This article identifies two trends in Dooyeweerd’s conception of ‘cosmic time’, and elaborates their consequences for the philosophy of history. The first trend, connecting time to modal diversity and the order of the modal aspects, prevails in Dooyeweerd’s analysis. The application of the second trend, emphasizing that in each relation frame the temporal order governs subject-subject relations and subjectobject relations, sheds a new light on the interpretation of history conceived of as development of the culture and civilization of mankind. The (...) distinction of faith and religion and the position of the aspect of faith in the order of the modal aspects play important parts in this discussion, in particular with respect to the possibility of transcending time. (shrink)

This is the last of three articles on the relationship between science, religion, and professional practice in psychology and psychiatry. The first article highlighted the importance of the distinction between four types of knowledge. In the second article the scope was broadened and amounted to an analysis of the normative structure of professional practices. I showed the relevance of this analysis by investigating its meaning for the notion of restoration, along the dimensions of structure and direction. The I-self relationship played (...) an important role in the conceptualization of the relationship between these two dimensions. In this article I will apply the notion of (normative) practice to science andphilosophy. After a discussion of the views on integration of Nancey Murphy and Ian Barbour (both Christian philosophers) I will briefly introduce some insights of the Dutch (Christian) philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd, who emphasized the primacy of everyday knowledge and experience. In the latter part of the article I will discuss and reject constructivist objections to both the idea of the primacy of everyday knowledge and the normative practice model. (shrink)

A Christian approach to scholarship, directed by the central biblical motive of creation, fall and redemption and guided by the theoretical idea that God subjected all of creation to His Law-Word, delimiting and determining the cohering diversity we experience within reality, in principle safe-guards those in the grip of this ultimate commitment and theoretical orientation from absolutizing or deifying anything within creation. In this article my over-all approach is focused on the one-sided legacy of mathematics, starting with Pythagorean arithmeticism (“everything (...) is number”), continuing with the geometrization of mathematics after the discovery of irrational numbers and once again, during the nineteenth century returning to an arithmeticistic position. The third option, never explored during the history of mathematics, guides our analysis: instead of reducing space to number or number to space it is argued that both the uniqueness of these two aspects and their mutual coherence ought to direct mathematics. The presence of different schools of thought is highlighted and then the argument proceeds by distinguishing numerical and spatial facts, while accounting for the strict correlation of operations on the law side of the numerical aspect and their correlated numerical subjects (numbers). Discussing the examples of 2 + 2 = 4 and the definition of a straight line as the shortest distance between two points provide the background for a brief sketch of the third alternative proposed (inter alia against the background of an assessment of infinity and continuity and the vicious circles present in contemporary mathematical arithmeticistic claims). (shrink)

Scientific inquiry is both theoretical and empirical. It succeeds by bringing thought into productive harmony with the observable universe, and thus, students can attain a robust understanding of the nature of science only by developing a balanced appreciation of both these dimensions. In this article, I examine naïve empiricism, a teaching pattern that deters understanding of NOS by attributing to observation scientific achievements that have been wrought by a partnership of thought and empirical experience. My more specific concern is the (...) naïve empiricism promoted when teachers illustrate NOS through historical anecdotes about conflict between science and religion. Since the religious actors depicted in such accounts appear to reject evidence, these narratives lead readers to suppose that scientists draw their conclusions in exactly the opposite way, from empiricism alone. I illustrate this pattern by examining two representative treatments of the Copernican revolution. My methods are historical and critical. (shrink)

Objectivity in the sciences is a much-touted yet problematic concept. It is sometimes held up as characterising scientific knowledge, yet operational definitions are diverse and call for such paradoxical genius as the ability to see without a perspective, to predict repeatability, to elicit nature’s own self-revelation, or to discern the structure of reality with inerrancy. Here we propose a positive and general definition of objectivity based on work in the Reformational philosophy tradition. We recognise a suite of relation-frames–ways in which (...) things function and relate to each other, which can be analytically distinguished in the process of conceptual abstraction. These relation-frames also ground the diverse aspects of scientific analysis within which relationships and properties may be abstracted from entities and systems. We argue that objectivity can be understood as characteristic of representations that attempt to portray a subject in an earlier relation-frame than that in which it characteristically functions. In short, objectivity is projection. This proposal is exemplified from mathematics and the natural sciences and some possible objections to it are considered, as well as its extension to the social sciences. (shrink)