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(1948 Cluj/Kolozsvár – 2023 Budapest)
Professor G.M. Tamás, Gazsi, passed away on January 15, 2023. He was with us from the very beginning, 2003-2004. Trained as a philosopher, he taught his "Class on Class", and later Critical Theory, to generations of students at the department. We'll remember his watchful gaze, uncompromising intellect, theoretical and linguistic precision and wit, which he applied in his teaching just as much as in his analytically sharp and compassionate writings on contemporary society. The cold brutality of the world remains, but we, especially, we Hungarians, Romanians, and other CEU citizens have lost one of its most brilliant interpreters and critics. We only stutter without him.
Professor Tamás graduated from Babes-Bolyai University, in 1972. He originally has studied philosophy and classics. After a stint as an assistant editor of a literary weekly in his native Transylvania, he got into political difficulties with the authorities of the time, emigrated to Hungary where he taught at the University of Budapest (ELTE). Sacked for political reasons again, he became known as a dissident intellectual and published only in the underground or abroad. Elected as a liberal member of the Hungarian Parliament in 1989, he quit professional politics in 1994. He was the head of the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy and has taught at Columbia, Oxford, Chicago, Georgetown, Yale and other universities and was a visiting research fellow in Paris, Vienna, Washington DC and Berlin. He was granted the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Soros Foundation Hungary. He published books on political philosophy and social theory. His works have been translated into 12 languages.