Jean-Yves Lacoste and the 'task of thinking'

Abstract

Jean-Yves Lacoste is one of the most prominent philosophers of religion in contemporary France. Challenging the tendency, perpetuated by university tradition, to draw a sharp line between philosophy and theology, he takes up the 'task of thinking', which is much older than the division between academic disciplines. In his view, this boundary, if we can draw it at all, is far more likely to unite than divide these two orders of reflection. Access to the frontier that stretches between them is opened up to Lacoste by phenomenology, both in its classical Husserlian formulation and in its Hideggerian reinterpretation. Against all appearances, however, Lacoste does not propose an escape into religious metaphors closer to poetry than to methodical philosophical reflection. Instead, he tries to apply the phenomenological method not only to the study of the initial conditions of religious experience, but also of its subsequent content. All this in order to test whether thinking pushed to its limits when confronted with religious experience will still be able to fulfil its task.