Profile of an East-European Thinker. Dimitrie Cantemir's Humanism

Abstract

The work of Dimitrie Cantemir (1673-1723), though of an exceptional amplitude, is (still!) almost unknown today. Unknown to the European culture, unknown even to the Romanian culture in which he originates, at least as a pattern. A prince and a musicologist, an encyclopaedist and a historian, a composer and musicologist and a linguist as well, an ethnographer and philosopher at the same time, Cantemir is one of the most significant intellectual figures of late 17th-early 18th century Europe.The present study aims to reveal a part of his philosophical thinking, which places him, on the one hand, in the thick of humanism, and, on the other, in early Enlightenment. Cantemir's philosophical thinking is a unique form of combining oriental and western thinking, logico-rational thinking and the esoteric one, it is, in fact, one of the first ways of manifestation of what we would later call: universal spirit.