An Aristotelian School in Romania

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to trace Aris-totle's presence within Philosophy as a sufficient argument for the existence of an established School.At a first glance, such an investigation should be risk-free. It could simply mean re-sorting to counting the term Aristotelian in the corpus of Philosophy and re-transiting the routes of the conceptual context of However, the limitations of such a quantitative investigation do present a real problem. If we refer to a philosophical school in general (or, as in our case, to the School), then there are diversities of meanings concerning this term. But if we refer to a philosophical school in a specific or technical meaning (for example as the phenomenological school of Freiburg or the French school of structuralism), then we have only one answer to my question: there is no real School. There-fore, my argument seems to have been exhausted even before I approached it.Nevertheless, I am interested in understand-ing whether the School has an existence or it is rather not present under specified conditions. I will proceed by ex-plaining what I understand by Aris-totelian School. My prerequisites have already been formulated by Gabriel Liiceanu in a pub-lic presentation (which has not been published, as far as I know) titled Why we do not have a history of philosophy.' First, we can talk about a philosophical school if sev-eral thinkers (with scientific expertise in the field), researching the same idea or topic or (e.g., Aristotle in our case), up and hand on the torch in a roundabout of the same thinking. By applying this definition to philosophy, Liiceanu concludes that Romanian philosophers do not think on a unique problem and they do not pass it on to further generations. Each of them is the tribu-tary of his readings made abroad and each of them is an epigone of other Western epigones. He gives as examples Vasile Conta, Constantin Ra dulescu Motru, Petre P. Negulescu, and Lucien Blaga, but we can give other examples such as Aram Frenkian, § tefan Bezdechi, and Athanase Joja.Certainly, these statements are rather radi-cal. However, they seriously question any kind of justification of a specifically tra-dition of philosophy. If we are to keep in mind all these issues, then we probably should limit ourselves to a simple quantitative research. In the end, however, such a quantitative research would lead to a diversity of opinions without reaching a unitary view. But the topic of this essay can delimitate and organize a corpus of texts, beyond all variations of personal opin-ions, even if indirectly rather than frontally ap-proached. We can assert that there is a sum of shared perspectives on the philosophy of Aris-totle in culture. Considering this, I will focus on discovering these perspectives, although they are not regarded as a philosophi-cal school in a technical sense. It is by search-ing the shared perspectives on the philosophy of Aristotle in the culture rather than by proving the existence of an Aristote-lian School of Thought on the territory that this theme can be tackled and divided as follows:Highlighting Aristotelianism in the Space: Seventeenth-Eighteenth CenturiesHighlighting Aristotelianism in the Roma-nian space is an extremely controversial prob-lem and, unfortunately, insufficiently studied so far. The main reason for this is that Roma-nian space has been exposed, over the centu-ries, to a variety of influences (Slavonic, Greek, French, German, Russian)-both cul-tural and linguistic, but also political and reli-gious. I must therefore highlight the fact that my essay will not take in account Aristotelian-ism as practiced in religious or monastic spaces; I will strictly focus on Aristotelianism practiced in secular environments. …