Laszlo Katona
Graduate Student
Laszlo Katona is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University. He primarily works in 19th and 20th century German philosophy– with a strong emphasis on the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics by way of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. Within hermeneutics, broadly, he thinks about questions of aesthetic experience, judgment, and the irremovably historical dimension of human understanding. He is especially interested in the influence of Kant (esp. his Critique of Judgment) on the development of hermeneutic phenomenology.
Laszlo also does considerable work in political philosophy, through which he hopes to bring to the fore the political import of hermeneutics in the areas of philosophy of law and democratic theory. Within political philosophy, he is also invested in questions of biopolitics, violence/ non-violence, and political theology (esp. Arendt, Benjamin, Agamben).
Laszlo graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy from DePaul University, with minors in History, German Studies, and Linguistics. There he completed an honors thesis titled “Hannah Arendt and The Possibility of Political Forgiveness.” Laszlo is proudly born and raised in Chicago IL.