Volume 13 (2017)

Transcendo has two etymological explanations: trans + scando, meaning “going beyond something”, and trans + ascension, which means “climbing over”. Both meanings of passage, “beyond” and “over”, are maintained in the Romanian sense of the verb “to transcend”, the strongest of them being “beyond”. With this distinction in mind, the present text seeks to review some of the most relevant theories of transcendence in the contemporary philosophy.

The paper argues that a functional moment is involved in the way how Lucian Blaga understands the religious dogma. It is shown that this moment exists also in some of the recent results of the scientific research, such as the acknowledgment of the dual character of light or of the so-called quantum entanglement. This functional moment is explained through what Imm. Kant called function of understanding, which allows the theoretical possibility of using our categories beyond any relationship to sensibility and imagination.

There is a connection between certain commune prejudices and different philosophical judgments about the transcendence. Starting from an analysis of the structure of judgment with the transcendence as subject (with some examples about mentioned connection), going on to an interpretation of judicative or non-judicative origin of different elements from this structure, the author reveals by turn: the ontology of judgment regarding the transcendence, the relation between transcendence and non-judicative experience, and the meontology of judgments concerning the transcendence. In the philosophical judgments regarding the transcendence, the philosophers attempt to de-constitute the common prejudices about the same term: this is the conclusion of
paper.

This study aims at analysing the issue of transcendence from the perspective of the critical realism of Dumitru Isac. The research of the results obtained by the systematic philosophy („metaphysics”) along the historical eras has constituted the constant preoccupation of the young writings of Dumitru Isac (1914–1984). Starting with his notes in The Journal of Ideas and the articles published during the period 1936–1945, these culminate with the work Knowledge and Transcendence (1943). The last work published by D. Isac on this theme, inspired by the philosophical conception of Mircea Florian, bears the title of Critical realism – Philosophical synthesis (1946). Author’s convictions are situated at the crossroads of the gnoseological idealism (transcendentalism) with the metaphysical (ontological) realism – synthesis appreciated as desirable and achievable by the future metaphysics. Our study represents a continuation of the interpretation of D. Isac main works from the perspective of the non-symbolic phenomenology, which uncovers their spiritual consonance with the transcendental phenomenology and the fundamental ontology.

The following study tackles the possibility of rethinking Lucian Blaga’s concept of transcendence from a meontological point of view. In this purpose, we will analyze the transcendence of the concepts of “mystery” and “the Great Anonymous” and the mechanisms through which the transcendence remains unknowable to human cognition and unimaginable to human creativity. In this way, the two main meanings of transcendence which the philosopher attributes to phenomena in the domains of theoretical knowledge and cultural-artistic creation gain a common ground as meontological hypostasis of the same fundamental manifestation of nothingness.

In this paper, we will be discussing the concept of alterity and the concept of transcendence in the view of two philosophers, Constantin Noica and Edmund Husserl. Being given the fact that both Noica and Husserl are influenced by the German idealism, our purpose becomes to explore the similarities between their philosophies, concerning the notion of transcendence. At his turn, alterity is discussed as being related to transcendence. Firstly, we will follow the occurrences of this notion in Noica’s ontology. Secondly, we will be focusing on the description of transcendence in Husserl’s intersubjectivity and Noica’s thematic dialectics to see the points they seem to converge.

My aim in this paper is to try to offer an exercise of comparative philosophy: I compare Whitehead’s metaphysics proposed in Process and Reality with Noica’s metaphysical project developed in The Becoming within Being. I also try to test Noica’s ontological model with the help of some scientific ideas, first of all, that of irreversibility. I suggest that the two philosophers developed a new model of Being and that Noica’s new concepts, like ontological precarities or becomance (translation proposed by Alistair Ian Blyth for “deveninţă”), offered new insights into metaphysics.

The main aim of this article is to examine the reception of Descartes’ Metaphysical Meditations, as forms of spiritual exercises, in the sense proposed by Ignacio de Loyola, Foucault and McGushin, in the field of the Romanian philosophy. My thesis is that this reading is possible in Constantin Noica’s work, Sketch for the history of how is it that there is anything new (Schiţă pentru istoria lui cum e cu putinţă ceva nou) in which meditations are addressed as practices of disciplining the activity of the intellect and avoiding its “laziness”, synthesized as life of the spirit, by applying the Cartesian principle ne ratio nostra finietur, that I will largely expose among this paper. The working-hypothesis is that Noica finds a proper answer for the question “how is possible for our intellect to create something new?” in Descartes’ Meditations, criticising the French philosopher’s theory on innate ideas and arguing that it provides an explanation exclusively for how is possible for a subject to get to know what is unknown. Therefore, the intellectual creation and not achievement of something now, in the terms of the so-called “logic of invention”, remains a consistent problem. In the first part of my article, I will sustain my arguments against Noica’s position, based on the assumption that these two aspects – the unknown and the invention – are part of the life of the spirit, in which the new is possible only through meditations and becomes the result of what Descartes recognized as cogitationes privatae. In the second part of my research I will apply the test of “the opened concepts”, following Noica’s terminology, in order to analyse the determinations that terms such as “new”, “innate”, “ready-made judgments” and “possibility” have in the larger context of keeping the exigencies of meditation as form of spirituality in the project of early-modern rationalism.

Epistemology is supposed to explain how science works in theory as well as in practice. But a discipline which reflects on the way science works also reflects on the status of science as a part of culture, i.e. it implicitly handles the question whether science is or is not more rational and efficient than other areas of culture such as myths, religious systems, the arts or the human sciences. The following article can be broken down into two main parts. In the first part (section I), I argue that epistemological theories can be exploited ideologically according to the way they relate to science and that many popular epistemologists of the 20th century (such as Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos or Feyerabend) tend to subvert the idea of science as a rational, self-contained enterprise. Although these theories do not damage the reputation of science in my opinion, they are subversive in that they help weaken the claim that science should be deemed the most rational form of knowledge at man’s disposal. In the second part of the article (sections II and III) I will present a special form of epistemological subversion, one that recognizes knowledge itself as a violent act (i.e. as a potential threat to nature), thus taking into account „nature’s point of view” as well. This type of subversion can be found in the views of science put forward by poets such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe or Lucian Blaga. In the synopsis, I bring together the aspects discussed in all three sections, emphasizing the idea that every epistemological theory implicitly deals with the fears which may derive from the domination of science over other forms of knowledge.

This article is devoted to the aim of reconstructing Blaga`s metaphysics, through a critical inquiry based on five personal and original thesis: (1) The reconstruction of metaphysics is the direct consequence of the characteristics that a philosophical discourse has, as well as of its importance for human knowledge, (2) The reconstruction of metaphysics is exclusively a meta-theoretical process, (3) The reconstruction has a double theoretical founding: an ontological, respectively, an anthropological one, (4) The reconstruction of metaphysics has, as metodological principle, the transfigured antinomy, (5) This methodological content inspires, in fact, a new model of logic.

The paper presents the historical context of the development of the Slavonic literature in the Romanian Principalities, the main types of Slavonic writings that circulated in the 14th–16th century in Moldavia and Wallachia, and the philosophical content of these writings. Then, the most important writing from the Slavonic-Romanian period, The Teachings of Prince Neagoe Basarab, to his son Prince Theodosie (preserved entirely in a 16th-century Romanian translation) is presented.

The paper will present the historical and cultural context of the usage of the Greek language in medieval Romanian Principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia, until the emergence of higher education in Greek and teaching philosophy in Greek.