Thesis proposal defence of Gyula Pál – planetary political theory and the Spirit of the Earth

The Doctoral School of International Relations and Political Science of Corvinus University of Budapest cordially invites all those interested to the public defence of the thesis proposal of PhD candidate Gyula Pál. Title: The Spirit of the Earth: Recursive Sittlichkeit as a Metamodern Contribution to Planetary Political Theory. 

Date: 19.10.2026. 11:00—12:30 

Venue: C510 

Format: hybrid 

Language: English 

Supervisor: Zoltán Balázs 

Chair of the committee: Zoltán Gábor Szűcs 

Opponents: Csaba Olay (ELTE), Fulvio Attinà (University of Catania) 

About the research 

The contemporary polycrisis – the entanglement of ecological, geopolitical, democratic and technological crises – is traced in this dissertation to a deeper structural condition: the mutually reinforcing duality of modernity and postmodernity, which dissolves shared normativity and reduces politics to technique. 

Drawing on Aristotle’s four causes as an organising framework, the dissertation extends Hegel’s concept of Sittlichkeit recursively across scales: from intimate relations through the polity to planetary coordination. This “Recursive Sittlichkeit” sketches an institutional architecture capable of preserving biodiversity, noodiversity and technodiversity while enabling planetary-scale cooperation. 

The research brings together Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, Yuk Hui’s theory of cosmotechnics and Hegel’s political philosophy into a metamodern synthesis, and generates falsifiable predictions distinguishing this framework from cosmopolitan reform, post-liberal reaction and technocratic optimisation.