Abstract

Constantin Noica is widely believed to be one of the most original and prominent Romanian thinker of the last fifty years. In 1998, a year after his death, his book De dignitete Europae appeared in German translation. In it Noica tackles the classical philosophy of culture as morphology in Frobensius and Spengler, suggesting an interpretation of European historical cultural epochs from the viewpoint of linguistic-morphological forms: the Middle Ages correspond to the noun, the Renaissance to the adjective, Reformation, Counter-Reformation and Classicism to the adverb, followed by the Pronoun, and the present age to numerals and conjunctions. To what extent can we today, twenty years later, at the time when Romania is entering the European Union, still advocate such philosophical Eurocentrism?