studied at the University of Leuven, from which he graduated with a doctoral dissertation on 'The Starting Point of Marxist Philosophy' (published and awarded a biennial prize in 1956). In 1958, he immigrated to the United States and taught philosophy at Georgetown University until 1972. In 1973, he became the T.Lawrason Riggs Professor in the philosophy of religion at Yale University. His teaching and writing have concentrated mostly on the phenomenology and philosophy of religion and on the philosophy of culture. He has lectured at a number of universities in the USA, as well as in Belgium, The Netherlands, Italy, and Ireland. He has written 15 books, and published 4 collective works, in addition to some 200 articles in professional journals, collective works, and encyclopaedias. He has just completed a long study on the Enlightenment that will appear with Yale U. Press in the early spring of 2005. At present he is working on a study on Religion and Romanticism. In 1989 he was elected a foreign member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Letters, Arts and Sciences and in 1994 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The members of the class of 1996 of Phi Beta Kappa awarded him the William C. DeVane Medal for distinguished teaching and scholarship at Yale College. In 1998, at the occasion of his retirement, former students and friends presented him with a Festschrift on Religious Interiority and the Culture of Modernity published by Wm. Eerdmans Publ. (Grand Rapids MI).