Bogdan Rusu

In imperial Transylvania, the Hungarian professors of philosophy served as models for the Romanian proponents of philosophy. Due to the official catholic hostility to Kant, Márton Istvan promoted the philosophy of Krug, of which he edited and translated a compendium into Latin. Krug was not a genuine Kantian, but an eclectic post-Kantian, in­fluenced by Reinhold, Fichte, and Schelling. His metaphilosophy influenced a whole genera­tion of Hungarian thinkers, most of them eclectics, who forged along its lines a broad con­cept of “critical philosophy”, of which Kantianism was supposed to be just a species among others. “Critical philosophy” became the name of a new brand of eclecticism, integrating common­sensism, the main theses of the old ontotheological metaphysics, and elements of Kantian doctrine in diverse proportions. The Transylvanian Romanian teachers of philoso­phy imitated the example of their Hungarian models, went to Krug’s texts, either in Latin or in German, translated them to the purpose of using them in their lectures, and sometimes published their translations. The first centre of diffusion of Krug’s critical philosophy was the Blaj Gymna­sium, at the end of the 1820s. Krug’s philosophy reached Bucharest in the 1840s, through a graduate of Cluj Piarist Lyceum, and eventually Jassy, through a former Blaj teacher, in the second half of the 1850s, where it was taught until the end of the 1870s. Despite this relatively wide diffusion, Krug’s critical philosophy was far from having on Romanians the same kind of impact it had on Hungarians. It left virtually no traces on the Romanian culture, with the exception of a political manifesto by Simeon Bărnuț (1842) and, most importantly, it was inef­fec­tive in generating interest in Kant’s philosophy. Thus it can­not be said, as the accepted narrative holds, that the diffusion of Krug’s works in Romanian marks a moment of the reception of Kant in Romania.

The aim of this paper is to present Peirce’s semiotics as an important factor in the genesis of Alfred North Whitehead’s doctrine of symbolism. I argue that Peirce had a direct impact on Whitehead’s earliest reflections on symbolism generally and mathematical symbolism particularly. From his first encounter with Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic doctrine, contrasted to that of George F. Stout, Whitehead derived a general doctrine of signs which he never abandoned and which formed the basis of his mature doctrine of symbolism. While in the first years of his Harvard professorship, Whitehead suffered a second, indirect, influence from Peirce, through the American philosophers he interacted with. His mature philosophy of perception is both the development and application of the doctrine derived from Peirce and Stout thirty years before, and a reply to the realist doctrines which stressed the symbolic nature of perceptual knowledge, most importantly Santayana’s. Whitehead’s own brand of realism rests on the assumption of a pansemiotic principle, obscurely and mediately derived from Peirce.

Constantin Leonardescu (1844–1907) was a professor of philosophy for 34 years at the University of Iași. He was an adept of the French eclectic spiritualism, which he tried to reconcile with the positivism of Herbert Spencer and with the Darwinism of Ernst Haeckel, while countering Vasile Conta’s brand of scientific materialism. Leonardescu argued against the positivist tenet of the incompatibility of metaphysics and positive science, based on the emergence of new “partial” or “local” metaphysics in the thought of contemporary genuine scientists, who philosophized disregarding the former metaphysical tradition, using only the concepts of their own disciplines and forging their own principles. Positive metaphysics exists thus potentially, the metaphysician’s task being to systematize, or to “reconcile” the local contributions of the scientists-philosophers in the framework of a general, unifying theory. This framework, he argues, is a generalization of “Darwinism”, that is, of the special metaphysics initiated by Darwin, then rendered general by Spencer and most importantly by Haeckel. However, philosophical Darwinism or “evolutionary monism” curiously vindicates, in Leonardescu’s view, traditional spiritualism. Generalized Darwinism thus interpreted offered a fundamental theory in which science could achieve systematic unity and become a true mirror of the Totality, which is metaphysics’ true object. Scientific metaphysics is principally a reflection upon science, taking as starting point the positive facts recognized as such by the sciences, and the empirical generalizations validated within each science, and aiming to ensure logical coherence amongst them, under the rule of the supreme evolution-principle.

In this article I trace back Whitehead's concept of feeling to its psychological sources. I argue that Whitehead's way of conceiving feeling was made possible by the works of British psychologists-philosophers, most importantly G. F. Stout. The latter's Analytic Psychology, a work of great authority read by Whitehead very early, contains the conceptual resources Whitehead needed to elaborate his concept of feeling as immediate experience, in partial contrast to the similar concept proposed by F. H. Bradley. I suggest that Bradley, Stout, and other prominent representatives of British philosophy-psychology are more relevant to understanding the genesis of Whitehead's ideas than William James and his followers.

The aim of this historically oriented article is to give an account of the methodological similarity of Whitehead and Russell with regard to the logico-mathematicalmode of philosophical analysis, and of Whitehead and Moore with regard to common sense. According to the authors, these similarities, especially when taken together, justify the classification of Whitehead as an analytic philosopher. Because of the doctrinal uniqueness of Whitehead, however, they also hold that he will always remain an atypical analytic philosopher.