic philosophy. How did it come out in Hungary? Which names? Which ideas? András Máté: Four years ago our department has finished a common research with the Institute Vienna Circle of the Vienna University about the reception and influence of the Vienna Circle in Hungary. The results of the research have reinforced my previous impressions that this influence was rather poor. Hungarian intellectual life before the First World War was open to new and modern ideas and because of geographical and political reasons, new ideas from Vienna have found especially easily their way to Budapest. But in the inter-war period, Hungary became a bad-tempered, stuffy, conservative and nationalistic country – this was a ressentiment against the lost war, the huge territorial losses that Hungary suffered from and the continuous economical difficulties in comparison with the dynamic development for a half century before the War. The official, academic philosophy was dominated by conservative tendencies, and a little minority of the intellectual life had their orientation towards innovative ideas coming from the part of Europe lying west from Hungary – mostly towards very different ones from the views of the Vienna Circle. I have found in the journals of that period a few papers by younger philosophers who knew that views and tried to convey them – but nothing more