# Rémi Brague

Rémi Brague (born 8 September 1947) is a French historian of philosophy specializing in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian thought of the Middle Ages. He is professor emeritus of Arabic and religious philosophy at the Sorbonne and Romano Guardini chair of philosophy (emeritus) at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

## Biography

Educated primarily at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Brague began his career as a student of Greek philosophy, interpreted in a distinctly modern key. His doctoral thesis, later published as Aristote et la question du monde: Essai sur le contexte cosmologique et anthropologique de l'ontologie (1988), developed a phenomenological account of Aristotle's world conception. In particular, his goal was to write the book on Aristotle that Heidegger would have written had he not written Being and Time. From there, he was led to study Hebrew to read the Old Testament and Arabic in order "to read the Jewish philosopher Maimonides' The Guide for the Perplexed in its original language." Since then, most of his work has occurred at the intersection of the three Abrahamic religions as they developed out of the ancient world, formed themselves in dialogue, and eventually gave rise to modernity.
He has written numerous books on classical and medieval intellectual history, religion, national identity, literature, and law. He is perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for his book Europe, la voie romaine (1992), translated into English as Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization (2009). His masterwork thus far is his trilogy on the philosophical development of law in the West, La Sagesse du monde: Histoire de l'expérience humaine de l'univers (1999), La Loi de Dieu. Histoire philosophique d’une alliance (2005), and Le Règne de l'homme: Genèse et échec du projet moderne (2015). They have been translated into English as The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought (2004), The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea (2007), and The Kingdom of Man: Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project (2018).
While his intellectual influences are various, Brague has developed some of the chief points of his unique account of Western intellectual history in dialogue with the controversial political theorist Leo Strauss. Brague has said, "Leo Strauss taught me that when reading a text, you must be open to the possibility that it contains different layers of meaning. All philosophical books written before the Enlightenment aim at both a wider audience and a small elite, able to understand the deeper meaning of the texts." This approach informed Brague's understanding of Maimonides and the medieval Muslim philosopher Al-Farabi, among others. Still, he declared himself unconvinced "that it applies to the Greek philosophers" in the way Strauss has taught. Brague holds that "Strauss became so convinced of his way of interpreting texts, that he came to apply it to all sorts of books, even Cervantes' Don Quixote. Strauss taught me to read very carefully. But I don't consider myself a Straussian, nor do the real Straussians consider me one of them." Arguably, Brague's "Roman" view of Western Intellectual History (as enunciated in Eccentric Culture) responds to Strauss's famous emphasis on the longstanding tension between Athens and Jerusalem. For Brague, we cannot understand this tension fully without considering the historic mediation of Athens and Jerusalem through Rome. Likewise, Brague's account of Divine Law in the Western intellectual tradition (as presented in The Law of God) reframes the relationship between faith and reason, the secular and the sacred, in response to Strauss's recurrent emphasis on "the Theological-Political Problem."
Brague has received numerous awards, including honors from the French National Centre for Scientific Research and the Academy of Moral and Political Science. In 2009, he received the Josef Pieper Prize and the Grand prix de philosophie de l'Académie française, and was awarded the 2012 Ratzinger Prize for Theology alongside Brian E. Daley. In 2013, he was named a Chevalier de l'Ordre National de la Légion d'honneur.