Jean-Yves Lacoste, a philosopher who works in
Paris, France and Cambridge, UK, is the author of Experience and
the Absolute.
W. Chris Hackett is Research Fellow and Lecturer
in the School of Philosophy at Australian Catholic University.
Jeffrey Bloechl is Professor of Philosophy at
Boston College, USA.
Discerning readers of modern European philosophy know that
Jean-Yves Lacoste is a thinker as elegant as he is incisive, as
knowledgeable as he is inventive. In these remarkable lectures, we
encounter Lacoste not in his usual mode as phenomenologist but as a
historian of ideas. Readers will find his sustained revision of
Christian history, in which theology plays second fiddle to
philosophy, at once insouciant and bracing. --Kevin Hart,
University of Virginia
Few books called 'subversive' are so, and fewer still would-be
subversive books are also lucid, scholarly, and rigorous. But this
most excellent short work by Jean-Yves Lacoste is genuinely
subversive, and in part because it possesses these three
attributes. The subversion consists in the demolition of any
supposed boundary between theology and philosophy: a division
unknown to antiquity and much of the Middle Ages, and meaningless
after the work of Hegel, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. Theology is
not 'regional' -- rather it contests the philosophic logos itself
by proclaiming that it is the rational word of Creation and of the
crucified God-Man. To be true to itself it must take thinking to
the limits and beyond, while remaining conjoined to the work of
prayer. Yet the latter stipulation is in Lacoste no pious
condemnation of 'secular' philosophy, for he hints that to think at
all is in some sense already to pray. The implications of Lacoste's
subversion are immense. It helps to explain how today theology is
suddenly everywhere, yet also in an extreme institutional crisis.
Moreover, it begins to point a way out. None of our existing
faculty boundaries make any sense for theologians; instead, what
they need is a new academic practice combining theology,
philosophy, and the history of religions (implicitly crucial in
this book), alongside an encouragement of spiritual formation. The
question then, after Lacoste, is what sort of institutional
innovations would provide the necessary carapace? --John Milbank
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