Background
Laberthonnière, Marie Paul Lucien was born on October 5, 1860 in Chazelet, Indre.
Laberthonnière, Marie Paul Lucien was born on October 5, 1860 in Chazelet, Indre.
Collège de Juilly. 1887; École Massillon, 1886. Rector, Collège de Juilly. 1900.0.
Laberthonnière first appears as an ally of Blondel, with a like emphasis on action in practice and on the primacy of the will over the intellect, and when Blondel bought the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne in 1905 he became its editor. He called his position ‘dogmatisme moral’, meaning that the foundations of belief, religious or otherwise, were ultimately moral. Resolutely opposed to scholasticism and to positivism of any kind, he was equally opposed to all authoritarian approaches to belief and therefore, unsurprisingly, fell victim to the purges of the Catholic modernist crisis, escaping excommunication but banned from publishing from 1913 for the remainder of his life. In epistemology, his system was a type of pragmatism which claimed to avoid relativism by including the self-criticism of the knower. In metaphysics Laberthonnière shares with Berkeley and Leibniz the view that only active beings or spirits can properly be entities, although he sees their existence in the mutual dependence of these beings, with each other and with God. Resolutely opposed to what he regarded as the abstractions of Greek idealism, Laberthonnière only accepted individuals, each absolutely unique, their uniqueness being guaranteed by God. Denying that any demonstration or catalogue of facts, whether logical, scientific or historical, could ever bring about faith, Laberthonniere seems to have developed his system as an account of human life *n which faith could have its place. In later life he quarrelled with what he saw as Blondel’s compromises with scholasticism.