Julius Kovesi
This website is dedicated to the life and work of Julius Kovesi. We think he deserves to be better known, and here we are making his writings and ideas more readily accessible.
Kovesi was born in Hungary in 1930, moved to Perth, Australia, in 1950, and died in Perth in 1989. He taught philosophy at the University of Western Australia for 26 years. His only book was Moral Notions, published in 1967.
Although he is little known, some of his fellow philosophers held him in very high regard. He influenced a small but significant number of his contemporaries. One of them, Bernard Harrison, has said that he regards Kovesi as ‘the most brilliantly original moral philosopher of the twentieth century’. “Julius”, he says, “was a delightful, sublimely intelligent man”.
Kovesi is notable also for his connection with the Quartet of women philosophers — Elisabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley. Foot described Kovesi as one of the “members of a small band of guerrillas fighting the prevailing orthodoxy of anti-naturalist emotivism and prescriptivism in ethics, and challenging the Humean doctrine of the gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’.”
Kovesi was also a scholar of Marx and Marxism. He focused especially on Moses Hess, who introduced Engels to communism. When captured trying to escape with his brother across the Hungarian border, he told the guards that they were not rejecting communism, they were only foolish young bourgeois students who wanted to see Paris before the final collapse of capitalism.
As a student at Oxford, Kovesi and Anthony Kenny produced a spoof magazine, Why? Its motto was: “The value of Philosophy is to protect us from other Philosophers. But will protect us from ourselves if we take ourselves too seriously? So here is Why? which intends to provide this very important second-order protection.” Why? is reproduced here.
We have included photographs wherever possible. Unfortunately, as far as we know, there are no audio or video recordings of him.
Alan Tapper
Chris Ulyatt
David Tapper