Tamás Ullmann

Támas Dániel Ullmann (Hungary 2018) is Professor of Philosophy at the ELTE Institute of Philosophy. He obtained a DSc in Philosophy from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2015, habilitation from ELTE University, and PhD from the University of Sorbonne Paris I. He has worked in Vienna at IWM, in Edinburgh at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and in Leuven at the Husserl Archives. His research fields are Kant and German Idealism, Phenomenology, French Philosophy in the 20th Century, Psychoanalysis and Critical Social Philosophy. He is editor of the Hungarian Philosophical Quarterly (Magyar Filozófiai Szemle), chief editor of Aspecto (Philosophical review of Hungarian Phenomenological Society), president of the Hungarian Phenomenological Society and director of the Doctoral School of the Institute of Philosophy at ELTE.

Topic: The Social Unconscious: Trauma, Habitus, Ideology

Evidently, modern social and cultural environments challenge the classical concept of “human being”: that of the conscious, rational, moral subject. If the subject has no universal and atemporal human standards and, on the other hand, if we do not want to give up in a postmodern manner the very concept of subjectivity, we have to interpret it in the framework of its relation to the social-cultural lifeworld. That is what the author would like to prepare by elaborating the concept of the social unconscious. In his view, it is no longer consciousness, rationality and freedom that render possible to conceive the human social actor. On the contrary, we understand the thinking and behavior of the modern subject on the basis of its unconscious desires, habits and ideologies.