Abstract

Although Plesu started his career as an art historian, he soon came under the influence of Constantin Noica, a major Romanian thinker who had tried to combine Platonism with a rather idiosyncratic form of existentialism. Plesu was briefly a minister for culture in the first post-revolutionary Romanian cabinet, and thereafter worked as an editor and as an educator; he is currently the president of a small private graduate international college in Bucharest. He is the author of a number of books in which he draws intriguingly from material in art, religion, philosophy, and sometimes politics. The current volume, his most recent, is a case in point.