Rémi Brague

Rémi Brague (born in Paris in 1947) is a French Catholic philosopher and historian of philosophy, known for his work on the medieval thought of the three Abrahamic religions. He has been professor emeritus of medieval philosophy at the Sorbonne and of the history of European Christianity at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, and he led the research centre Tradition of Classical Thought at the Sorbonne. His work sits at the meeting point of Greek philosophy, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and asks how these traditions shaped the modern world.

He was educated in Paris, beginning with Greek philosophy and then learning Hebrew and Arabic. His doctoral thesis, published in 1988 as Aristote et la question du monde, offered a phenomenological reading of Aristotle's view of the cosmos, in the spirit of Heidegger's critique of metaphysics. Hebrew gave him access to the Old Testament, and Arabic allowed him to read Maimonides in the original, which drew him into the medieval Muslim world.

He is best known in the English-speaking world for Europe, la voie romaine (1992), published in English as Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization. Its central claim is that European civilization is eccentric: it does not come from a single source but from a inheritance passed on through Rome, which received Greek culture and joined it to the biblical tradition. He later wrote a trilogy on the philosophical history of law in the West, The Wisdom of the World, The Law of God and The Kingdom of Man, tracing how ideas of divine and natural law changed into the modern project.

Brague engaged critically with Leo Strauss. He acknowledged Strauss's teaching that texts may carry several layers of meaning, but he distanced himself from Strauss's method, especially when applied to Greek philosophers. His view of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem, mediated by Rome, remains a reference point in debates on faith and reason. He received the Ratzinger Prize for Theology in 2012 and the Grand Prize of Philosophy of the French Academy in 2009.