Sociology of Knowledge, Aesthetics of Music, History of Philosophy

The review outlines the way how Demeter tackles in his book the correspondence between a so called sociological tradition (from positivism to post-Marxism) in Hungarian philosophy and aesthetics of music. In this theoretical framework Georg Lukacs’ and Karl Mannheim’s early sociology of knowledge plays a constitutive role. For both of them, Geistgeschichte was more inspirative than Hyppolite Taine’s positivism, in their effort of reconstructing a rather collective than individual world-view behind artworks. The latter. though, massively influenced the sociological tradition of the Hungarian musicology, primarily Antal Molnar’s work, being in the focus of Demeter’s argumentation. The reviewer draws the attention to the fact that in the field of literary criticism a similar tendency can be shown pertaining the reception of French ‘sociological’ tradition represented by Alfred Fouillee, Jean-Marie Guyau, Emile Hennequin. The author’s other remarks refer to the book’s structural problems, and the lack of recent musical narratology in the theoretical horizon of the chapter addressing such musicological questions as the conceptual potential of music.