METAPHYSICS IN A NUTSHELL – A ROMANIAN VIEW
METAPHYSICS IN A NUTSHELL – A ROMANIAN VIEW

Summary/Abstract: The early philosophical works written by Professor Dumitru Isac were focused mainly on the so-called „critical spirit”. By this syntagm, Prof. Isac meant to express philosophically what would be essential in Kant’s criticism, once featured in the famous Critiques of the magister in Königsberg and subsequently detailed by his philosophical posterity. But being essentially an inquiry and a search for the truth, for the value as well as for the certainty of knowledge, the range of critical spirit is much wider than Kant’s metaphysics itself. The modern beginning of the spirit of criticism could be located in Descartes’ masterwork Discourse de la méthode. Since then, it had a huge impact on the philosophical methodology, imposing a specific style of thinking on every established philosopher. Therefore, Dumitru Isac considered that such a conceptual framework allows a specific philosophical reading: instead of a linear approach of individual metaphysical innovations, seen as a big plain “line” of individual systems of thinking, being historically isolated from one another, it would rather be useful to analyse and evaluate all of them as “steps” of coherent development in the spirit of criticism. Therefore, through his early writings, whose climax remains the book Cunoaștere și Transcendență [Knowledge and Transcendence] (1943), D. Isac sketches an original metaphysical draft, from the standpoint of a holistic “conciliation” and “mix” of the two major trends recognizable over the entire history of philosophy: metaphysical/ ontological realism and epistemological idealism/ transcendentalism.

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