Alexandru Dragomir was born in 1916 in Romania. After studying law and philosophy at the University of Bucharest (1933-1939), he left Romania to study for a doctorate in philosophy in Freiburg, Germany, under Martin Heidegger. He stayed in Freiburg for two years (1941-1943), but before defending his dissertation he was called back to Romania for military service and sent to the front. After 1948, historical circumstances forced him to become a clandestine philosopher: he was known only within a very limited circle, and even his friends did not know whether or not he was giving concrete expression to his philosophical preoccupations in a written work. He died in 2002 without ever publishing anything. It was only after his death that the "Dragomir notebooks" came to light, the record of an astounding exercise of solitary thinking. His work has been published posthumously in five volumes by Humanitas, Bucharest. Two of these volumes have been published in French translation by Jean Vrin, Paris: Banalités
