Romanian philosophy
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Romanian philosophy is a name covering either a) the philosophy done in Romania or by Romanians, or b) an ethnic philosophy, which expresses at a high level the fundamental features of the Romanian spirituality, or which elevates to a philosophical level the Weltanschauung of the Romanian people, as deposited in language and folklore.
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[edit] The specificity of the Romanian philosophy
The discussion concerning the existence of a Romanian philosophy knew three stages.
Between the two World Wars, after the emergence of the Greater Romania, the national identity went through a crisis. The new national identity that was forged by the intellectuals of the time was not centred on political goals like before (national rights, independence, national unity etc.), but took initially a more cultural character. Thus the discussions concerning the “national specificity” invaded historiography, literature and philosophy. The first history of the Romanian philosophy is published in 1922 by Marin Stefanescu, proving thus the fact that the philosophical thinking in Romania had reached the level of self-reflexivity; that, in other words, had acquired self-conscience. The general conclusion of the interbellic discussions which involved almost every notable philosopher was that there is a Romanian philosophy proper, with a distinct profile among other national philosophies. Constantin Noica, one of the most prominent Romanian philosophers of all times, considered back then that the Romanian philosophy is characterised by paganism, cosmicism (i.e. no acute separation of the world of the man from the transcendence) and determinism (or rather fatalism).
During communism, the existence of a Romanian philosophy was an uncontested dogma. The official histories of the philosophy, influenced by the national-communist and protochronistic ideology, spoke even of the “philosophy of the Geto-Dacians”. They were affirming a continuity of philosophical vision from Dacians, via folklore, to contemporary authors. Needless to say, the “materialistic” character of the Romanian philosophy was over exaggerated. Some non-Marxist authors, like Noica, insisted also on the singleness of the Romanian philosophical thinking. Noica even wrote a book called The Romanian Feeling of the Being.
After the communism, the discussion resurfaced. One opinion is that there are Romanian philosophers, but there is no Romanian philosophy. In other words, that the phrase “Romanian philosophy” has a mere historical-geographical content. The opposite point of view consists in two theses: 1) not all the European nations have their own national philosophy; 2) the Romanian nation has its own, distinctive, national philosophy, which continues at a higher level the traditional world-view. The article from the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy concerning the philosophy in Romania seems rather to adopt a weaker version of the second position. The existence of a Romanian philosophy is recognized, but is not connected to the national ethos, nor to the ethnical substance of the Romanians. Thus, the authors say: “At the peak of its evolution between the two world wars, Romanian philosophy had the following characteristic features: it was closely related to literature, in the sense that most Romanian philosophers were also important writers; it showed excessive preoccupation with the issue of Romanian identity; it was involved in Romania's historical, political and ideological debates, fuelling attitudes in favour of or against Westernization and modernization; it synchronized quickly with Western philosophical thinking; and it was (and still is) lacking in ethical thought.” (Marta Petreu, Mircea Flonta, Ioan Lucian Muntean, “Romania, philosophy in”, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2004)
[edit] Historical outline
[edit] Beginnings
The first broadly philosophical texts attested on the Romanian territory are the Patristic writings. Among this corpus of texts, in Church Slavonic translations, the most important are the works of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite and the Dialectics of St. John Damascene . Excerpts from ancient philosophers circulated also. The only notable indigenous production of the epoch is The Teachings of Neagoe Basarab to his Son, Theodosius, written around 1521. The book is a compilation of patristic and biblical sources, with many moral and political reflections, on an ascetical background. It illustrates Byzantine theocracy and proposes the model of a prince-monk.
[edit] 17th century
In the middle of the 17th century Romanian acquires the status of liturgical language alongside Greek and Slavonic, and begins to develop a philosophical vocabulary. Among the few philosophical productions of the period, the most influential is The Divan (1698) of Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723), a philosophical treatise which supports the Orthodox ethics with rational arguments. Cantemir authored also a textbook of logic and a treatise of “theologo-physics”, Sacrosanctae scientiae indepingibilis imago (1700) which, besides discussing the nature of time, or the problem of the universals, tries to justify the biblical cosmogony with non-theological arguments drawing on the philosophy of Jan Baptist van Helmont.
[edit] 18th century
In the 18th century the dominant philosophy in Moldavia and Walachia is the neo-Aristotelianism of Theophilos Chorydaleos, which was in fact the Paduan neo-Aristotelianism of Zabarella, Pomponazzi and Cremonini. Towards the last quarter of the century the modern philosophy arrives in Romania, under the form of Wolffian rationalism and Lockean empiricism. Important figures may be considered Samuel Micu (1745–1806) in Transylvania, and Iosif Moisiodax (1730–1800) in Moldavia. The first translated intensively from the Wolffian Baumeister, thus promoting the German enlightenment. The last contributed decisively at the modernization of the philosophical curriculum in the Princely Academies. He wrote an essay called The Apology, a splendid plea for the modern European philosophy as against the old Aristotelian Chorydaleian scholasticism. The philosophical language of this century was mostly Greek.
[edit] 19th century
In the 19th century the Greek language is replaced in the Academies with the Romanian. Although there existed still supporters of Wolff and Condillac (Locke being now eclipsed by his French continuator), like Eufrosin Poteca (1786–1859), the Kantianism will impose itself quickly. The list of Romanian Kantians, mostly Transylvanians formed at the Greek-Catholic Gymnasium in Blaj, may begin with Daniil Philippidis (d. 1832), and continue with Gheorghe Lazar (1779–1823), August Treboniu-Laurian (1810–1881), Simeon Barnutiu (1808–1864), Timotei Cipariu (1805–1887) and Ioan Zalomit (1810–1885). They left little original work, their chief concern being to put in the hands of the youth philosophical textbooks in Romanian. Thus, the works of Krugg, Kant's successor at Königsberg, were translated four times, independently. Zalomit published in Latin, in 1848, an inaugural dissertation called De Kantianae philosophiae principiis et dignitate.
At the middle of the century the most important philosopher is Ion Heliade Radulescu (1802 – 1872). He was influenced by Victor Cousin’s eclecticism, by Hegel (indirectly, via Victor Cousin), and by the socialist Proudhon. His metaphysics and political philosophy are contained in Equilibrium between Antitheses and The Critical Universal History.
Beginning with 1864, the pole of the Romanian philosophical life becomes the “Junimea” literary society. Titu Maiorescu (1840 – 1917), its founder, studied philosophy in Germany, where he even published a work, Einiges philosophische in gemeinfasslicher Form (1860). In Romanian he published a treatise on Logic (1876). He was under the influence of Kant, Herbart and Feuerbach, and he promoted also Schopenhauer in Romania. Maiorescu, by his teaching rather than by his published work, became the founder of the first Romanian philosophical „school”. Other important philosophers at Junimea are Vasile Conta (1845–1882) and Alexandru Xenopol (1847–1920). The first wrote a philosophical system influenced by Spencer's transformism, August Comte’s positivism, and Büchner's vulgar materialism. His reflections on the nature of cognition are now obsolete, depending on infirmed physiological hypothesis. He was also a defender of metaphysics, in a deeply anti-metaphysical climate. Xenopol developed a philosophy of history, trying to clarify the scientific status of his speciality, history. He proposed a distinction between facts of repetition and facts of succession, laying thus the basis for a classification of sciences, of which Rickert said that it had anticipated his own. His reflections on causality, hypothesis and their verification are still worthy of interest.
[edit] 20th century
In the 20th century, the history of Romanian philosophy is divided in three periods: the pre-communist period, the communist period, and the post-communist period.
[edit] Pre-communist period
Two major „schools” of philosophy will give in the first half of the century the peaks of the Romanian philosophy: the school of Maiorescu, and the school of Nae Ionescu. The Transylvanian philosophers can also be grouped together, mostly by reason of their non affiliation to the two other schools, but also on the reason of their belonging to the same spiritual family. Apart this three „schools” or orientations, there are many other authors, cultivating with predilection the philosophical essay.
[edit] The Maiorescians
The „Maiorescians” are Constantin Rădulescu-Motru (1868 – 1957), P. P. Negulescu (1872 – 1951), Ion Petrovici (1882 – 1972), and Mircea Florian (1888 – 1960). Constantin Rădulescu-Motru, the grandson of Eufrosin Poteca, called his philosophical system „Energetic Personalism”. An expert in experimental psychology, he followed the inductivist trend in metaphysics. The human personality was considered by him a superior form of energy. His metaphysics implies a political program as well as an ethics of labour. The purpose of the political life must be the transition from the “anarchic personalism” that governed the Romanian society to the “energetic personalism”. P. P. Negulescu published a Philosophy of the Renaissance still readable and a capital study in the philosophy of the culture, called The Genesis of the Forms of the Culture. Ion Petrovici wrote on logic and metaphysics. In logic he had contributions in the theory of the notions, chiefly concerning the rapport between the intension and the extension of a term. He contradicted the law of their inverse dependence. In metaphysics perhaps the most well known of his contributions is the article “The Idea of Nothingness”. Mircea Florian elaborated between the wars a philosophy of the “pure datum”, trying to overcome the epistemology based on the subject-object dichotomy. His results are published in the volume Philosophical Reconstruction (1943).
[edit] The Ionescians
The “Ionescians” grouped around their teacher and/or friend, Nae Ionescu (1890 – 1940). He earned his PhD in Germany, with a study on the “logistic”, i.e., in the terminology of the epoch, the mathematical logic. He did not welcome mathematical logic, thinking that the classical logic is superior. His thinking on the subject may be regarded as a form of intuitionism. He published subsequently only press articles, where he exposed strong conservative views, and he became quickly the mentor of the extreme right. After his death, some of his students published his lectures. He taught a philosophy of the authenticity, called “Trairism” (from “a trai”=”to live”), an autochthon version of Existentialism. Although he plagiarised many times, this did him no harm; his charisma was apparently enormous, his students being completely captivated by the fact that he philosophised on the spot, in the course room, giving them answers to their problems, and provoking in them a certain tension of the spirit, an impetus toward thinking on their own.
The most important of his adherents were Mircea Vulcanescu (1904–1952), Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), Emil Cioran (1911–1995), Constantin Noica (1909–1987).
Mircea Vulcanescu had an enormous erudition, being considered by many the chief of the “generation”, but did not publish significantly in the domain of philosophy. He did, however, influence the Romanian philosophy by his seminal essay The Romanian Dimension of the Existence. In this work he analyses the conceptual paradigm that serves as a means of evaluation of diverse philosophical visions by the Romanians. By analysing certain Romanian phrases, in what he calls a phenomenological manner, he pretends to unravel the world vision they deposit. From an analysis of the linguistic particularities of the negation in Romanian, e.g., he deduces the whole Romanian ethos, with traits like fatalism or indifference in front of death, the easiness in front of life, the feeling that there is no alternative and nothing irremediable.
Mircea Eliade, the well-known specialist in the history of religions, published some essays showing the influence of his teacher, but through these early works he brought nothing essentially new in the landscape of the Romanian philosophy. He was, however, a very important personage in the intellectual landscape of the 30’s, another possible “chief” of the generation.
Emil Cioran, in his Romanian books, had a philosophy which expresses the despair, the obsession with the death, as well as a deep lyricism. He treated nihilist themes of Nietzschean and Schopeanhaurean provenance.
Constantin Noica debuted with an essay called Mathesis, or the Simple Joys. The short book glosses on the distinction between life and geometry. After this essay Noica will orientate himself towards the history of philosophy, writing on Kant, Leibniz, Descartes, Plato, Aristotle, Hume etc. His PhD thesis was called A Sketch for the History of How Something New Is Possible, where he tried to answer how it is possible that the spirit is not “endlessly tautologous”, analysing the European philosophy from Plato to Hume.
[edit] The Transylvanians
Transylvania produced between the Wars three remarkable thinkers: Lucian Blaga (1895–1961), D. D. Rosca (1895-1980), and Eugeniu Sperantia (1888-1972).
Lucian Blaga’s philosophical system, called “ekstatic intellectualism” is a highly original construction, with roots in the philosophy of Kant, psychoanalysis, and Patristic philosophy. The system was projected in five “trilogies”, but we only have three achieved and a fourth partially elaborated. The trilogies are, in order: The Trilogy of Knowledge, The Trilogy of Culture, The Trilogy of Values, and The Cosmological Trilogy.
The metaphysical vision of Blaga centres around a metaphysical source or principle called “The Great Anonymous”, which creates the Universe indirectly, by mutilating the forms of existence that emanate from him, in order to avoid the possibility of the apparition of a competitor Great Anonymous. The results of these acts of mutilation are infinitesimal fragments, structured in types, and called “divine differentials”. The extant beings appear by the aggregation of these differentials. The speculative cosmology of Blaga also includes an entelechial interpretation of the evolutionist biology.
His theory of knowledge asserts the existence of an “unconscious spirit” endowed with his own set of categories which double the Kantian categories of the conscious spirit. These categories of the unconscious stop the man from revealing completely the mystery of the existence, since all his knowledge must fit into this categorical framework. Thus, the Great Anonymous keeps the “centralism of the existence”, because a complete knowledge would make the man godlike. The metaphysical axiology of Blaga is connected with this principle. These categories, which function as limits of the revealing human powers, are converted by the unconscious spirit in final values. In other words, what we can not overcome, we idolise. This “finalist self-deluding” ensures the creative destiny of mankind.
The culture is for Blaga the result of man’s trying to reveal the mysteries of existence, it constitutes the man’s being. Since man can not reveal completely the mysteries, because of the “transcendent censure” exerted by the unconscious categorial scheme, all his productions bear the mark of this framework. The totality of these categories is called a “stylistic matrix”, and they have the structure of a “cosmoid”, that is of a small universe, self-sufficient. Thus, each culture is characterised by a style, in which different categories activate and wear off successively, until the complete exhaustion of the stylistic matrix. At that moment, the culture generated by the attempts of revelation within the respective stylistic matrix, dies. This vision is at the same time close and far from the morphological theory of culture, as exposed by a Frobenius or a Spengler.
D. D. Rosca, who would later be the coordinator and translator of the series of complete works of Hegel into Romanian, arrived at a philosophical synthesis presented in his book The Tragic Existence. It is a personal blend of Existentialism, with roots in Kierkegaard, but influenced also by Hegel. His PhD thesis at the Sorbonne, The Influence of Hegel on Taine, as well as his translation in French of the Life of Jesus made him a known name in the French-speaking world.
Eugeniu Sperantia was a very prolific author. He began his list of publications with his PhD thesis, The Pragmatic Apriorism, a rethinking of Kant's Transcendental Analytic from a Pragmatist stand-point. He wrote subsequently on various subjects, like the biology from a Hegelian perspective, gaining a reputation especially in the field of the philosophy of right. He was a pioneer in the field of erotetic logic (the logic of interrogatives), which he called “problematology”. A very interesting and most neglected work is his System of Metaphysics: Implicit in the Postulates of Any Possible Knowledge. We have here a theoretical innovation in metaphysics: Sperantia replaces the categorial theories of classical metaphysics with the analysis of the most general questions, analysis rendered possible by his problematology. Thus, the framework-theory of metaphysics becomes the logic of the interrogatives. Recently, his conception of metaphysics was compared to that of Collingwood.
[edit] Other philosophers
From the multitude of philosophical authors unaffiliated to the previous three currents we can mention here (almost randomly) Vasile Bancila (1897–1979), Ionel Gherea, Anton Dumitriu (1905–1992) and Stéphane Lupasco (1900–1988).
Vasile Bancila wrote two important commentaries on Blaga and Radulescu-Motru, and gave a valuable reply to Blaga’s Mioritical Space, called The Space of Baragan. Blaga’s book maintained that the unconscious category of space which operates in the Romanian stylistic matrix was “the space indefinitely wave-like”, an alternation on ups and downs, as a sinusoid. The name “mioritical” comes from “miorita”, diminutive of sheep, title of a popular ballad relevant for the Romanian mentality. Bancila showed that the Romanian culture does not reflect only one single abyssal category of space, that of Blaga, and he tried to advocate the existence of a “Baragan space” (Baragan is the name of the greatest plain in Romania); a space not determined by the mountain relief, but by the flat plain relief.
Ionel Gherea, son of the noted Marxist sociologist Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, published a book called The I and the World: Essay in Anthropomorphic Cosmogony. This much too neglected work contains a still interesting discussion of the concept of personal identity. The author does an unusual amount of conceptual analysis, although in extremely general lines he is a phenomenologist of Husserlian orientation.
Anton Dumitriu, mathematician by initial formation, obtains a PhD in philosophy and becomes the assistant of P. P. Negulescu. He was among the first philosophers in Romania interested in the philosophy of science, subject he treated in The Philosophical bases of Science. He introduces in Romania the mathematical logic, mostly by his works The New Logic and The Polyvalent Logic, where he presents the Russell-Whitehead axiomatic system of Principia Mathematica, and C.I. Lewis’ system of strict implication. Also, he researched intensively the problem of logical - semantic paradoxes, having the conviction that the solution to them was already available in the works of the Scholastic philosophers.
Stéphane Lupasco, renowned francophone philosopher of science, tried to lay basis of a new epistemology, consonant with the then newly developed quantum mechanics. He advocated a logic of the included third, which conducted him to sustain the existence of third state, beyond matter and energy.
[edit] Communist period
Within the first decade of totalitarianism, the philosophical life consisted in the moral execution of the interbellic philosophers. Lucretiu Patrascanu (1900 – 1954) was the author of a work, Currents and Tendencies in Romanian Philosophy, which will establish for decades the status of the Romanian philosophers. With mostly rudimentary means, with over-simplifications, appealing to the “Marxist-Leninist” doctrine, Patrascanu demolished philosophers as Blaga, Radulescu-Motru, Florian, Cioran and “exposed” them as idealists, irrationalists, mystics, bourgeois, imperialists and sometimes fascists. Among the local pseudo-Marxists a new star emerged quickly, Constantin I. Gulian (b. 1914), still member of the Romanian Academy. Gulian produced at the peak of his career several expositions of the Hegelian philosophy, completely lacking interest. After the first decades, when philosophy was taught in Universities by dentists or illiterate workers turned into professors over night, followed a period when the Stalinist dogma lost much of its sovereign authority.
After 1964, the date of the great amnesty of the political prisoners, the philosophical life could revert to being, partly catalysed by the professional reinsertion of the marginalised interbellic surviving philosophers. Thus, we can distinguish several “schools” of philosophers: the interbellic school, the Paltinis school, the epistemological school of Bucharest. Independent figures existed, of course, mostly as university professors.
[edit] The Interbellic School
The name of “school” is even more inappropriate in this case than it was before, when we spoke of Nae Ionescu’s school or of that of Titu Maiorescu. We speak of the Interbellic school in the same manner in which we speak of “the old school”. The most important philosophers formed in the interbellic period and that could practice again philosophy and remained significantly creative are: Mircea Florian, Constantin Noica, Anton Dumitriu, Mihai Sora (b. 1916), Petre Ţuţea (1902–1991), Alexandru Dragomir (1916–2002).
Mircea Florian wrote in the 1960s in solitude a system of philosophy presented in a two-volume treatise called The Recessivity as the Structure of the World. Florian arrives at the conclusion that experience is characterised by an invariant, the relation of recessivity that holds between two concepts. This relation is neither a relation of opposition, like the contrariety, nor one of concordance, like the subordination. It is a special relation which exhibits features of both types of inter-notional relation acknowledged by logic. It is both a relation of subordination, and a relation of opposition. In a pair of concepts united by this relation, there is one which is hierarchically superior, called the “dominant” concept, and another which, although hierarchically inferior, is ontologically superior, called the “recessive” concept. Florian shows that every important concept of philosophy belongs to a pair which instantiates recessivity. He analysed several dozens of such pairs, writing for each term practically a micro-monograph.
Constantin Noica become during communism, after his release from prison, a continental metaphysician of European dimensions, arguably one of the greatest of the 20th century.
His first book published after detention was 27 Steps of the Real. He unifies here three categorial systems, those of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. Under a Hegelian, but maybe also Hartamannian influence, he thought the reality, divided in three realms, inorganic, organic and spiritual, is characterised by three distinct sets of categories. At the peak of this categorial ladder he put a new category, which reflects the impact that physics had on his thought: the undulation, or the wave, which became thus the supreme category.
He followed later the model of Vulcanescu, and he wrote several books which brought him overnight celebrity, especially in the literary circles. Books as Creation and Beauty in the Romanian Speaking, or The Romanian Feeling of the Being, masterpieces of etymological speculation and philosophical hermeneutics, have though limited value, being of interest only to those researching the Romanian spirituality per se. In these books Noica arrived at the conclusion that the Romanian language possesses a word, a preposition, which mediates a unique access to the realm of being. It is the preposition întru, which expresses the processuality of the being or what he calls „the becoming in-to (întru) the being”. This idiomatic preposition, of Latin provenance (intro) stands for more than a spatial inclusion: it indicates a going on, a movement both toward something, and within that something.
His ontology (more correctly called metaphysics) is edified without idiomatic peculiarities in two later works: The Becoming in-to the Being and Letters on the Logic of Hermes, but it was present since Six Maladies of the Contemporary Spirit. In these works the monolithic unity of being is broken, and being displays three instances. The being of first instance is arrived at phenomenologically. Thus, the being of the things appears as a functional model, the structure Individual – Determinations – General (I-D-G), which the things are striving to realise. But the model of the being is rarely found realised as such; most currently it is incomplete, only two of the three terms being present. Thus, there are six incomplete, unsaturated formations, called by Noica „ontological precariousness” or „maladies of the being (spirit, in Six maladies...) ”. These maladies, schematically represented as I-G, G-I, I-D, D-I, D-G, and G-D, are the rule of the real. The being of second instance is the „element”, characterised as an individual-general, which is an entity that is not a particular, i.e. its conditions of identity do not make reference to a single spatio -temporal location. Something is an individual-general if it distributes itself without dividing. Like the Whiteheadian ingression, the “distribution without dividing” is a rethinking of the Platonic participation. A favourite exemplification of the nature of an element is for Noica the concept of biological species. The elements are characterised by different categories than the things, of a speculative nature, like unity-multiplicity-totality, reality-possibility-necessity. The being of the third instance, or the being qua being, is theorised in several pages of an incredible density, and in a language close to theology. Noica attempts to rethink here the problem of the one and the many, in a Parmenidean – Platonic style. He formulates as a criterion for being the same “distribution without dividing”. Methodologically, Noica is an anti-Hegelian Hegelian. He revises the Hegelian dialectics, accused of being dominated by the “ethos of the neutrality”. In Hegelian logic, he says, Hegel himself must intervene in order to give the concepts the necessary impetus for their movement. They do not have in themselves the power to move dialectically. Noica considers that the dialectics is circular and tetradic. The scheme thesis – antithesis – synthesis is replaced by him with the rival scheme theme – anti-theme – thesis – theme (refound). The spirit, Noica says, begins not with a thesis, but with a thematic horizon in which it moves, and into which it digs repeatedly, going more and more toward the intimacy of this horizon. Several of Noica’s concepts, which permit him to articulate his views on dialectics, are difficult to comprehend and require much sympathy from the reader in order to be accepted: “the non-limiting limitation”, “the opening closure” etc.
Noica’s philosophy is concerned, besides the problem of the being, with the problem of the reason and the problem of the individual. He redefines the reason as “the conscience of the becoming in-to being”. The philosopher wanted to save the individual from “the tyranny of the general”, to give to the individual an “ontological dignity”. He was deeply deranged by the image of the individual as a simple instance of generals, as a simple particular case of a general rule. But he intended also to maintain the reality of the general natures, not wanting to reduce them at mere collections or classes of individuals. Thus, he refused both the Platonic realism, and the nominalism of all kinds. Instead of choosing between nominalism and realism, he proposes a third version, which insists on the solidarity existent between individuals and generals, on the fact that they are linked by their determinations. His triangle I-D-G forms thus an irreducible unity, reminding of Peirce’s triad.
Constantin Noica formed around him an unofficial school of philosophy, based at Păltiniş, a mountain location where he spent his last living years. Paltinis became a place of pilgrimage for the Romanian youth, who went there to search a spiritual mentor. Noica became thus a kind of national institution with an influence unequalled by any other intellectual figure before or after him. He imposed to his disciples the study of Greek and German, and he made them read “cultures”, not authors and certainly not isolated books. He had an effervescent activity of translator, initiating the Plato integral edition in Romanian. He translated also from the neo-Platonic Aristotelian commentators, Dexippus, Ammonius, Porphyry and others. He contributed to the translation of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, and he translated from Chorydaleus, the Introduction to logic and the Commentary to Metaphysics. He himself wrote commentaries and interpretations of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel, and encouraged the introduction of Heidegger in the Romanian culture. He was by far the philosophical sun of this cloudy period of the Romanian cultural evolution.
Anton Dumitriu continued after 1964 his initial preoccupations, publishing in the philosophy of mathematics and in the theory and history of logic. His enormous History of Logic, although a landmark of the Romanian philosophy and of the discipline, suffered by many shortcomings and had a rather bad reception in Occident. Dumitriu included both too much in his history, having chapters on the transcendental and dialectical logic, and too little, not treating many branches of recent logic, or treating them completely sketchy and insufficiently, like in the case of the modal logic. Also, he was many times misinformed in what concerns the Scholastic philosophy. However, there are many parts of this work that are still valuable today.
Anton Dumitriu wrote also a series of essays, more literary in style, which made him well agreed by the literature-centred Romanian intellectuality. Thus, he published Philosophia Mirabilis, an essay on the esoteric dimension of the Greek philosophy, Eleatic Cultures and Heracleitean Cultures, a comparative essay in the philosophy of culture, or Aletheia, a study of the Greek meaning of truth and of philosophy, where he criticises Heidegger’s position from Introduction to Metaphysics.
Mihai Sora was a student of Nae Ionescu and Mircea Eliade, but younger than the members of the ’27 generation. He obtained in 1938 a bourse at the Sorbonne, where he went for preparing a thesis on Pascal. During war time he wrote a book called On the Interior Dialogue, published only in 1947 at Gallimard, and well received by Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson. In this work Sora explores the problem of human authenticity, in an existential tone, but influenced greatly by the Scholastic philosophy (notably that of Thomas Aquinas and Nicolaus Cusanus) and by Marxism (he was a member of the French communist party and a fighter in the Résistance).
In 1948 he returned to Romania, and he will be not allowed to live the country anymore. He did not publish anything until the end of the 70s, when he began a cycle of four books, containing a philosophical system, achieved only in 2005. During communist regime he wrote and published three of the four books composing the cycle: The Salt of the Earth, To be, the do, to have and I & You & He & She or the Generalised Dialogue. His last book is called The Instant and the Time.
His system contains an ontology, a poetics, an ethics and a political philosophy, all deriving from an original “ontological model”. The influences come from Péguy, Pascal, the Scholastics and from Husserl. Sora considered himself ever since his first book a “Cartesian of the utmost consequence”, i.e. a phenomenologist.
His concept of intentionality, crucial for the comprehension of his philosophy, was neither that of Brentano, nor that of Husserl, but an original one with deep roots in the Scholastic philosophy. In-tentio, derived from IN aliud TENDERE is the penetrating act of the spirit, which goes beyond the things into their origin, which is the Unum with his three transcendentals: Bonum, Verum and Pulchrum. Thus, we have three forms of intentionality, moral, theoretical and esthetical, characterising three types of human attitudes toward the world. The Unum is not viewed only as an actus purus, but rather as an “universal potentiality of being”. As such, ie is placed, in Sora’s metaphorical model, at the centre of a sphere of null radius, which has, thus, the same topos as the periphery. The surface of this sphere represents the pure exteriority, composed of “terminal actualities”. The radius is the geometrical locus of the interiority, where we find the “intermediary potentialities”.
Mihai Sora is the mentor of another “school”, more discrete and heterogeneous than the school of Noica, and there is currently an increasing interest in his work, especially from the young philosophers grouped around the Studia Phaenomonologica philosophical review.
Petre Ţuţea had a PhD in Administrative Law. Before and during the Second World War he worked as a director in the Ministry of National Economy, and was known and appreciated by all members of the ’27 generation as one of their own, even though he was a little older. He widely gained the reputation of a rhetorical genius, when he spoke everybody stood and listened. Some even considered him the "leader of our generation". Initially having youthful Marxist convictions, he developed rightist sympathies, that would later lead to his arrest and conviction. In prison he rediscovered Christianity, and after his release he considered himself a Christian philosopher.
Although due to his political antecedents and uncompromising content of philosophical convictions Ţuţea could not publish very much, he wrote a considerable amount, including a work projected in five volumes, "Problems, Systems, Styles, Sciences" and "Dogmas". He completed the first two, and a small part of "Styles" and "Dogmas" - some of which were published posthumously. "The Philosophy of the Nuances" is also an important essay, more like a manifesto for a new philosophy, dating back to 1969. Ţuţea was influenced by a whole plethora of intellectual personalities, but mostly by Plato, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Bergson, Simmel and the fictionalism of Hans Vaihinger. Theologically, he was under the sway of St. Thomas Aquinas and of St. Paul. He also admired thinkers like Werner Sombart.
Initially Ţuţea rejected the categories of Western idealism, replacing the kantian conceptual framework with a spectrum of empirical-phenomenological nuances. His later philosophy, as he declares, is an effort of "theologal" (not theological) thinking. He argues that Truth is unique, but human reason cannot find it by itself, although it can be a receptacle of truth. Thus, in order to really know the truth, man needs inspiration and revelation. Man is not autonomous, and all intellectual efforts like science or philosophy are only means of producing fictions, at the level of material and cultural comfort. Ţuţea believed that science and philosophy don’t even have a consoling function, being essentially irrelevant with respect to the most dramatic problems of man, like death. Thus, only religion (specifically, Christianity) possesses the truth and bears relevance to the destiny of men. Without it, he says, man is "a rational animal that comes from nowhere and doesn't go anywhere". Anthropologically, Ţuţea analyzed what he calls "Christian man". The anthropological model to be pursued is that of the saint.
Tutea was undoubtedly an unusual, Socratic figure, and his writing style is peculiar. The wide Romanian public came to know his personality only after 1989, when several interviews of Tutea were broadcast on TV. He was surrounded by disciples who multiplied his writings, and neighbours usually called him "Professor", although as he liked to say, his "chair" was under the blue sky, in Cismigiu, a central park in Bucharest close to his studio apartment. Several of his close friends and disciples such as Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Petre Pandrea, Aurel-Dragos Munteanu and Marcel Petrisor are also accomplished philosophers and writers.
Alexandru Dragomir is a late discovery for the Romanian public. He was a former doctoral student of Heidegger, who wrote secretly and never published anything. In his old days he began giving private seminaries, which he carried on until his recent death, where he accepted a very narrow group of intellectuals. After his death several manuscripts were found, proving that Dragomir was a phenomenologist of great class. Among this manuscripts, whose publication is not finished, there are several notebooks filled out with reflections on time, which form the most consistent part of his thought. The influence of Dragomir on the Romanian philosophy is still to come. For the time being, Studia Phaenomenologica dedicated one of its numbers to this philosopher.
[edit] The School of Paltinis
Constantin Noica was in a continuous search for the gifted young philosophers, which he discovered and trained. Among these (at the time being) young men, there are several which imposed themselves in the philosophical and literary, or rather literary-philosophical Romanian environment. Such are Gabriel Liiceanu (b. 1942), Andrei Plesu (b. 1948), Sorin Vieru (b. 1933), Andrei Cornea (b. 1952), Vasile Dem. Zamfirescu, Alexandru Surdu (b. 1938) and Corneliu Mircea.
Gabriel Liiceanu grew to prominence when he published The Păltiniş Diary, the intellectual diary of his paideic adventure under Noica's guidance. It was also the book that transformed Noica into a star. The Diary is perhaps the most influent Romanian philosophical book of the 20th century, provoking the endless pilgrimage of the youth to Păltiniş, and determining even now the young to study ancient Greek, Latin, German, in order to begin the serious study of the philosophy. The philosophical project of Liiceanu focused on the idea of “limit”, and he called his inquiry into the nature and history of this concept “peratology” (from the Greek peras = limit). His program was realised in a first phase in The Tragic. A Phenomenology of Limit and Overcoming, his PhD thesis, where he lays much accent on Nietzsche, and accomplished in On Limit, the final and general expression of his peratology. On Limit treats of liberty, destiny, responsibility, encounter with the other, in a framework basically Heideggerian. It was Liiceanu who initiated and supported the translation of Heidegger into Romanian.
Andrei Plesu remarked himself as an art historian, but also as a subtle philosopher. He was more interested in the “light” philosophy, as he had a “respectful antipathy” towards Aristotle and considered that he had absolutely no use for Hegel. He oriented himself toward ethics and the philosophy of religion. His focal idea is that of the “interval”, as a space of itinerancy. Plesu wrote one of the very few Romanian treatises of ethics, Minima Moralia, which is an ethics of the interval. It begins by affirming that only the man in the condition of itinerancy has moral competence, only him needing to make choices at every step of the way. Thus, his ethics is not one of the great problems and puzzles, but an ethics of the quotidian life and of ordinary situations. Further on, he explored the theme of the interval in his On Angels, a book of angelology, arising at the intersection between metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. In this book, the entities called angels are analysed as a cases of “beings of the interval”. The entire exercise has thus the secondary value of ontology of the interval.
Sorin Vieru is one of the few Păltiniş logicians. He established his reputation by his researches on the classical syllogistic, which he axiomatised. He was also a specialist in Frege, from whom he translated abundantly. His interests covered also the Greek philosophy, mostly Plato’s political philosophy. He translated several of Plato’s most difficult dialogues. Finally, he published an essay on The Risk of Thinking, in collaboration with the mathematician Uther Morgenstern, alias Terente Robert.
Andrei Cornea is a specialist in the ancient Greek philosophy and also a political thinker. During the communist regime he published little in the domain of philosophy, but he translated Plato's Republic. After 1989 he published intensively. Thus, we can cite his interpretation to Plato from Plato. Philosophy and Censorship, his interesting rehabilitation of the points of view sophistically rejected by Plato’s Socrates from When Socrates is not Right, or his proposing of replacing the concept of utopia with that of ek-topia, as opposed to en-topia, in From the School of Athens to the School of Paltinis. But perhaps his most important contribution is the valuable critique of contemporary relativism from The Khazar Tourney. He translated Aristotle’s Metaphysics and a great part of Plotinus’s Enneads.
Vasile Dem. Zamfirescu’s main interests are in psychoanalysis. Therefore, his philosophy bears the marks of these interests. He wrote a book on The Logic of the Heart and the Logic of the Mind, well liked by Noica, and after 1989 he published his Philosophy of the Unconscious (2 volumes), exploring the philosophical potential of the psychoanalytical idea of unconscious.
Alexandru Surdu was one of the earliest collaborators on Noica, but in a great measure independent. He specialised initially in logic, publishing books on Intuitionism and Intuitionist logic. He also studied the Aristotelian logic, thus arriving to his The Theory of Pre-judicative Forms, a rethinking of the categories with the means of formal logic. After 1989 he published on the Romanian philosophy and speculative philosophy. Notable volumes are The Pentamorphosis of the Art and The Speculative Philosophy. Alexandru Surdu is, like Noica, an anti-Hegelian Hegelian. Thus, he criticises Hegel for his “absolutisation” of triadic dialectics, he criticises also Noica for absolutising the tetradic dialectics, while proposing his version of a pentadic dialectics. He maintains, though, that diverse experiential realms are to be investigated by diverse dialectics, binary, triadic, tetradic or pentadic. His philosophy continues the long-time discredited epistemology of the faculties, which he complicates by speaking of five faculties of thinking. Thus, we have: intellect, rational intellect, reason, speculative reason, and speculation. The categories of the systematic philosophy, as determined by Surdu, are also five: Transcendence/Subsistence, Being, Existence, Real Existence, and Reality. Surdu was one of the translators of Wittgenstein's Tractatus into Romanian and he translated also from Kant.
Corneliu Mircea is a psychiatrist and also a philosopher, encouraged by Noica, but not actually one of his disciples. Still, his interests, themes, and style, places him in the Păltiniş circle, where he paid visits regularly. He published quite consistently. During communism he gave, among other publications, The Book of Being, Being and Consciousness, Discourse on Being, and after 1989 he published (among other things) The Originary, Being and Ek-stasis, The Making. A Treatise on Being. Influenced by Hegel and by Sartre, his philosophy is an inquiry into the meaning of being, commencing with the nothingness, in an attempt of rethinking both Hegel's Logic and Sartre's Being and Nothingness. He cultivates a deliberate literary expression, maintaining that the philosophical discourse must have two sides, one conceptually objective, the other subjective, esthetical, persuasive. Lately, Corneliu Mircea seems close to a certain form of mystical philosophy of the revelation.
[edit] The Epistemological School of Bucharest
Following the examples of Anton Dumitriu, Grigore Moisil or Octav Onicescu, several teachers at the University of Bucharest oriented themselves toward epistemology and the philosophy of science, where the ideological control and interference did not exist. After the demise of the communism, they continued their preoccupations, but they wrote also on other subjects. The protagonists of this school were Mircea Flonta (b. 1932), Ilie Parvu (b. 1941), Vasile Tonoiu (b. 1941), and Marin Turlea (b. 1940).
Mircea Flonta wrote a valuable monograph on the theme of the analytic/synthetic distinction in contemporary philosophy, and a study on the Philosophical Presuppositions of the Exact Sciences. He can be considered the first analytical philosopher in Romania, understanding philosophy as a critical study of presuppositions. His activity continued after 1989 and diversified, as he approached such themes as the perception of the philosophy in the Romanian culture.
Ilie Parvu is an epistemologist, philosopher of science, metaphysician and interpreter of Kant.
His Introduction to Epistemology was the first book of this kind who had a European level, after the period in which the only epistemology was the Marxist-Leninist one. It is still the best autochthon introduction available. His studies in the philosophy of science (The Scientific Theory, The Semantics and the Logic of Science) laid accent mostly on the contemporary formal instruments of analysis of the scientific theories. Parvu can be considered as belonging to the structuralist current in the philosophy of science, following Joseph D. Sneed, J. Stegmüller, C.U. Moulines, W. Balzer etc.
The structuralist analysis of theories was applied by Ilie Parvu in the domain of the reconstruction of some crucial philosophical works, like the Tractatus of Wittgenstein or the Critique of Pure Reason.
As a metaphysician, Parvu published the two-volume The Architecture of Existence. In the first volume he analyses the structural-generative paradigm in ontology. He conceives of an ontological theory as having an abstract-structural nucleus, which generates its applications not by direct instantiation, but by restrictions and specialisations of this nucleus, which evolves at the same time with the application. Professor Parvu analysed also the theories capable of furnishing decisive mediations between the structural abstraction of the nucleus and the world of empiric evidence. In the second volume he analysed the contemporary analytic metaphysics, the great ontological contemporary constructive programs, as that of Carnap or Quine, as well as diverse local metaphysics, like that of dispositions, powers, the ontologies of events, and different theories of the individual. He presented also important discussions concerning the metaontology, constructional apparatus, style and techniques in recent metaphysics.
Vasile Tonoiu was interested mostly in continental philosophy of science, translating Poincaré, Gonseth, Bachelard, and writing monographs on Gonseth and Bachelard. He also published a book on Morin’s epistemological vision of complexity. Another chief interest of Tonoiu’s is the dialogic philosophy, or the philosophy of the dialogue. He wrote also an excellent book on Mircea Eliade, Archaic Ontologies in Actuality.
Marin Turlea dedicated his career to the philosophy of mathematics. His work on The Philosophy and the Fundaments of the Mathematics traces a distinction between the foundational and the foundationist research in mathematics, i.e. between the mathematics’ own research on its foundations, and the philosophical research of the fundaments of the mathematics. He establishes thus the possibilities, sphere of action and relevance of the philosophical study of mathematics. Following the lines of the program indicated in this first work, Turlea will elaborate a Philosophy of Mathematics, more like a history of the philosophical problems connected with the mathematics, from Plato and Proclus to Principa Mathematica. He will analyse the metaphysics of mathematical entities in his Existence and Truth in Mathematics, and he will study Wittgenstein’s philosophy (or rather anti-philosophy) of mathematics.
[edit] The Marxism
In Romania Marxism did not produce any great name. Within the mass of ideologists with philosophical pretensions, several figures detach though as honest philosophers.
This is the case of Athanase Joja (1904 – 1972), logician and interpret of the ancient philosophy, with contributions to Marxist “dialectical logic”. He founded the Romanian Academy’s Institute of Logic, where many interbellic philosophers, including Noica, were reinserted professionally.
Another Marxist figure was Henry Wald (1920 - 2002), whose thinking was a mixture of French Structuralism and Marxism, and who wrote also an Introduction to the Dialectical Logic.
Ion Ianosi (b. 1928) is a Marxist philosopher from a higher class, very close to literature, being for many years the secretary of the literary critique section of the Union of the Writers from Romania. He published a trilogy on the esthetical category of the sublime, a volume on Hegel and the Art and many others, among which a study of the Romanian philosophy in its rapport with the literature, Philosophy and Literature.
[edit] Post-communist period
After the Revolution from 1989, the philosophy in Romania began rapidly to synchronize with the Western contemporary philosophy.
Thus, the phenomenology is represented especially by two groups, one from Cluj, with Virgil Ciomos and Ion Copoeru as main characters, the other from Bucharest, developed as a consequence of Liiceanu’s influene. This later group includes the editors of Studia Phaenomenologica, Cristian Ciocan and Gabriel Cercel, and the Heideggeriens like Catalin Cioaba or Bogdan Minca. Virgil Ciomos published phenomenological interpretations of Aristotle and Kant, while Copoeru is a Husserlian scholar. Catalin Cioaba is for the time being the most important Heideggerian Scholar in Romania.
The post-modernism in Romanian philosophy has as recent notable exponents Ciprian Mihali and Bogdan Ghiu. Although Mihali is interested in the phenomenological analysis of the quotidian, his thinking is deeply rooted in the French post-Structuralism. Ghiu, through his translations and essays was also a very important diffuser of the post-modern French philosophy in Romania.
The analytic philosophy is developed mostly at the University of Bucharest, by such names as Mircea Dumitru, Adrian-Paul Iliescu, Valentin Muresan, Mihail-Radu Solcan. Mircea Dumitru wrote on philosophical logic, the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. Iliescu is a political philosopher (liberalism and conservatism), but also has interests in the philosophy of language, publishing a book on Wittgenstein. Valentin Muresan works in the field of ethics, cultivating the philosophical commentary. He published commentaries of Plato, Aristotle, and Mill. Professor Solcan contributed to the development of the philosophy of mind in Romania, publishing an introduction to the philosophy of mind form the perspective of the cognitive sciences.
A philosopher intellectually affiliated to the interbellic tradition, very close to the members of the Paltinis school, is Horia-Roman Patapievici. He was saluted by Liiceanu as a “Romanian Kierkegaard” for his first published essays. His most ambitious realisation is a treatise on The Recent Man, or What is lost when Something is won. In this book of political philosophy Patapievici develops a conservative critique of the modernity, vast and of unequal pertinence, but making him however the most important Romanian conservative thinker of today.
Finally, many university philosophers, exponents of a style rather continental, continue the interbellic tradition of the Jack-of-all-trades philosophers, producing mostly works of history of the philosophy and of philosophical hermeneutics.
[edit] Bibliography
- Bagdasar, Nicolae - Istoria filosofiei româneşti, Bucureşti: Societatea Română de Filosofie, 1940
- Ianosi, Ion - O istorie a filosofiei româneşti în raport cu literatura, Cluj: Apostrof, 1997
- Marta Petreu, Mircea Flonta, Ioan Lucian Muntean, “Romania, philosophy in”, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2004
