Ştefan Lupaşcu

Ştefan Lupaşcu (Stéphane Lupasco, 1900–1988) was a Romanian philosopher who developed Non-Aristotelian logic.


Stéphane Lupasco was born in Bucharest on 11 August 1900. His family belonged to the old Moldavian aristocracy. His father was a lawyer and politician, but it was his mother, a pianist and student of César Franck, who established the family in Paris in 1916. After high school at the Lycée Buffon, he studied philosophy, biology and physics at the Sorbonne and, briefly, law. He participated fully in the artistic and intellectual life of Paris in the 20’s and 30’s and defended his State Doctoral Thesis in 1935.

In 1946, he was named Research Assistant at the French National Science Research Center, a post he was obliged to leave ten years later because of the inability of the Center to decide in which faculty his work belonged! The next ten or fifteen years were those of greatest acceptance of his work by the public and other thinkers, but unfortunately not by main-stream logicians and philosophers. His Trois Matières, published in 1960 was a bestseller, and people began calling Lupasco the Descartes, the Leibniz, the Hegel of the 20th Century, a new Claude Bernard, a new Bergson, etc. He continued to publish books in the 70’s and 80’s, the last being L’Homme et ses Trois Ethiques in 1986, two years before his death on October 7, 1988 in Paris. An Award of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984 was among the few honors that came to Lupasco during his lifetime. Lupasco was one of the founding members of the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research (Centre International de Recherches et Etudes Transdisciplinaires (CIRET)), founded in Paris in 1987 by Basarab Nicolescu, Edgar Morin, René Berger, Michel Random and other key figures of the French intelligentsia. As Nicolescu has recalled, Lupasco was deeply affected by the stubborn resistance of the academic community to honest debate and discussion of his new principles and postulates, and it is with an understandable bitterness that Lupasco saw in this resistance another example of the operation of his principles.


Lupasco's work is a complex philosophical system focused on the dynamic logic of contradiction. It is about a theoretical daresome creation meant to offer a solution to the epistemological contemporary crises, towards a new and original approach of the philosophy as a science. Further on Stefan Lupascu aims even an essential change of the human capacity to understand the reality. Having the new logic as a basis, without being classical, he places the whole explanation about the surrounding environment in other terms. Stimulated by Einstein's works and quantum theory, Lupasco founded a new logic, questioning the tertium non datur principle of classical logic. He introduced a third state, going beyond the duality principle, the T-state. The T-state is neither 'actual', nor 'potential' (categories replacing in Lupasco's system the 'true' or 'false' values of standard bivalent logic), but a resolution of the two contradictory elements at a higher level of reality or complexity. Lupasco generalized his logic to physics and epistemology and above all to a new theory of consciousness.

Main source of informations: Wikipedia.

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