Menyhért Palágyi

Who was Menyhért Palágyi?

Menyhért Palágyi, in German Melchior or Meinhert Palagyi was a Hungarian philosopher, mathematician, and physicist of Jewish descent. He was the elder brother of the Hungarian poet Ludwig Palágyi.

Palágyi presented new theory of space and time, which had a certain similarity with the space-time formalism of Henri Poincaré and Hermann Minkowski in the context of special relativity theory. However, his philosophy had little in common with the physics of relativity theory. Therefore in 1914 he expressed his criticism of the theories of Albert Einstein and Minkowski. However, in a subsequent paper Max Born showed that Palagyi's criticism was misguided.

Palagyi's concept of vital fantasy makes him an ancestor of cybernetic anthropology. His theory of virtual movement forms the basis for different movement-therapeutic concepts. Palágyi also engaged in controversy with Edmund Husserl.