‘Freedom, understood concretely, is a civilizational, not a natural, construct. This essentially conservative argument could provide the very basis for the continuation of a certain political tradition without which we, modern souls, would live in a much more cruel and…
‘Ortega’s image of what members of his ideal elite should be like derives from his wider philosophy. His spells at German universities made him initially a fervent neo-Kantian who, seeing the world through the lens of transcendental idealism, believed in…
‘The Third Budapest School strives to debate the one-sided, analytical, progressive, nihilistic aspirations that dominate American intellectual life, and to cultivate initiatives based on classical European philosophy. It does this by stimulating the formulation of important questions: in contrast to…
‘There is one sense in which Aquinas certainly did not believe in worlds. This is the sense in which certain Greek philosophers held that there is an infinity of worlds…Aquinas asserts what he calls the “unity of the world”. He…
Policies such as pro-family tax cuts, housing programmes, child benefits etc., all resulting in a kind of family income system that aims to reduce the harm inflicted on families by a Ricardian conception of the economy (which, obviously, cannot be…
‘On our part, we doubt that “history of ideas” as a methodologically coherent discipline existed in Hungary between the two world wars…Nevertheless, their work is undoubtedly a prime example of an attempt at the creation of a conservative-oriented social science….
‘Linguistic–ethnic nationalism is the quintessential negative (in Joó’s parlance, “imperialist”) nationalism, a nationalism insensitive to qualitative differences or to more elevated spiritual concepts of the state, such as the unifying “Hungarus consciousness” of the nomadic empire’s supranationalism, which derives from…
‘The most important distinguishing feature of the Hungarian national ethos and Hungarian nationalism, according to Joó, is that the Hungarian nation’s leitmotif of Steppe origin survived the foundation of the Christian state, and even survived the Middle Ages, synthesizing it…
Dr Jordan B Peterson has recently had a public discussion with evolutionary biologist Dr Richard Dawkins, one of the most prominent figures of the popular atheist movement of the early 2000s. The two philosophers touched on subjects such as Jesus…
‘As a committed Protestant, Joó emphasized the primacy of “spirit” over matter in almost all his writings, but he failed to take into account that religion and “spirit” do not always overlap, and religiosity itself simply becomes ineffective if so-called…
