The Hungarian philosopher Akos Pauler, son of an archivist and historian and grandson of a professor of law, grew up in an intellectual and bookish environment. Even before he matriculated, he published his first article in the scholarly journal Bölcseleti Folyoirat in 1893. It was a defense of metaphysics against positivism—metaphysics starts from what is given and goes back to that without which the given cannot be thought. This is, in germ, Pauler's "reductive method" (as against induction and deduction), which became his main preoccupation in later life. However, influenced by his university professor Imre Pauer, he was first a positivist for about a decade. After obtaining his doctorate at Budapest in 1898, he spent a year at Leipzig and another at the Sorbonne. In 1902 Pauler became Privatdozent at Budapest and, in 1906, lecturer in ethics on the faculty of law at Pozsony (Bratislava). His...