Ever since his inaugural lecture as professor in 1959, Joseph Ratzinger has been engaged with the intellectual crisis of our times. Reason, he argues, has been reduced to what can be quantitatively assessed. Such a self-limitation of reason, he contends, has had, and continues to have, serious negative consequences for European civilization and its global outreach. Returning to his former university as Pope Benedict XVI in 2006, he used the occasion to give a lecture on the relationship between faith and reason, and how each needs the other. His main thesis was to demonstrate the indispensable role of theology as an academic discipline on the university: namely, to keep reason open to what is beyond reason and so to ensure that reason and its artifacts—science and technology—remain truly human, serve humanity, and do not destroy it.

Contemporary Philosophy