Louvain Realism in Context: The Legacy of Léon Noël (1878-1953)

Léon Noël was an important figure of Louvain’s Higher Institute of Philosophy, which he presided from 1927 to 1948, during the years of the rise of fascism and the Second World War. Like most Louvain philosophers of the time, he was an ordained priest, trained in the neo-Thomistic school of Louvain. But he was nonetheless an independent mind, interested in the wider philosophical production of his time, and curious about other «realisms,» such as that of nascent phenomenology (he is credited with the first French-language review of Husserl’s work) and about the various English neo-realisms, which he discovered during his time as a refugee in the UK during the First World War. This seminar will focus on his Notes d’épistémologie thomiste (1925), where he confronts Thomas Aquinas’s legacy with with Descartes and Kant, and for which we are preparing the first English translation.