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I am beginning an exploration of Dooyeweerd’s, “A New Critique of Theoretical Thought.” If anyone has access to the book and is interested in working through them, please send me an email. I hope to use this web page for our discussion platform. Others who have read through them already, your input would be much appriciated.

Herman Dooyeweerd

 Born in Amsterdam in 1894.
 Raised in Calvinist home and deeply influenced by Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920).
 Main philosophers of influence include, John Calvin, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and most of all Immanuel Kant.

 Professor of Law at the Free University

 Founder of the “Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea.”

 "The central thought of his philosophy is that all philosophy has nontheoretcal, religious presuppositions which it cannot do without, and that philosophy fails as soon as it desires to be “autonomous” and thus is itself not aware of this presupposition" (Kalsbeek, 11). This makes his philosophy very difficult to relate to other philosophical traditions or categories.
 In reflecting on his own life, Dooyeweerd marks the turning point in his philosophy was when he realized the religious root of thought its self. "I came to understand the central significance of the “heart,” repeatedly proclaimed by Holy Scripture to be the religious root of human existence" (Kalsbeek, 19).

Kalsbeek, L., “Contours of a Christian Philosophy (An introduction to Herman Dooyeweerd?s thought)”., Wedge Publishing Foundation, Toronto, Ontario, ? 1975

I have just posted a Trinitarian elaboration of Dooyeweerd, which has been posted to the group Religion/Trinity and Society. Members of this forum may be interested in this.

If you are looking for copies of the New Critique, or anything else by Dooyeweerd, you may want to check out Redeemer University College’s website, www.redeemer.on.ca and follow the research centre links to “the Dooyeweerd Centre.” There are links on how to purchase Dooyeweerdian books, and there is a link to Andrew Basden’s web page that attempts to outline some of Dooyeweerd’s thought. Tough, but helpful.

Disclaimer—I’m NOT particularly philosphically minded and can become very easily confused.

What REALLY does ?reformational? mean? Is it interchangeable for Dooyeweerdianism? Yes?it comes out of Kuyper (which I embrace)—-but it goes beyond a Kuyperian worldview. Would you include Plantinga at Notre Dame as ?reformational??would he accept that term? Marsden? Jim Bratt at Calvin? These are people who have had an impact in academia on a large scale working from the Reformed/Kuyperian perspective.

?A problem with this ?reformational? approach—-if by ?reformational? you mean Dooyeweerdianism?is that, at least in history field of academia— no one has published a work of history coming out of this approach. Its been out there for a long time, too. It may be an attractive philosophy to those who are philosophically minded (and, admittedly, I am not) but why should we continue spend time on a possibly fruitless direction—if it has no practical implementations ? Is it truly different for other disciplines?beyond philosophy?

Even if someone has published a work that I am unaware of (which is certainly, nay likely, possible) out of this background, why should we or anyone else consider using a philosophy that we - and others— can?t understand. For all of the discussion about Dooyeeweerd, it is necessary to translate the translators and interpreters of Dooyeweerd into plain English for the rest of us! And even then—I’m not sure if its useful.

Having tried to read some Dooyeweerd, Marx is far more understandable to the average person than is Dooyeweerd or his adherents—-an important reason why Marxism has had such an impact! Shouldn?t we want a Reformed perspective and worldview to be put forth that COULD have a wide impact —so that it CAN have a chance of transforming the world! I read these articles for hours and hours—truly trying to make sense out of them?and mostly failed, I admit.

I think the greatest value of Dooyeweerd and those that have followed him is that they try to keep Kuyper’s vision alive. Even if I can’t understand them—-they’ve tried to keep the rest of us on the straight and narrow without drifting off into mainstream.

I think you’re right that Dooeyweerd’s impact stems from his Kuyperian roots. I wouldn’t be concerned with not getting Dooeyweerd if you like Kuyper. I think part of the value of Dooeyweerd is that he put many of Kuyper’s ideas into philosophical expression, enabling others like Seerveld in aesthetics and Schurrman with technology to offer a radical approach in their fields.

I haven’t read Dooeyweerd’s systematic work closely enough, but it does seem that, though his categories put God in His rightful place as lord over other “idols” (history, science, art, etc.), it still expresses the richness of God’s creation in CATEGORIES and that just seems contrary to human experience. And aren’t we just going along with the way our culture has defined the world by breaking it up into these categories as if God created the world with these categories in mind?

And in response to why Dooeyweerd doesn’t catch on like Marx, I don’t think it’s just the difficulty level. Hegel is extremely difficult, yet he has really caught on (Marx himself was very influenced by Hegel’s “Science of Logic”). I just finished reading N.T. Wright’s “Jesus and the Victory of God”. Wright is a pretty popular theologian who is making arguments that many in our tradition take for granted. Yet, why does N.T. Wright get the popularity? I think it’s because he writes in such a way that speaks to many different traditions. The thrust of Dooeyweerd’s message (“the twilight of western thought”) can be seen in the works of much contemporary philosophy (Levinas, Derrida via Heidegger and Husserl), but contemporary philosophers are known because they express their thoughts in language that is familiar, through the philosophical tradition of Hegel-Aristotle-Plato etc. There is a delicate balance that Reformational Christians have to make between radically rethinking philosophy’s tradition and still being understandable to the many.

And, I have been thinking alot about why we haven’t seen much work about history itself as a response to Heidegger and Hegel in the reformational tradition. History (as a science) is such an abusive power in our society, as we’ve seen again during the Gulf War, that it’s totally necessary to reclaim the story of humankind.

Regarding CATEGORIES. I haven’t read Dooyeweerd’s systematic. I have, however, read Clouser’s Myth of Religious Neutrality. I know Clouser draws from Dooyeweerd’s philosophy, but I don’t know how closely. Clouser makes it clear that the catergories/aspects aren’t fundamental to human experience. We only see the categories when we function in the analytic aspect and place the other aspects “against” the analytical. The aspects are abstractions of everyday experience. Clouser says that there are actually 3 types of thinking – everyday thinking, lower abstraction, and higher abstraction (for a good summary of this, see here: http://www.basden.u-net.com/Dooy/thinking.html ). In everyday thinking, we don’t break up the world into catergories.

Thanks. That’s very helpful. I’m still a bit suspicious of thinking about abstract thinking as a higher thinking. That still sounds like the ideals of Greek thinking, which invented an objective perspective in order to see like God sees, from a “higher” view.

And it’s hard to imagine that human beings sense all these areas in their naive experience. Do people really sense the dimensions of space and time before they think of it in abstraction? It’s my experience that when I bump into a wall, I don’t smile knowingly and say, “Ah, just another example of the limitations of space”. Instead, I know the wall as a painful obstacle on my way to the phone, which I need to answer because I’m expecting an important phone call…

My point is that such abstract categories (if we may call them that) might not be there before our thinking on a “higher” level. Such categories might only be just another way of looking at the world.