Panajotis Kondylis (Greek: Παναγιώτης Κονδύλης, Panagiotis Kondylis, Panagiotes Kondyles) (Archea Olymbia (West Greece), August 17, 1943 - Athens, July 11, 1998) was a Greek publicist, translator and philosopher. He wrote in German as well as in Greek. His thinking can be placed in the tradition of Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli and Max Weber.
LifeKondylis initially studied classical philology and philosophy in Athens. As a student, Kondylis had been a Marxist. Later he went to Germany to study philosophy, medieval and new history and political science at Frankfurt am Main and Heidelberg. Kondylis graduated in Heidelberg in 1979 with a study on Die Entstehung der Dialektik at Dieter Henrich. This work was about the origin of German idealism at Hölderlin, Hegel and Schelling. In 1991 he received the Goethe Medal.
Kondylis did not have an academic career, on the contrary: He just believed that "the academic philosopher was dead and buried" and, on the other hand, worked as a private teacher. Kondylis died at the age of 55 in Athens. His private library of about 5,000 works was taken over by the library of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Philosophy
Kondylis has written on many different subjects. One of his research topics was the idea of Enlightenment. Traditionally, the lighting is characterized by central order words such as autonomy, self-determination, universality. However, this view is far too unilateral. She may also strike with the French Siècle des Lumières, with his strong criticism of religion, emphasizing the importance of rational ordering and the pronounced political emancipation behavior. On the other hand, it is not so much the German Aufklärung and the English Enlightenment. The German variant was predominantly anti-clerical, pietistic, and not rationalistic, but had more attention to the feeling and the inner that will ultimately result in the Sturm und Drang and the Romanticism. The English variant also spoke differently, especially with emphasis on empiricism. This is, for example, strongly expressed in the philosophy of John Locke and David Hume.
The classic view of the Enlightenment is thus not as accurate as it seems. Nevertheless, it is taken over by many philosophers, for example in the Dialectik der Aufklärung work by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, or in the postmodernism debate between philosophers like Jean François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas.
However, Panajotis Kondylis offers a more appropriate alternative: he talks about 'the rehabilitation of sensuality'. This denominator seems more effective in comparing the variety of the Enlightenment phenomena. Kondylis shows that in the time of Enlightenment there is a great interest in the "sensual" embedding of man, culture and society; that is, for anchoring it in what is unremittingly non-rational. Examples of Kondylis are De l'esprit des lois (1748), in which philosopher Charles de Montesquieu investigates what is the sensual embedding of states, which he hopes to be able to cite for their state structure. In addition, there is also the philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie, who in his work L'homme machine (1747) examined the embedding of reason in the irrational human nature and body. Another example is the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder who, with his understanding, sought to explain how nations are determined by their embedding of states and nations. Bibliography
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