Arthur Koestler (redirected from Artur Kösztler)

Koestler, Arthur 

Born Sept. 5, 1905, in Budapest. English writer and philosopher. Son of an industrialist.

Koestler graduated from the University of Vienna (1926) with a major in psychology. He is the author of several publicistic satirical novels, including Darkness at Noon (1940), Arrival and Departure (1943), and Thieves in the Night (1946), which have been used as anticommunist propaganda. During the 1940’s and 1950’s, Koestler was a supporter of the “cold war.” In the late 1950’s he abandoned politics and has since then published a series of essays and studies on philosophy, biology, and the theory of biological systems, including The Sleepwalkers (1959), The Act of Creation (1965), and The Ghost in the Machine (1967); these works, using the theories of modern bourgeois philosophical anthropology, develop the idea of man as a “mistake of evolution.”

WORKS

Drinkers of Infinity. London, 1968.
The Roots of Coincidence. London, 1972.

REFERENCES

Glagoleva, E. “Psevdonauchnye rassuzhdeniia o prirode tvorchestva.” Kommunist, 1972, no. 12.
Potter, D. “The Ominous Beat of Koestler’s Ragged Black Wings.” The Times Saturday Review, Oct. 21, 1967.
Europäische Begegnung, October 1970, p. 37.

E. N. GLAGOLEVA and A. V. POTEMKIN