Background
Lachance, Louis was born on February 18, 1899 in Saint-Joachimde-Montmorency, Quebec.
Lachance, Louis was born on February 18, 1899 in Saint-Joachimde-Montmorency, Quebec.
Petit Séminaire du Québec, 1912-1920. The Dominican College of Philosophy and Theology, Ottawa, 1921-1924. And the Université de Montréal.
1925-1927.
After several years of teaching and study in Rome he returned to the Dominican College, Ottawa, as Professor of Philosophy in 1931. In 1936 he was appointed to the Angelicum University. Rome, but teaching in Latin seemed to him unnaturally restrictive, and he returned to Ottawa in 1938.
He moved in 1939 to the Grand Séminaire de Sherbrooke and in 1943 became Professor of Moral and Social Philosophy at the Université de Montréal, where he remained until his death, serving as Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy from 1960 onwards.
Lachance's main interests were always in law and politics, although his work extended naturally to political philosophy and the philosophy of history. Because of his basic outlook these issues inevitably involved him in questions about metaphysics and the philosophy of language. Although a Thomist by conviction, Lachance took scholastic theory on to new ground in the philosophy history and the philosophy of language. He is best known as a philosopher of language. The ideas of law and politics as activities which could be conducted on the basis of reason were always at the forefront of his writings. He was not very much influenced by the various kinds of neoThomism which nourished while he wrote but rather by events and currents of thoughts in h«s native Quebec, and particularly by the need to provide a reasoned alternative to the emotion» nationalism of Lionel Groulx. Le Droit et les droits de T homme ( 1959) offers a social justification for individual human rights- • »he arguing that they are intelligible only m context of a community. Lachance’s Thomiste work tends to show St Thomas as a humanist who provided an underlying basis for democratic theory. Nationalisme et religion (1936) develops arguments for a limited and rational nationalismquite unlike the ideology of Lionel Groulx whic animated many thinkers and still animates some—in Quebec. His Philosophie du hntgttg1 ( 1943) explores the social origins of language an its consequent importance in politics.
