Metafizica științifică după Constantin Leonardescu
Scientific metaphysics according to Constantin Leonardescu

Summary/Abstract: Constantin Leonardescu (1844–1907) was a professor of philosophy for 34 years at the University of Iași. He was an adept of the French eclectic spiritual­ism, which he tried to reconcile with the positivism of Herbert Spencer and with the Darwin­ism of Ernst Haeckel, while countering Vasile Conta’s brand of scientific mate­ialism. Leonardescu argued against the positivist tenet of the incompatibility of meta­physics and positive science, based on the emergence of new “partial” or “local” meta­physics in the thought of contemporary genuine scientists, who philosophized disre­garding the former metaphysical tradition, using only the concepts of their own disci­plines and forging their own principles. Positive metaphysics exists thus potentially, the metaphysician’s task be­ing to systematize, or to “reconcile” the local contributions of the scientists-philosophers in the framework of a general, unifying theory. This frame­work, he argues, is a generali­zation of “Darwinism”, that is, of the special metaphysics initiated by Darwin, then ren­dered general by Spencer and most importantly by Haeckel. However, philosophical Darwinism or “evolutionary monism” curiously vindicates, in Leonardescu’s view, tradi­tional spiritualism. Generalized Darwinism thus in­ter­preted offered a fundamental theory in which science could achieve systematic uni­ty and be­come a true mirror of the Totality, which is metaphysics’ true object. Scien­tific meta­physics is principally a reflection upon science, taking as starting point the positive facts recognized as such by the sciences, and the empirical generalizations val­idated within each science, and aiming to ensure logical coherence amongst them, un­der the rule of the supreme evolution-principle.

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