Problema minte–corp la elevii lui Ion Zalomit
The mind–body problem in the works of Ion Zalomit’s disciples

Summary/Abstract: Ion Zalomit (1820/23–1885, PhD Berlin, 1848) was a professor of philosophy at the Saint Sava College and later at the University of Bucharest, Rector of the latter for 14 years, and a high State official, member and sometime vice-president of the Permanent Council of Public Instruction. He was influential in synchronizing Romanian academic philosophy with the French academic philosophy, which was by then dominated by Victor Cousin and the members of his eclectic spiritualist school. A disciple of Schelling himself and possibly of Krause, Zalomit formed his students in the spirit of a liberal and spiritualist eclecticism, with rational psychology as a foundational discipline. This psychology, maintaining the soul’s substantiality, simplicity, immateriality and spiritual character as well as the existence of the soul’s several “faculties” centred around the will, provided a general basis on which the Romanian philosophers of the 1870’s built their psychological doctrines, or against which they reacted. Two of Zalomit’s students, D. A. Laurian (1846–1906, B.A. Bucharest, 1868, Ph.D. Bruxelles, 1871) and C. Leonardescu (1844–1907, B.A. Bucharest, 1868, Ph.D. Bruxelles, 1872), contributed to psychological literature with studies and textbooks in which the joint influence of French spiritualism and Belgian Krausism was manifest. While remaining broadly spiritualistic dualists, they proposed a form of psycho-physiological parallelism as a solution to the mind–body problem, insisting on the contrast of mind and body, cohering by reason of their very harmonic contrast, rooted in a deeper essential unity. The following paper tells in some detail the story sketched above.

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