Panagiotis Kondylis - Life

Life

Born in 1943 in the small community of Drouba (Δρούβα) in Olympia, Greece, where the Kondylis' family house is still standing today, he moved with his father, who was a military officer, at the age of six to Kifisia, Athens, where he attended school. Kondylis studied classical philology and philosophy at the University of Athens (at which time he was drawn to Marxism), as well as philosophy, medieval and modern history and political science at the Universities of Frankfurt and Heidelberg. During his postgraduate studies at Heidelberg he earned his PhD (under the supervision of Dieter Henrich) with the 700-page study of the origins of post-Kantian German idealism, including the early years of Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin: Die Entstehung der Dialektik (The Genesis of Dialectics), which supported views considered innovative and provocative at the time, including illuminating the pre-history of Marxism and the world-theoretical presuppοsitions of the Marxist philosophy of history. Outstanding German historians Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck were important guiding influences during his formative years in Heidelberg.

Kondylis was awarded the Goethe Medal in 1991. As a recipient of the Humboldt Prize he also was in 1994/95 a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. Kondylis, though, was independent – a "Privatgelehrter" (private scholar) who never aspired to an academic career apart from one attempt in the early 1980s when he entered into discussions with the Philosophy Department of the University of Athens, applying for a placement. His application was confronted with the distrust of the conservative faculty of the philosophical department. Although Kondylis was supported by the then well-known professor Theofilos Veikos, he still had to contend with the opposition of many University based philosophers and subsequently did not succeed in commencing a career as an academic. Thereafter, he never expressed any wish for an academic career (expressing the view that "academic philosophy is dead and buried"), although he was offered a lot of honorary placements, including by the University of Ioannina, which he politely refused.

He died in Athens in 1998. His library of some 5000 titles based in his house in Politeia, Athens was donated by his sister, Melpo Kondylis (Μέλπω Κονδύλη), to the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in which a special "Kondylis" section exists in the campus library. In November 2008 a conference was held in Heidelberg honouring the memory of the late Panagiotis Kondylis. A similar event was held in Greece on 22 May 2008.