Abstract

In a conference held at Sorbonne on March 25, 1936, “La connais­sance humaine et le transcendent” (Human knowledge and the transcendent), Ion Petrovici discussed the following problem which he traced through the history of phi­losophy to the present day: Is thought capable of perceiving reality itself? He distin­guished between the gnoseological and ontological aspects of the problem. The first one is related to the nature and capacity of human functions (sensation, perception, in­tellect, reason) to intuit and render reality in knowledge. The second one belongs to the very struc­ture of reality, of the object of knowledge. Fundamental catego­ries of Kant’s philosophy, such as exist­ence, causality, and substance are brought into discussion. Provocative, but often puzzling, is that, from whatever field we start, we quickly reach a result that has an almost apodictic meaning: thinking always aims beyond itself.