Léon Ollé-Laprune

Léon Ollé-Laprune (25 June 1839 – 19 February 1898) was a French Catholic philosopher.

Under the influence of the philosopher Elme Marie Caro and of Père Gratry's book Les Sources, Ollé-Laprune, after exceptionally brilliant studies at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (1858 to 1861), devoted himself to philosophy. His life was spent in teaching, first in the lycées and then in the Ecole Normale Supérieure from 1875.

As Frédéric Ozanam had been a Catholic professor of history and foreign literature in the university, Ollé-Laprune's aim was to be a Catholic professor of philosophy there. Theodore de Regnon, the Jesuit theologian, wrote to him:

The Government of the Third Republic was now and then urged by a certain section of the press to punish the "clericalism" of Ollé-Laprune, but the repute of his philosophical teaching protected him. For one year only (1881–82), after organizing a manifestation in favour of the expelled congregations, he was suspended from his chair by Jules Ferry, and the first to sign the protest addressed by his students to the minister on behalf of their professor was the future socialist deputy Jean Jaurès, then a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.

The Academy of Moral and Political Sciences elected him a member of the philosophical section in 1897, to succeed Vacherot. Some months after his death William P. Coyne called him "the greatest Catholic layman who has appeared in France since Ozanam" ("New Ireland Review", June, 1899, p. 195).

Ollé-Laprune's first important work was La Philosophie de Malebranche (1870). Ten years later to obtain the doctorate he defended before the Sorbonne a thesis on moral certitude. As against Cartesian rationalism and positivistic determinism, he investigated the part of the will and the heart in the phenomenon of belief. This work resembles in many respects John Henry Newman's Grammar of Assent.

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