Nicolae Bagdasar

Nicolae Bagdasar (February 5, 1896–April 21, 1971) was a Romanian philosopher.

Biography

Early life and education

Born in Roșiești, Vaslui County, his parents were Iancu Bagdasar and his wife Smaranda (née Aftenie). Another six siblings were born after him, and his mother died giving birth to her twelfth child, in 1911. His parents were affluent peasants at the top of village society; his father served five consecutive terms as mayor, amounting to twenty years. His mother was illiterate, but valued education and urged all her children to study. As he thought the teacher in Roșiești to be incompetent, his father sent Nicolae to attend primary school in nearby Idrici village, together with his older brother Dumitru, to whom he was very attached. He then entered the prestigious Gheorghe Roșca Codreanu High School in Bârlad, graduating in 1916. He began publishing in Neamul Românesc magazine in 1915, while still a student, signing as Bărdescu. While in Bârlad, he supported himself through tutoring.

In October 1916, shortly after Romania entered World War I, he began studying at the reserve officers' school in Botoșani. From spring 1917 to March 1918, he fought on the front as a student master sergeant. He later recalled his wartime experiences in Amintiri. Notații autobiografice, pointing out the absurdity and uselessness of many of the army's actions. He found that officers, rather than judging based on circumstances, hid behind regulations, and that the troops' activities were subject to little real oversight. In October 1918, near the war's end, he enrolled in the literature and philosophy faculty of Bucharest University, graduating in 1922. Initially intending to study sociology, he changed his mind when he found that his professor Ion A. Rădulescu-Pogoneanu did not know the material. Bagdasar then opted for the history of philosophy, taught by a youthful Mircea Florian, whom he found erudite. While a student, he was an editor for Gazeta Transilvaniei, a newspaper based in Brașov, in the newly-acquired Transylvania region. Following graduation and with the help of Mihai Popovici, he earned a scholarship at the University of Berlin, where he studied from 1922 to 1926. At Berlin, he took courses with Carl Stumpf, Heinrich Maier and Max Dessoir, and was active in the Kant-Gesellschaft society. He also acquired a solid grounding in Kantianism. He took his doctorate in 1926; it was titled Der Begriff des theoretischen Wertes bei Rickert ("The Notion of Theoretical Value in Rickert").

Early career in education

Upon his return from Germany in September 1926, he was unable to find a university post, but was asked by the Public Instruction Ministry to teach German at the Romanian commercial school in Thessaloniki. He immediately accepted a job as substitute professor, teaching in the Greek city from that November until the following April. After his return home and until 1930, Bagdasar taught at the Nicolae Krețulescu Commercial School in Bucharest; he also worked for ten years at the private Prince Carol high school. From autumn 1928 to spring 1930, he was a librarian at Dimitrie Gusti's Romanian Social Institute.

Bagdasar was able to enter university teaching in 1928: thanks to the insistence of chairman Constantin Rădulescu-Motru, he was named assistant psychotechnician in the experimental psychology laboratory of Bucharest University. A year later, he agreed to teach a course on logic at a reduced salary. His acceptance was reluctant, as he did not wish to upset course professor Nae Ionescu, who could attack him in Cuvântul newspaper. In 1929, he thus became assistant lecturer of logic and epistemology, and remained in the post until 1941. He taught logic to preparatory-year students and epistemology to students in the other years. In 1938, when the department was restructured, he stopped teaching for two years and entered a competition for a history of philosophy post at Cernăuți University, but was not hired. In early 1940, he was drawn into a plagiarism scandal involving Alexandru Posescu, who a year earlier had published an introduction to philosophy at Bagdasar's printing press. In late 1939, Nicolae Tatu accused Posescu of plagiarizing P. P. Negulescu; Posescu sued Tatu in January 1940, and also named Bagdasar as the moral author of the allegations against him. Bagdasar was ultimately cleared in 1945.

Maturity and later years

After Rădulescu-Motru was forced to retire in October 1940, during the National Legionary State, Bagdasar became assistant to Ion Petrovici, who had recently transferred to Bucharest from Iași University. In December 1941, he was named administrator of Casa Școalelor, which managed donations to schools. In the summer of 1942, he became a professor at Iași, in the history of modern and contemporary philosophy, epistemology and metaphysics department, within the literature and philosophy faculty. The move was facilitated by Petrovici, by then Education Minister. He retained this post until March 1949, when, following the education reform enacted by the early communist regime the previous year, he was assigned to be a scientific adviser at the Bucharest-based Institute of History and Philosophy. Politically uninvolved and left-leaning, his relations with Rădulescu-Motru and Petrovici, as well as his work at Casa Școalelor, probably contributed to his removal. Meanwhile, in May 1943, upon the motion of Rădulescu-Motru, he was elected a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy. When the communist authorities revamped the Academy in 1948, he was stripped of membership. In 1970, he was elected to the Academy of Social and Political Sciences.

From 1949 to 1950, Bagdasar's work focused on the history of Romanian philosophy; he was then transferred to the history section of the Academy's Iași chapter, where he researched the history of Romanian literature. While there, he co-directed Ethos magazine with Ștefan Bârsănescu. Moving back to Bucharest in 1956, he delivered a eulogy the following March at Bellu cemetery for Rădulescu-Motru. He was somewhat marginalized during the 1950s and experienced a certain degree of poverty. He received a salary raise when he came to the national capital to work on Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române, but continued riding the tramway second class for a year, and bought black bread rather than baguettes. Bagdasar died in 1971.

Work

Bagdasar's most important works are: Filosofia contemporană a istoriei (vol. I, 1930), Din problemele culturii europene (1931), Istoria filosofiei românești (published as a standalone volume in 1940 and as part of Filosofia românească de la origini până astăzi, itself volume V of Istoria filosofiei moderne, 1941), Teoria cunoștinței (vol. I, 1941; vol. II, 1942) and Teoreticieni ai civilizației (1969). He was one of three co-authors of the 1943 Antologie filosofică. Filosofi străini. Together with Petrovici, he wrote Manualul de psihologie, a high school textbook that appeared annually between 1934 and 1945. He wrote nine studies in Societatea de mâine review, and others in Revista de filosofie, Minerva, Convorbiri Literare, Arhiva pentru reforma și știința socială and Ethos. Between 1930 and 1940, he edited special editions of Revista de filosofie dedicated to Baruch Spinoza, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Rădulescu-Motru, Negulescu, Ștefan Zeletin, René Descartes, Petrovici and Titu Maiorescu.In 1969, he published a translation of the Critique of Pure Reason; Critique of Practical Reason and The Metaphysics of Morals appeared posthumously in 1973. His first work in Romania was a study of Edmund Husserl that appeared in Revista de filosofie in 1928; there followed articles on Paul Natorp, Wilhelm Windelband and Rickert, all previously unknown in Romania.

References

• Constantin Schifirneț, Sociologie românească modernă. Bucharest: Editura Criterion Publishing, 2009. ISBN 978-973-8982-52-9