Menyhért Palágyi, in German Melchior or Meinhert Palagyi (16 or 26 December 1859 in Paks,

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia a ...

– 14 July 1924 in

Darmstadt Darmstadt () is a city in the States of Germany, state of Hesse in Germany, located in the southern part of the Frankfurt Rhine Main Area, Rhine-Main-Area (Frankfurt Metropolitan Region). Darmstadt has around 160,000 inhabitants, making it th ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

) was a Hungarian

philosopher A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

, and

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

descent (his original name was Silberstein, it was changed in 1895). He was the elder brother of the Hungarian

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral or writte ...

Ludwig Palágyi. Palágyi presented new theory of space and time (1901), which had a certain similarity with the space-time formalism of

Henri Poincaré Jules Henri Poincaré ( S: stress final syllable ; 29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as "The ...

and

Hermann Minkowski Hermann Minkowski (; ; 22 June 1864 – 12 January 1909) was a German mathematician and professor at Königsberg, Zürich and Göttingen. He created and developed the geometry of numbers and used geometrical methods to solve problems in number t ...

in the context of

special relativity In physics, the special theory of relativity, or special relativity for short, is a scientific theory regarding the relationship between space and time. In Albert Einstein's original treatment, the theory is based on two postulates: # The laws o ...

theory (e.g. Palagyi used the imaginary time coordinate ''it'' as the fourth dimension of "space-time"). 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 Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...

and

. However, in a subsequent paper

Max Born Max Born (; 11 December 1882 – 5 January 1970) was a German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a n ...

showed that Palagyi's criticism was misguided. Palagyi's concept of vital fantasy makes him an ancestor of cybernetic

anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavi ...

. His theory of virtual movement forms the basis for different movement-therapeutic concepts. Palágyi also engaged in controversy with

Edmund Husserl , thesis1_title = Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations) , thesis1_url = https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:58535/bdef:Book/view , thesis1_year = 1883 , thesis2_title ...

Works

* ''Madách Imre élete és költészete'' (I. Madachs Leben u. Dichtungen. Mit Portr. Von M. P.). Budapest: Athenaeum, 1900. * ''Neue Theorie des Raumes und der Zeit. Die Grundbegriffe einer Metageometrie''. Unveränd. reprogr. Nachdr. d. Ausg. Leipzig, Engelmanns Verlag, 1901. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchges., 1967. * ''Kant und Bolzano: Eine krit. Parallele''. Halle a.S.: M. Niemeyer, 1902. * ''Der Streit der Psychologisten und Formalisten in der modernen Logik''. Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1902. * ''Die Relativitätstheorie in der modernen Physik''. Vortrag gehalten auf dem 85. Naturforschertag in Wien. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1914. * ''Zur Weltmechanik''. Beiträge zur Metaphysik der Physik. Mit einem Geleitwort von Ernst Gehrcke. Leipzig. Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth. 1925 * ''Naturphilosophische Vorlesungen: Über die Grundprobleme des Bewusstseins und des Lebens''. Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth 1924. * ''Wahrnehmungslehre''. Mit e. Einführung v. Dr. Ludwig Klages. Leipzig: Barth, 1925. {{DEFAULTSORT:Palagyi, Menyhert 1859 births 1924 deaths Hungarian logicians Hungarian people of Jewish descent Hungarian philosophers Relativity critics Mathematicians from Austria-Hungary