Herman Dooyeweerd

Yeah, it's been a while. I've been busy.

Following up on my last post, in which I determined to learn more about Neo-Calvinism and what motivates it, I've just started reading Herman Dooyeweerd's In the Twilight of Western Though: Studies in the Pretended Autonomy of Theoretical Thought. His thesis is that only Christian philosophical theory can truly be critical. All non-Christian theory is limited to being dogmatical. All culture, particularly philosophy, is based on fundamental assumptions that are essentially religious in nature. A non-Christian thinker makes his own thought or experience absolute and everything else, including God, relative. The non-Christian, therefore, must consider everything from his own vantage point--which he knows he cannot maintain is absolute--and he has no objective or even consistent point from which to critique. He is reduced to skepticism about the existence of anything, including himself, and skepticism about his ability to know anything at all. The "pretended autonomy" of his thought--its ostensibly non-religious character and ability to critique--is the dogma he is reduced to asserting vainly.

This theory is interesting to me, and promises to be very insightful.