The Dooyeweerd Pages

"The most profound, innovative and penetrating philosopher since Kant." [1]

"Most impressive about Dooyeweerd are his universal interest,

his multidisciplinary competence and his respect for empirical data.

I know no philosopher who laboured so hard

to understand the essence of all diciplines

in the whole spectrum of scholarly endeavours

nor one who contributed so fundamentally to their foundations,

from theology, history, law and the social sciences

to biology, physics and mathematics." [2]

Come to this website if you want to:

Find out about Dooyeweerd's philosophy (especially his aspects)

Explore, discuss, critique Dooyeweerd

Compare his ideas with others

Use Dooyeweerd's ideas in practice.

Overview

Dooyeweerd's philosophy is unusual and interesting in several ways:

2. Dooyeweerd puts meaningfulness and normativity (law) at the centre, as the ground for existence, process, ethics and rationality. (Most philosophers either ignore meaningfulness or treat it as a mere byproduct of subjective or intersubjective attribution.)

3. Dooyeweerd went deeper than Kant, Husserl, Habermas, Bhaskar or Foucault in understanding the non-neutrality of theoretical thinking in sciences and philosophy, penetrating to the very attitude of thought. With a wide-ranging immanent critique of 3000 years of thinking with a deeper transcendental critique than these applied, he revealed inescapable religious presuppositions underlying all theoretical activity.

4. What Heidegger did for Being, Dooyeweerd did for Meaningfulness. Dooyeweerd can heal the Cartesian rift between subject and object and the Kantian gulf between ontology and epistemology, without denying any of them.

Dooyeweerd's philosophy is valuable because:

2. Valuable in research in the natural sciences and humanities. Dooyeweerd provides a new understanding of sciences and disciplines, and a foundation for interdisciplinarity. His transcendental critique offers fresh explanations of the dialectical tensions that prevail in many fields, and possibilities of overcoming them.

3. Valuable in philosophy. Dooyeweerd provides new foundations for understanding meaning and law, being and time, diversity and coherence, subject and object, intuition and knowledge.

Structure of Site: