Gabriel Liiceanu is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bucharest and director of the publishing house Humanitas. During the communist period he was a researcher at the Institute of Art History. In 1983 he published Jurnalul de la Paltinis (English version: The Paltinis Diary, CEU Press, Budapest/New York, 2000), a diary recording his “private seminars” with his mentor, the philosopher Constantin Noica (who was imprisoned by the communist regime in the 1950s and 60s). The Paltinis Diary was very popular among the young intellectuals because of its “subversive” message about free thinking in an oppressive society. In addition to his original publications, Liiceanu has published Romanian translations of Plato and Heidegger.
Herta Müller has publicly criticized Romanian intellectuals for their passivity during the Ceausescu regime. Talking to the publisher and philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu in Bucharest in October 2010, the novelist and Nobel laureate defended her often unpopular view that the preservation of personal intellectual integrity alone was inadequate as a form of political resistance.
