Born to a peasant family north of Bârlad, he fought in World War I before attending the University of Bucharest and going on to earn a doctorate in Germany.
Both in the interwar period and during World War II, he was involved in running publishing houses, with the latter stint incurring disfavor from the communist authorities.
Born into a family of Armenian origin in Roșiești, a village in the former Fălciu County,[1] his parents were Iancu Bagdasar and his wife Smaranda (née Aftenie).
His parents were affluent peasants at the top of village society; his father served five consecutive terms as mayor, amounting to twenty years.
As he thought the teacher in Roșiești to be incompetent, his father sent Nicolae to attend primary school in nearby Idrici village, together with his older brother Dumitru, to whom he was very attached.
[5] Upon his return from Germany in September 1926, he was unable to find a university post, but was asked by the Public Instruction Ministry to teach German at the Romanian commercial school in Thessaloniki.
In early 1940, he was drawn into a plagiarism scandal involving Alexandru Posescu, who a year earlier had published an introduction to philosophy at Bagdasar's printing press.
[9] After Rădulescu-Motru was forced to retire in October 1940, during the National Legionary State, Bagdasar became assistant to Ion Petrovici, who had recently transferred to Bucharest from the University of Iași.
[10] He retained this post until March 1949, when, following the education reform enacted by the early communist regime the previous year, he was assigned to be a scientific adviser at the Bucharest-based Institute of History and Philosophy.
He received a salary raise when he came to the national capital to work on Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române, but continued riding the tramway second class for a year, and bought black bread rather than baguettes.
Well-informed, constantly studying developments in the field, he sought to shed light on rationalist tendencies in philosophy, while taking account of his era's rapid scientific progress to question the limits of Auguste Comte's positivism.
In Teoria cunoștinței, he critically analyzed epistemological theories such as relativism, agnosticism and positivism, while systematically presenting philosophical doctrines of knowing.
Filosofia contemporană a istoriei, of which one out of a planned three volumes were completed, deals with foreign philosophers' approach to history, but also discusses the thinking of Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol and Nicolae Iorga about this topic.
[16] Rădulescu-Motru selected Bagdasar as editing secretary of Revista de filosofie, which he proceeded to turn into the country's most important philosophy periodical,[17] beginning with its appearance in a new format in March 1928.
[18] After relaunching the magazine, he obtained Rădulescu-Motru's assent to invigorate the Romanian Philosophical Society, which at that point was holding small, sporadic meetings.
The most important of these was Istoria filosofiei moderne, which appeared in five volumes between 1937 and 1941 and brought together contributions from all the country's academic centers, under the leadership of Rădulescu-Motru and Bagdasar's coordination.
[22] In 1930, he edited a celebratory volume marking 35 years of university teaching by Rădulescu-Motru; the book brought together contributions from leading academics, including Gheorghe Vlădescu-Răcoasa, Eugeniu Speranția, Mihai Ralea, Tudor Vianu, Mircea Djuvara, Petrovici, and Gusti, as well as Bagdasar.
Bagdasar went directly to the minister, pleading that at the postwar peace conference, the Romanian government would be able to argue that cultural figures continued to work even during the war.
He noted that he detested the Ion Antonescu regime, as well as Adolf Hitler, but wished to do a favor for Petrovici, who knew of his anti-fascist leanings but imposed no conditions.