Tribute to Prof. Jean Ladrière
isp | Louvain-la-Neuve
On November 26, 2007, philosopher Jean Ladrière peacefully passed away at the Clinique St Pierre in Ottignies. He had reached the age of 86 years old. Both intellectually and personally, he was one of the most respected Belgian academics of the last century.
Of Armenian origin through his mother, he was the son of the architect who renovated the collegiate church in Nivelles, where he grew up and in which he returned to live after his emeritus. After the turmoil of the war, during which he served in the Piron Brigade, he studied mathematics and philosophy in Louvain. An FNRS researcher, then professor at UCLouvain's Institut supérieur de philosophie, he devoted his first major writings to the foundations of formal logic and the epistemology of mathematics. But his publications and teaching soon extended far beyond these fields. It was through his lectures that Louvain discovered Wittgenstein and Popper, Chomsky and Habermas. He founded a center for the philosophy of science to which no field of knowledge was foreign. His legendary Friday afternoon seminars explored cybernetics and catastrophe theory, evolutionary theory and the theory of justice, Whitehead's metaphysics and contemporary Marxism.
Far beyond his critical appropriation of an immense scientific and philosophical literature, Jean Ladrière is also the author of a rich and influential personal legacy, embodied in a succession of works written with great care and elegance, the last three of which (La Foi chrétienne et le destin de la raison, Le temps du possible and L'Espérance de la raison) were published in 2004.
At the heart of this work stands the connection between faith and reason. "What is at stake", he said in an interview published by Louvain magazine on the occasion of his 80th birthday, "is not a simple confrontation, but a justifiable relationship, both reflected and lived, between faith and reason. It is the aim of this relationship that I believe underlies the vast majority of the texts I have written, the others being merely occasional interventions."