English-Language Writings of Herman Dooyeweerd

NOTE: This is a list of works by Herman Dooyeweerd originally written in English. I have intentionally excluded English translations of Dooyeweerd’s other writings. Works are organized by year of initial publication. – KRH

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“The Contest About the Concept of Sovereignty in Modern Jurisprudence and Political Science“, Free University Quarterly 1 (1951): 85 – 106, online at [http://www.reformationalpublishingproject.com/pdf_books/Scanned_Books_PDF/TheContestAbouttheConceptofSovereigntyinModernJurisprudenceandPoliticalScience.pdf].

“Del Vecchio’s Idealistic Philosophy of Law Viewed in the Light of a Transcendental Critique of Philosophical. Thought”, Philosophia Reformata 22, no. 1 (1957): 1 – 20; 22, no. 3 (1957): 101 – 124. Entire volume online at [http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_phi003195701_01/]

In the Twilight of Western Thought: Studies in the Pretended Autonomy of Philosophical Thought (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1960; second printing Nutley, NJ: The Craig Press, 1968).

“Introduction to a Transcendental Critique of Philosophic Thought“, Evangelical Quarterly 19 (1947) 42-51, online at [http://www.members.shaw.ca/hermandooyeweerd/Introduction.pdf].

Transcendental Problems of Philosophic Thought: An Inquiry into the Transcendental Conditions of Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948).

A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, 4 volumes (Philadephia: Reformed and Presbyterian Publishing Company, 1953/1954/1957/1958; second printing 1969; third printing Ontario: Paideia Press, 1984; fourth printing Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997) [1]

Volume I: The Necessary Presuppositions of Philosophy, trans. William S. Young and David H. Freeman.

Volume II: The General Theory of the Modal Spheres, trans. David H. Freeman and H. de Jongste.

Volume III: The Structures of Individuality of Temporal Reality, trans. H. de Jongste.

Volume IV: Index of Subjects and Authors, ed. H. de Jongste.

“Sociology of Law and Its Philosophical Foundations“, in Truth and Reality: Philosophical Perspectives on Reality Dedicated to Professor Dr. H. G. Stoker (Braamfontein: De Jong’s Bookshop, 1971), online at [http://www.reformationalpublishingproject.com/pdf_books/Scanned_Books_PDF/SociologyofLawanditsPhilosophicalFoundations.pdf]

“What is Man?“, International Reformed Bulletin 3 (1960): 4 – 16. Republished in In the Twilight of Western Thought (The Craig Press, 1968). A scan of the original article can be found online at [http://www.plantinga.ca/rr/dooy-irb.pdf#]

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[1] Many Dooyeweerd scholars acknowledge that, while A New Critique of Theoretical Thought was originally intended to be a translation of Dooyeweerd’s earlier De Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee (3 vol., Amsterdam: H.J. Paris, 1935 – 1936), the New Critique ended up becoming a new work.

Cornelio Fabro Links

The Cornelio Fabro Cultural Project is currently translating the works of Italian Thomist Cornelio Fabro into English. According to their website:

The work of translating Fabro’s works into English and diffusing them began many years ago.

The following works are currently in the process of translation or of being edited:

– The Metaphysical Notion of Participation

– Introduction to Saint Thomas

– God: Introduction to the Theological Problem

– Cornelio Fabro: Biographical Profile (by Suor Rosa Goglia)

Also in preparation are several volumes of Fabro’s articles in English. The first volume focuses on participation and metaphysics.

Frankly, I’d be perfectly happy with a reasonably priced copy of Fabro’s God in Exile.

They have a larger website with more information on Fabro’s thought.

New Book: “The Philosophy of Edith Stein: From Phenomenology to Metaphysics”

From here. Book synopsis from Peter Lang:

Many interested reader will have put aside a work by Edith Stein due to its seeming inaccessibility, with the awareness that there was something important there for a future occasion. This collection of essays attempts to provide an idea of what this important something might be and give a key to the reading of Stein’s various works. It is divided into two parts reflecting Stein’s development. The first part, «Phenomenology», deals with those features of Stein’s work that set it apart from that of other phenomenologists, notably Husserl. The second part is entitled «Metaphysics», although Stein the phenomenologist would, like Husserl, initially have shied away from this designation. However, as Stein gradually understood the importance of the Christian faith for completing the phenomenological project of founding the sciences, and accepted it as indispensable for a philosophical view of the whole, her «attempt at an ascent to the meaning of being» can legitimately be called metaphysics, even as it also constitutes a fundamental criticism of Aristotle and Aquinas.

Lent Reflection (1): Edith Stein on Our Ontic Dependence on God

Despite this fleeing of being, I am; from moment to moment I am being held in being and in my fleeting being I am fastened to an enduring Being. I know that I am being held and therein I find calm and security.

Edith Stein, Endliches und ewiges Sein, translation by Antonio Calcagno (The Philosophy of Edith Stein, p. v)

Jennifer Frey Explains the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas

Over at Elucidations.

The epistemological dangers of skepticism

Another great quotation from Chapter 3 of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:

The last chapter has been concerned only with a fact of observation: that what peril of morbidity there is for man comes rather from his reason than his imagination. It was not meant to attack the authority of reason; rather it is the ultimate purpose to defend it. For it needs defence. The whole modern world is at war with reason; and the tower already reels.

The sages, it is often said, can see no answer to the riddle of religion. But the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle. They are like children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical in the playful assertion that a door is not a door. The modern latitudinarians speak, for instance, about authority in religion not only as if there were no reason in it, but as if there had never been any reason for it. Apart from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even see its historical cause. Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars. For there is a great and possible peril to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary. Against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier. And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin.

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?” The young sceptic says, “I have a right to think for myself.” But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, “I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.”

Edith Stein on the History of the Phenomenology of Causality

In the Introduction to her treatise “Sentient Causality”, which can be found on pages three through five of Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities (Volume 7 of the Collected Works of Edith Stein), Edith Stein gives a beautiful account of the history of the phenomenology of causality [footnotes removed]:

The concept of cause today has not yet recovered from the blow that Hume’s devastating critique dealt to it (in spite of the skeptical contradiction in his method, which unraveled the concept of cause on the basis of a causal consideration). The mind of the Humean critique is to be detected in all modern treatments of the problem – in spite of Kant and the “definitive solution” customarily attributed to him.

And no wonder. Because what Hume was looking for and believed he conclusively proved unfindable – the phenomenon of causality – Kant has not exhibited either. Rather he obviously shares Hume’s view on  this point, and infers form the indemonstrability of causality, which he recognizes, the necessity of pursing the investigation on an entirely  different ground. Kant deduces causality as one of the conditions for the possibility of an exact science of nature. He shows that nature, in the sense of natural science, is not conceivable without causality. That is an incontestable consequence, but it doesn’t settle the causality problem and it doesn’t give a satisfying answer to Hume’s question.

 Hume can be overcome only on his own ground, or, more precisely, the ground on which he was trying to carry out his own considerations but which methodologically he himself was unable to secure sufficiently. He started out with nature as it present itself to the eyes of the naive contemplator. In this nature there’s one causative linkage, one necessary sequence of happening. He wanted to investigate consciousness of this linkage: what kind of consciousnesses it is and whether it is rational. All that kept him from finding the evident coherence that he sought was a half-baked theory of the nature of consciousness and especially of experience. It misled him on the conclusion as well, to explain away the phenomena from which he started out and without which his whole way of setting up the issue would become incomprehensible.

This question undoubtedly exposes a genuine epidemiological problem, but it’s not possible to give an answer with a treatment like Kant’s which has to do only with a natura formaliter spectata [nature viewed formally]. It is not concerned with the phenomena. The causality that it deuces is a form allowing itself to be filled in in many ways. It calls for only a necessary linkage in time; but what kind of linkage this is we can’t find out form a ‘Transcendental deduction in the Kantian sense. It takes a method of analysis and description of phenomena, that means, of objects in the whole fullness and concretion in which they present themselves to us, and of the consciousness corresponding to them.