Kostas Axelos | |
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Born |
Athens |
June 26, 1924
Died | February 4, 2010 Paris |
(aged 85)
Alma mater | University of Paris (PhD, 1959) |
Era | 20th-century philosophy |
Region | Western Philosophy |
School | Continental philosophy, Western Marxism, Phenomenology |
Main interests
|
History of philosophy, praxis, techné, Open Marxism |
Notable ideas
|
The game, planetary thinking, mondialisation, errance |
Influences
|
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Influenced
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Kostas Axelos (also spelled Costas Axelos; Greek: Κώστας Αξελός; June 26, 1924 – February 4, 2010) was a Greek-French philosopher.
Axelos was born in Athens in 1924 to a doctor and a woman from an old Athenian bourgeois family, and attended high school at the French Institute and the German School of Athens. He enrolled in the law school in order to pursue studies in law and economics due to dissatisfaction with the philosophy taught at the School of Philosophy of the University of Athens, but did not attend. With the onset of World War II Axelos got involved in politics. Then during the German and Italian occupation he participated in the Greek Resistance, and later on in the prelude of the Greek Civil War, as an organiser and journalist affiliated with the Communist Party (1941–1945). He was later expelled from the Communist Party and condemned to death by the right-wing government. He was arrested but managed to escape.
At the end of 1945 Axelos moved to Paris, France on the Mataroa voyage, with around 200 other persecuted intellectuals, where he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and lived most of his life. From 1950 to 1957 he worked as a researcher in the philosophy branch of CRNS, where he was writing his dissertations, and subsequently proceeded to work in École Pratique des Hautes Études. From 1962 to 1973, Axelos taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, and met Jacques Lacan, Pablo Picasso, and Martin Heidegger. His 1959 primary doctoral thesis Marx, penseur de la technique (translated as Marx, the Man Who Thinks Through Technique) tried to provide an understanding of modern technology based on the thought of Heidegger and Marx and was very influential in the 1960s, alongside the philosophy of Herbert Marcuse. Axelos' secondary thesis was on Heraclitus and was eventually published in 1962 as Héraclite et la philosophie: La première saisie de l'être en devenir de la totalité (Heraclitus and Philosophy: The First Grasp of the Being-in-Becoming of Totality).