Critique of Mihály Greguss on István Nyiry’s Dream Philosophy in the Context of 19th Century Dream Perceptions

Philosophical dream interpretations form a separate group of Hungarian oneirological literature at the beginning of the 19th century. István Nyiry’s study entitled The Philosophy of Dreams (1836) also shows the influence of the most important representatives of the romantic natural philosophy, such as Schelling, Oken and Ørsted, but the author came up with the need for independent systematization. In this endeavour, Lajos Schedius’s work aimed at establishing a “universal human science” entitled Principia philocaliae seu doctrina pulcri (1828) was a model for which Nyiry reflected as early as two years after its publication. Mihály Greguss’s critique remaining in manuscript—Notes on Dream Philosophy (1837)—criticized the cognitive foundations of Nyiry’s work partly from the aspect of the Kant tradition in Eperjes (Prešov) and partly from the aspect of Locke’s empiricism. Greguss’s manuscript, for being unreleased, could not become an inducer of a philosophical discourse in which the Kantian problem of foundation and empiricism could have emerged as counterparts of natural philosophical and anthropological approaches, so the natural philosophical approach had remained characteristic for the Hungarian philosophical-aesthetic dream interpretations.