Background
Gourd, Jean-Jacques was born in September 1850 in bleix.
Gourd, Jean-Jacques was born in September 1850 in bleix.
Geneva, Leip- *‘g. Berlin, Heidelberg and Tübingen, initially Theology and then Philosophy.
Entered the ministry, 1879. Professor of the History of Philosophy, University of Geneva, 1881-1909. Active on the international scene from the time of the first International Congress of Philosophy, Paris, since 1900.
Admired by Bergson and Boutroux.
Best remembered for his philosophy of religion, this aspect of Gourd’s thought rests on a phenomenalist epistemology. The ultimate datum in philosophy is the field of consciousness, in which both reality and the self are given as phenomena—this phenomenalism Gourd regarded as the way to avoid positing an unknowable noumenon. His second major assertion is that the analysis of the field of consciousness reveals that it is not coextensive with reason, but contains an irrational element which Gourd calls the incoordinable, sharply distinguished from the coordinable. The use of reason increases knowledge in terms of its extent: the incoordinable is grasped by intuition, and furnishes us with intensive knowledge. Gourd finds incoordinable elements in many areas of experience: society, morality and the aesthetic—generally in whatever is unforseeable. individual and creative. The major field of experience, however, in which the incoordinable is most fully manifest is that of religion, where we must use concepts such as mystery, revelation and grace in order to capture the quality of the experiences concerned. The ultimate experience of the incoordinable is the mystical, union with that which is beyond all concepts and laws. In this way Gourd, who was personally a deeply and genuinely religious man, sought to allow for the possibility of religious knowledge within a phenomenalist epistemology.