A natural history of a lonely man

Abstract

Philosophy has a lonely role in Hungarian intellectual life. While celebrating scientists and artists for their international reputation in several fields, there is almost no one in philosophy who could be mentioned at the same level. This fact could perhaps be explained by pointing out that it was philosophy which had left the Hungarian intellectual tradition. On the one hand, had someone done philosophy at a high level then he was not taken to represent the "Hungarian spirit." And on the other hand, had someone worked in the "Hungarian style of thought" then at the international level he was no more than a peculiarity. All the same, in speaking about a special Hungarian kind of philosophy we are claiming that Hungarian thinking, from the beginning of the 20th century at least, has had a socio-historical character (see Demeter' s "The Many Faces of Sociological Interpretation: The Unity of Nyiri 's Thought"). Explaining ideas in a socio-historical context presupposes the existence of those ideas. The main reason behind the peripheral status of Hungarian philosophy is not that it has no special nature, but precisely the opposite: // has its own specific nature. As J.C. Nyiri, a paradigmatic figure in this tradition, and whose 60th birthday was the occasion for this volume, sometimes claims: from the perspective of mainstream philosophy the socio-historical approach is an outsider position. The aim of this review is, using Schulte's ("Readings of 'Natural History'") happy phrase, "a clarification of structural relations" (187) among the papers. Hopefully, this clarification helps in presenting not only the essays the volume contains but also those topics of Austro-Hungarian philosophy which interest Nyiri. Thus I am also trying "to discover or invent intermediate cases whose inner congruity and agreement with other cases will not [...] be tested by standard historical research but by means of something like aesthetic appraisal" (194). The present purpose is not to defend Nyiri from the consequences of his outsider