Louis Dupré (philosopher)

Louis Dupre is a Catholic phenomenologist and religious philosopher. He was the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor in Yale University's religious studies department from 1973 to 1998, after which he became Professor Emeritus.^[1] His work generally attempts to tie the modern age more closely to medieval and classical thought, finding precursors to Enlightenment and Reformation events that were naively viewed as revolutions. His well known works include "Passage to Modernity" and "The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture."

Dupré is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[1]

He was born in the Flemish i.e. Dutch speaking part of Belgium in 1926 in the village of Veerle (Antwerp province). He graduated at the KULeuven as a doctor in philosophy in 1952 with a dissertation on Karl Marx. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1958 and became a professor at Georgetown University. Known as a Marx specialist then with three studies on Marx he became a professor in religious philosophy at Yale University in 1973. Afterwards he was known as a Kierkegaard specialist. Marx' and Kierkegaard's criticisms on modernity and the cultural fragmentation inherent to it became the kernel of his later works. The phenomenon of religion in a secularised world becomes his main subject in "The Other Dimension", "Transcendent Selfhood" and "A Dubious Heritage". Eventually, the religious philosopher poses the large cultural question about the relation between (Christian) religion and the birth of modern western culture: "Passage to Modernity" (14th–16th century), "The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture" and "The Quest of the Absolute. Birth and Decline of European Romanticism". In 2010, he left the United States and he has lived in Courtrai in Belgium since.

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