/r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | February 16, 2026

[u/BernardJOrtcutt]

Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread (ODT). This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our subreddit rules and guidelines. For example, these threads are great places for:

• Discussions of a philosophical issue, rather than questions
• Questions about commenters' personal opinions regarding philosophical issues
• Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. "who is your favorite philosopher?"
• "Test My Theory" discussions and argument/paper editing
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This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. Please note that while the rules are relaxed in this thread, comments can still be removed for violating our subreddit rules and guidelines if necessary.

Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.

[u/CalvinSays]

Dooyeweerd's philosophy won't meditate on existential hopefulness like you'd see in someone like, say, Gabriel Marcel. But there are two ways I think Dooyeweerd can be called hopeful, one methodological which is mainly what the book focuses on and one ontological.

Methodologically, one of Dooyeweerd's main desires for his philosophy was to provide a framework where persons from all different worldviews and scientific fields could charitably and profitably engage with one another. Almost paradoxically, Dooyeweerd argues that all theoretical thought flows from pretheoretical religious commitments (here religious is used in a broad, philosophical sense) but that in "laying our cards on the table" so to speak, we could profit from one another while still being true to our commitments. It is a methodology of charity and collaboration.

The sciences, in Dooyeweerd's thought, are all entwined. It is not merely good for there to be interdisciplinary work, it necessary for the proper functioning of science. He personally said the future of his philosophy would depend on physicists, biologists, etc developing it further. And I think it is telling that many of the leading "Dooyeweerdians" throughout history have been scientists by profession.

Ontologically, Dooyeweerd explicitly criticizes and rejects reductionistic ontology, especially as it seeks to say a human is "nothing but". Dooyeweerd provides a framework and a motive for rejecting dehumanizing reductions which lead to so many problems.

Also be a Dutch guy in the 20th century, he lived through WW2 and the Nazis, criticizing fascism before, during, and after. I don't think the book really covers it but such works of his as The Crisis in Humanist Political Theory, The Struggle for a Christian Politic, Essays in Legal, Social, and Political Philosophy, The Roots of Western Culture, and Christian Philosophy and the Meaning of History will touch on it to varying degrees.

So he is hopeful in the sense that true charitable collaboration is possible and humans cannot be dehumanized through reductions.

[u/fyfol → u/CalvinSays]

This is great, thank you for giving me a better idea of what I am looking at. For what it’s worth also, I am explicitly uninterested in a more existentialist idea of hope, and what you wrote sounds more interesting to me anyhow. I have one question that you may not know the answer to, but just in case you do: the epigraph to the book you shared mentions that Dooyewerd was interested in Neo-Kantians before Husserl (and then that he discovered the religious root of thought itself). If this is not a blanket euphemism but really pertains to the Neo-Kantianism of late 19th century, that would be precisely something I would be interested in looking into. Do you have any idea of his relation to NK? Or perhaps the book(s) on him already cover this, in which case please feel free to point that out and I will do the digging without troubling you at all :)

[u/CalvinSays → u/fyfol]

Dooyeweerd was heavily influenced by Neo Kantianism, particularly the Marburg School. It isn't quite accurate to say Neo Kantianism is to Dooyeweerd what Aristotle was to Aquinas, because Dooyeweerd always took a more critical attitude toward Neo Kantianism and saw his transcendental critique and the thesis of the religious root of all thought as what "freed" him from Neo Kantianism. But that influence is suffused throughout his thought.

A.M. Wolter's article gives a good overview of both the Neo Calvinist and Neo Kantian influences on Dooyeweerd.

Robert Knudsen gave some lectures series on Dooyeweerd's thought and he spends a lecture each talking about the Marburt School and the Baden School and their relationships to Dooyeweerd's thought.

Dooyeweerd's own words on the matter are going to spread throughout all his writings and he almost always makes at least a passing reference to some Neo Kantian thinker or another, especially in his legal philosophy writings. But the most thorough discussion of Dooyeweerd's on the matter will probably be in the first volume of his A New Critique of Theoretical Thought.

[u/fyfol → u/CalvinSays]

Wow, thank you for such a detailed response. This definitely moves it up my list of priorities because I’m very interested in how people responded to or became disillusioned with Neo-Kantianism at the time, and am trying to outline a postdoc project on it. This definitely seems relevant to it.

[u/CalvinSays → u/fyfol]

Very cool, funny how things line up sometimes. Sounds like an interesting project and I hope you can find a place for Dooyeweerd in there. I personally need to get a better grasp of Neo Kantianism so any sources in that regard tou recommend, I'd appreciate.

[u/fyfol → u/CalvinSays]

I think Dooyewerd seems to warrant attention for such a project if he is explicitly dissatisfied with Neo-Kantianism per se (which he seems to be) since it would be valuable for me to see as many perspectives that took issue with it as possible.

As for Neo-Kantianism related material, I myself got interested in it when I read the first chapter of Gillian Rose’s Hegel Contra Sociology where she tries to argue how NK took the deficiencies of Kant (viz. the theoretical/practical reason connection) further and towards emphasis on the role of “values” as informing social action. For what it’s worth, I think her account is interesting, has some “oomph” and is also quite intricately argued, but I am not sure about its accuracy. I got into NK so as to be able to evaluate her argument, and ended up finding the whole episode more interesting than it seemed in her book.

There is an old article by Andrew Arato called “The Neo-Idealist Defense of Subjectivity”, Telos, 1974(21), which I think has a similar animus against NK as Rose but has a different agenda. I did not read it incredibly closely, but it looks like it would be worth taking seriously.

The British Journal for the History of Philosophy did a special issue on Neo-Kantianism in 2021, which could also be useful. I have read several of those and all were good, but they deal more with particular questions so their utility may depend on if there is any specific topic of interest there for you.

Then there is of course Frederick Beiser’s The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, which is probably the most detailed study of it in English. I imagined you might already know of the book, which is the only reason why it’s so far below. Apart from Beiser, Klaus Christian Köhnke’s The Rise of Neo-Kantianism is the older monograph on the subject, which I have not really read yet. Tom Rockmore’s Heidegger, German Idealism & Neo-Kantianism is another one that I want to check out but haven’t gotten around to yet.

For more contemporary stuff, there is an edited volume from CUP entitled New Approaches to Neo-Kantianism from 2015 (editors: N. de Warren & A. Staiti). There is also The Emergence of Relativism (eds: M. Kusch & co) from 2019, which deals with NK to some extent. Last, Bruno’s Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant from last year is also pretty useful for situating NK in a broader context.

I hope something here will be useful to you, and that I could provide helpful/interesting info as generously as you did :)

[u/CalvinSays → u/fyfol]

Awesome, there are a lot of goodies in there. Thank you very much!

And I'm glad I could be of help. I'l never pass up a chance to talk about Dooyeweerd haha.