This short biography was written by Alan Tapper for inclusion on the website “Women in parenthesis” (https://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk), a website dedicated to the “Wartime Quartet” of Elisabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch. The foursome have been the subject of two recent widely-read and excellent books: Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman’s Metaphysical Animals (2022), and Benjamin Lipscombe’s The Women are Up to Something (2021). The connection between Kovesi and The Quartet is sketched below:
Writing in 2004, Philippa Foot described Julius 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’”. This is good-enough grounds for thinking of Kovesi as a member of the Quartet+. Kovesi was about 10 years younger than the Quartet members. He was a friend of Foot and Midgley. But he remains little known and so, readers might ask, who was Julius Kovesi?
Kovesi was an Australian moral philosopher and intellectual historian. He was born in Budapest in 1930 and grew up in north-western Hungary, where his father managed a brickworks. The mid-twentieth century brought war, invasion, and occupation first by German troops and then by the Russians. After the War, Kovesi was a student at Budapest University, where he attended the philosophy lectures of George Lukács. As communist rule became increasingly oppressive, he and his brother decided to escape while it was still possible, only to be caught at the Austrian border. Kovesi, even then ideologically quick on his feet, told the guards that he and his brother were not rejecting communism, they were only foolish young bourgeois students who wanted to see Paris before the final collapse of capitalism. They were released after a beating, but only on condition that they reported on fellow-students who might also be planning to escape. Within days they again headed for the border, and this time succeeded in crossing it.
In 1956, six years after migrating with his family to Perth, Western Australia, Kovesi had mastered English, completed a first class honours degree in philosophy, and taken up Australian citizenship. He was awarded a scholarship for postgraduate study at Balliol College. He was at Oxford in 1956-58, a time when the Quartet –– Foot, Midgley, Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Anscombe –– was flourishing. His tutor was R.M. Hare, but the philosopher who had the greatest influence on him was his thesis supervisor, J.L. Austin. Just before his final exams at Oxford, Austin gave him a note reading: “Be relevant. Read and answer the question.” It was a note he framed and kept on his desk for the rest of his career.
After Oxford, Kovesi spent a year at Edinburgh University, followed by three years at the University of New England, before returning to the University of Western Australia in 1962. He remained on the staff there for the rest of his life, where he taught until a week before his death, aged 58, in 1989.
Kovesi’s only book, Moral Notions, was published in 1967. It was highly praised in a 1969 Critical Notice in Mind by Bernard Mayo, who described it “a lightning campaign of a mere 40,000 words” which is “somewhat intoxicating”, and which “decisively and permanently alters the balance of power” in the debate about the relationship between facts and values. The book presents “a general theory of concept-formation, meaning, and rules of usage”, which is then used “to solve or dissolve an impressive list of standard problems in moral philosophy”. “Time and again a startling paradox brings us to a halt, and we want a recapitulation of the steps in the argument that got us there. Nearly always we are driven back to realise that a favourite preconception has been subtly charmed away.” Mayo saw the book as carrying forward the work of Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot.
Moral Notions is in part a reply to Hare’s 1952 The Language of Morals, but it is much more than that. It shows a deep knowledge of the history of moral philosophy, most obviously of Plato, Aristotle, Hume and G.E. Moore. Foot herself observed that Moral Notions is “like no other book of moral philosophy” and is “radically different from anything else on the scene, either then or now”. Alasdair MacIntyre has described it as making “a remarkable contribution both to the philosophy of language and to moral philosophy”. Bernard Harrison has said that he regards Moral Notions as the best book on moral philosophy written since the War, and that “I have constantly recommended [it], whenever I have had the chance, to dozens of people over the succeeding thirty years, and used it in teaching a lot before I retired”.
Kovesi also published four later papers on moral philosophy: “Valuing and Evaluating”, Jowett Papers 1968-69, (1970), 53–64; “Against the Ritual of ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’“, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, III (1978), 5–16; “Descriptions and Reasons”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1979–80), 101–113; and “Principia Ethica Re-examined: The Ethics of a Proto-Logical Atomism”, Philosophy, 59 (1984), 157–170. These are collected in Julius Kovesi, Values and Evaluations: Essays on Ethics and Ideology (Peter Lang, 1998).
Moral Notions was republished as Moral Notions, with Three Papers on Plato, edited by R.E. Ewin and Alan Tapper (Cybereditions, 2004), with a Foreword by Philippa Foot. Foot commented that “It is sad that we have a second chance to appreciate this remarkable book only after Kovesi’s death, and I myself much regret that I cannot discuss it with him”.
A collection of reflections on Kovesi’s work, Meaning and Morality: Essays on the Philosophy of Julius Kovesi (Brill), was published in 2012, with contributions by (amongst others) Harrison, R.E. Ewin, Anthony Kenny, Peter A. French and Jean Bethke Elshtain. French remarks that Moral Notions “struck me in the same way it did many other philosophers at that time who were interested in understanding our moral vocabulary: it was unorthodox and yet persuasive in a most disarming and straightforward way”. In her essay, Elshtain comments that “Contrary to the presuppositions of the political science in which I was trained, description and evaluation are not entirely separate activities. We do not layer evaluations onto a neutral description; rather, moral evaluation is embedded in our descriptions. How we describe is itself often a moral act. This is a case made eloquently in a book that seems to have disappeared from view, Julius Kovesi’s Moral Notions”. Reviewing Meaning and Morality, Roger A. Shiner speaks of “Kovesi’s originality and his importance as a contributor to moral philosophy, at least its meta-ethical aspect” and of his “character as a thoughtful and humane practitioner of the moral life”. Kovesi was also a scholar of Marx and Marxism; his special interest was in the thought of Moses Hess, a Jewish Left Hegelian who introduced Engels to communism. Kovesi was a thinker with broad interests, a very quick wit and an incisive intelligence, though not well-known except to a few, including Foot and Midgley.
Alan Tapper