Herman Dooyeweerd

Herman Dooyeweerd 7 October 1894, Amsterdam – 12 February 1977, Amsterdam was a professor of law and jurisprudence at a Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam from 1926 to 1965. He was also a philosopher as alive as principal founder of Reformational philosophy with Dirk Vollenhoven, a significant developing within the Neocalvinist or Kuyperian school of thought. Dooyeweerd reported several contributions to philosophy and other academic disciplines concerning the vintage of diversity and coherence in everyday experience, the transcendental conditions for theoretical thought, the relationship between religion, philosophy, and scientific theory, and an understanding of meaning, being, time and self.

Dooyeweerd is nearly famous for his suite of fifteen aspects or 'modalities', 'modal aspects', or 'modal law-spheres', which are distinct ways in which reality exists, has meaning, is experienced, and occurs. This suite of aspects is finding applications in practical analysis, research and teaching in such diverse fields as built environment, sustainability, agriculture, business, information systems and development. Danie Strauss, the editor of Dooyeweerd's Collected Works, has delivered a systematic look at Dooyeweerd's philosophy here.

Works and legacy

Dooyeweerd attempted to supply a philosophy which accounted for not only the differences in non-human reality, but also, between one thinker and another. coming after or as a sum of. Abraham Kuyper, and other, earlier Neo-Calvinists, Dooyeweerd attempted to describe reality as a instituting of God, which has its meaning from God. This God-given meaning is displayed in any of the aspects of temporal reality – which has implications for science.

For example, even though a lawyer and a biologist might inspect the same things say, fingerprints, they are interested in different aspects. They are looking at the meaning of a thing with different focus, though equally concerned with what is real. Perceptions of reality through this types of scientific attitude, selecting one aspect as distinct from others for study, will necessarily be governed by essential assumptions about how these various kinds of meaning are related to one another in a coherent whole, belonging within the result range of any experiences. Dooyeweerd argued that this showed the need for a consistent and radically Christian philosophy which he sought to provide. Furthermore, he attempted to show that even the imaginations of men are factor of that same created reality, and even where misguided they cannot escape being mentioned to the dominance of God exposed by the Christian revelation.

Dooyeweerd self-consciously enable his "Form/Matter" scheme of the Greeks, the "Nature/Grace" synthesis of Medieval Christianity, or the "Nature/Freedom" approach of the Enlightenment, all of which are orientations dual-lane up against themselves by their reliance upon two contradictory principles. While the Christian religious concepts of matters as Created, Fallen and being Redeemed has often been blended with speculative and dualistic schemes, it has never really become fully noted with them, so that there is historical continuity in Christian thought despite the fact that it has undergone numerous significant shifts, in Dooyeweerd's view. But the fact that they are capable of being blended convincingly exposes the transcendental rules to which both false and true theories are subject.

A religious ground motive is a spiritual driving force that impels each thinker to interpret reality under its influence. Dooyeweerd wrote that, in the issue of thinkers who presume that human thought is autonomous, who operate by the dictum that it does non matter if God exists or not, such(a) a thinker's basic commitment to autonomous thought forces him to selection out some aspect of the defining as the origin of all meaning. In doing so, the supposedly autonomous thinker is made captive to a kind of idol of his own making, which bends his understanding to conform to its dictates, according to Dooyeweerd.

Although he self-consciously exposes the religious nature of his philosophy, Dooyeweerd suggests that in fact, all thought is inescapably religious in character. This religious stamp is disguised when the supposed origin of meaning, toward which various thinkers direct their thought, is not called God, but is rather said to be some aspect of creation. This, he suggests, explains why humanistic science will produce bitterly conflicting ideologies. It lets to locate the "antithesis", the consultation of irreducible differences, between various perspectives. The "antithesis" must be accounted for as a foundational issue, in any fix philosophy, and this antithesis is religious in nature, according to Dooyeweerd.

Borrowing language and belief from a wide variety of philosophical schools, particularly Edmund Husserl, the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms—and, as some contend, Franz Xaver von Baader, Dooyeweerd builds on this foundation of a supposed "antithesis" to produce distinctions between one kind of thinking and another, theorizing that diverse kinds of thinking disclose diverse kinds of meaning, and that this meaning corresponds in some way to the actual state of affairs.

Dooyeweerd developed an anti-reductionist ontology of "modal aspects", concerning diverse kinds of meaning which are disclosed in the analysis of every existent thing. He considered such modes to be irreducible to each other and yet indissolubly linked. Dooyeweerd at first suggested that there were 14 modes but later postulated 15. The indissoluble coherence of these modal aspects is evinced through their analogical relationship to one another, and finally in their concentration in the central religious selfhood which has a direct relationship to its origin: God.

The majority of Dooyeweerd's published articles and multi-volume works originally appeared only in Dutch. During his lifetime efforts were already underway to make his work usable to English-speakers. Translation of Dooyeweerd's writing has continued since 1994 under the oversight of the Dooyeweerd Centre see link below. To date, thirteen books have been published in English, including his magnum opus, De Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee 1935–1936, which was revised and expanded in English as A New Critique of Theoretical Thought 1953–1958.

Dooyeweerd's influence has continued through the joining for Reformational Philosophy and its journal Philosophia Reformata which he and Vollenhoven founded in 1932. The title of the journal is something of an arcane philosophical joke, which repristinates and shifts the meaning of the designation from a 1622 book, authored by Johann Daniel Mylius, Philosophia Reformata, a compendium of alchemy, then regarded by some as a science. There are also a number of institutions around the world that draw their inspiration from Dooyeweerd's philosophy.

Dooyeweerd became item of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1948.

In a commemoration editorial appearing in the newspaper Spinoza not excepted."