Aurel Fixation

While I’m recommending philosophers , I should make a particularly enthusiastic plug for Aurel Kolnai .

Kolnai was a Hungarian-Jewish Wunderkind who converted to Catholicism under the influence of G.K. Chesterton. He then proceeded to hop erratically around the western world, publishing volumes upon volumes of brilliant books and essays in several languages before suddenly dying of a heart-attack in 1973 while at Marquette University in Wisconsin. Very few people (even among the well-educated) have so much as heard his name, but thinkers as esteemed as Bernard Williams have named him as among the best philosophers of the last century.

So far, the only works by Kolnai that I have read are The War Against the West (his monumental 1938 polemic against the Nazis), Sexual Ethics , and his insightful pair of essays “On Disgust.” Soon I hope to get to his political writings, which philosopher John Haldane, inter alia , has enthusiastically recommended as a rich “new” resource for contemporary political philosophers—especially Catholics.

It may be, then, that the best is yet to come. But even judging only by what I have already read, I urge anyone who is the least bit curious to explore the works of this exciting, important, and unjustly neglected thinker.