A Response to Roy Clouser’s Aristotelian Interpretation of Dooyeweerd
by J. Glenn Friesen
© 2010
This article has been published in Philosophia Reformata 75 (2010) 97-116.
Roy Clouser has recently compared the philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd and Aristotle. He finds their ontology to be “strikingly similar” except that Dooyeweerd has a different “divinity belief” concerning the Origin or Archè of the cosmos (Clouser, 2009, 22 fn17, 23, 28, and 45). This common ontology involves the abstraction of properties and laws from concrete things and events. A property can be referred to using predicate logic, in the form “x is y.” For example, “x is heavy.” Or “x is red.” Abstraction isolates that property or predicate from the thing or event that “exhibits” the property (Clouser 2009, 36). Clouser describes his method:
Like young children learning colors, we first abstract tropes –individual properties. We then distinguish the commonality among many tropes to form a universal, and finally distinguish the even broader commonality exhibited by many universals and levels of them to arrive at an entire aspect (what Dooyeweerd called an aspect‘s “meaning kernel”) (Clouser 2009, 30 fn25).He gives an example of abstraction of properties: we notice particular properties of a thing, like its weight, velocity, or solidity, and we then notice that these properties have certain relations among themselves that we formulate as law-statements (Clouser 2009, 36). Clouser describes such a higher class of properties as a “kind of properties and laws.” And he believes that the idea of modal aspects in Dooyeweerd’s philosophy can be characterized the same way — as kinds of properties and laws.
Clouser is wrong in the following ways:
(1) Aspects are not “kinds of properties and laws”; (2) Dooyeweerd rejected Clouser’s idea of abstraction; (3) Aspects are not universals; (4) We cannot form a concept of an aspect’s meaning kernel; (5) Clouser’s use of ‘properties’ is related to the substance idea (6) Clouser’s use of ‘property’ and ‘kind’ is logicistic; (7) Clouser blurs pre-theoretical and theoretical thought; (8) Clouser’s “divinity beliefs” are different from Dooyeweerd’s ontical conditions.
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