High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Simion B?rnu?iu (21 July 1808 ? 28 May 1864) was a Transylvanian-born Romanian historian, academic, philosopher, jurist, and liberal politician. A leader of the 1848 revolutionary movement of Transylvanian Romanians, he represented its Eastern Rite Catholic wing. Barnu?iu lived for a large part of his life in Moldavia, and was for long a professor of philosophy at Academia Mih?ilean? and at the University of Ia?i. Born in Boc?a, he became a teacher of history at the secondary school in Blaj, which was at the time, like the rest of Transylvania, part of the Austrian Empire. B?rnu?iu was influenced early-on by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (Kantianism), in which he saw the means to reform society in opposition to traditional theological views, while supporting a presence of laity in the administrative structures of his own church.