D. H. Th. Vollenhoven

D. H. Th. Vollenhoven

Dirk Hendrik Theodoor Vollenhoven (November 1, 1892, Amsterdam–1978) was with Herman Dooyeweerd the first generation of reformational philosophers, an intellectual movement with which Vollenhoven worked communally from his election in 1936 as President of the newly-organized group formed to advance the movement; the organization is now known as the Association for Reformational Philosophy.

(Outside formal settings Vollenhoven always preferred to be addressed simply as "Theo," pronounced in his native Dutch with only a "t" sound, but spelled "Th" in deference to the Theta-sound in the Greek origins of the name.)

Pastor

After Vollenhoven's marriage, he became a pastor in the Gereformeerde Kerk in Oostkapelle from 1918. In 1921 he moved pastorates to Den Haag (The Hague) which afforded Vollenhoven and his friend Herman Dooyeweerd opportunities for discussions. These discussions formed the foundation of what became known as Reformational philosophy.

Doctorate and the VU University

While pastoring his congregation in Den Haag, Vollenhoven was appointed the first full-time Professor of Philosophy at the VU University in Amsterdam – partly because his academic background was strong in classics, philosophy, and theology and partly in consideration of his interdisciplinary doctoral dissertation in theology and the philosophical foundations of mathematics: 'The Philosophy of Mathematics from a Theistic Standpoint' (not yet translated from the Dutch). He successfully defended it in 1918. To prepare for it, Vollenhoven — whose undergraduate and Master's level studies were pursued at the VU University — turned to VU's larger rival, the University of Amsterdam (UA) in order to study under its Professor of Mathematics, Dr Lutgen Brouwer, an Intuitionist in mathematics and a Marxist in other respects. Vollenhoven in his dissertation criticized Brouwer's version of Intuitionism, but retained and revised the definition of the term "Intuitionist" for his own emerging position,¹ which would become a component of Vollenhoven's epistemology. Once inaugurated into the chair of Philosophy at the VU University, Vollenhoven shouldered the responsibilities of his task from the time of his appointment, being a relatively young scholar, to the time of his retirement in ripe old age.

Christian philosophy

Vollenhoven was one of the leading intellectuals at the Free University and in the broader Reformed community of his country, who were dedicated to work formatively at the task of founding a distinctively Christian Philosophy. At the time, philosophical thought was dominated by German neo-Kantianism, and that movement's main challenger, the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. An affinity for mathematics linked some of Husserl's and Vollenhoven's ideas. Vollenhoven also absorbed significant influence from the maverick neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer.²

Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd

The main influences on Vollenhoven's thought were the VU's founder Abraham Kuyper and leading theologian Herman Bavinck who both taught a theistic realism, along with a number of other VU professors and outside sources — Anema taught a transcendental realism, Wilhelm Geesink introduced Vollenhoven to the critical philosophy of Kant, Jan Woltjer taught him Classical languages and the literature and philosophy those languages carried, Woltjer also brought Vollenhoven into awareness of the modern natural-scientific theories of Lorentz, van der Waals, and Einstein. The professor of medical thought L. Bouman raised the questions of body and soul, and the lector F.J.J. Buytendijk the questions of the psychic aspect of human and animal life. Both Vollenhoven and the two-years-younger Herman Dooyeweerd had been educated at the Gereformeerd Gymnasium (an academic highschool in Amsterdam) and both studied straight through the VU curriculum to achieve their doctorates, with the younger Dooyeweerd always two years behind. ³

Vollenhoven first met Hermina Maria ('Mein') Dooyeweerd, a secretary, a year after he became a VU student in 1911; Mein typed a report for Vollenhoven on a summer evangelization project in Amsterdam during 1912. Once aware of Mein, Vollenhoven also became better acquainted with her younger brother Herman. Theo and Mein married in 1918; and fourteen days after, September 27, Vollenhoven obtained his doctoral degree; his dissertation supervisor and "promotor" (as the Dutch say) was Prof Geesink.

Thus the two emerging philosophers became more than friends but also brothers-in-law, while later they also became colleagues as professors at VU. For a while in Den Haag, Vollenhoven was also Dooyeweerd's pastor. In 1926, Vollenhoven received an appointment as professor of philosophy at VU, the first full-time appointment in the discipline. By 1933, he served as VU's first University Dean, a rotating position, and published Calvinism and the Reformation of Philosophy (not translated, Het Calvinisme en de Reformatie van de Wijsbegeerte). Two years later Herman Dooyeweerd published a first full-dress statement of their philosophy, although by no means did they agree on everything.[3] The three-volume work was entitled De Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee (The Philosophy of the Law-Idea, often abbreviated "WdW"). Both scholars surged forward as a team to lead the intellectual movement that crystallised around it.

As a result of the interest that the WdW generated, together Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd founded the Association for Calvinist Philosophy (ARP) (Vereningen voor Calvinistsche Wijsbegeerte), which soon counted some 500 members. Vollenhoven was the first president of the association, and remained in that office until his retirement in 1963.

Vollenhoven played a very large role in the development of the ARP, and mentored most of the philosophers who emerged from this intellectual movement for much of the time, while Dooyeweerd mentored students in the specialty of jurisprudence.

Problem-Historical Method

As professor of philosophy at the VU, Vollenhoven realized that a systematic/thetical approach implied a critical framework for understanding and evaluating the philosophical work of others. Philosophical systematics requires a close historical reading of the entire common tradition of Western philosophy, from the early Greeks onward. Vollenhoven was well equipped by his classical studies for this pursuit of an adequate historiographical backup for a systematic philosophy that sought to be meaningfully and distinctively Christian. So, he started from scratch and worked methodically, employing the tools that he had garnered.

As his horizon grew in those early years of his professorship, Vollenhoven envisioned writing nothing less than an entire history of Western Philosophy. He sketched out ideas for a ten-volume work and actually produced the first volume covering the fragments of the Pre-Socratics; published as the first volume of Gescheidenis der Wijsbegeerte: Deel I (History of Philosophy). This was to be the proof to the academic community and the government that he was competent to undertake the ambitious program of the full ten-volume work that he envisioned. In the mean time he carried a full teaching load of course offerings for undergraduate philosophy majors and graduate students in philosophy.

However, by the time his first volume appeared in 1950, his method was so innovative and unfamiliar that the editors, reviewers, and most of all the fellow academics in the field who sat on the committee to approve the government grants for "pure research" reacted negatively to his offering. Recovering from this keen disappointment⁴, Vollenhoven was nevertheless able to use his first volume as a textbook at the VU; and an American student of his, H. Evan Runner, later created an English translation in mimeo form to use as a course syllabus at Calvin College. There were also the better parts of two further volumes extant and a pile of notes for the later volumes, but at this point, Vollenhoven changed direction.

Critical Problem-Historical Method

Prof. Vollenhoven started work on what became the Schematic Charts⁵ for the history of Western Philosophy according to what he now began calling his Consequent Problem-Historical Method to distinguish it from other methods with less rigour and less sense of the scope of problems to be explored and connections to be clarified. The Schematisch Kaarten (Schematic Charts) finally appeared in Dutch long after Vollenhoven's retirement and death in 1978, posthumously in 2000. This was due to the devoted work of Dr Kor Bril who did the lion's share of the editorial work and devised the celebrated visual display that makes the work so effective as a reference source on every philosopher's desktop, assisted by (now Dr) P. Boonstra. This belated publication, still in Dutch only, constitutes a veritable revolution in our knowledge of the 16,000 philosophers whose views it classifies and briefly charactrises, based on close empirical attention to the fragments and the works the thinkers offered, each in his or her day.

Vollenhoven's successor and students

The Netherlands

Vollenhoven's successor as historian of philosophy at the VU was Jacob Klapwijk. Dr. Klapwijk picked up many of the loose ends in Vollenhoven's prodigious work, especially those around a central distinction within the new philosophy — namely, the problem that can be approached in terms of an antithesis/common-grace distinction with its theological overcast, and the problem of radicality/normalcy within the history of Western philosophy, which leads to an inquiry regarding reformational philosophy's place within its broader context, synchronically and diachronically. In Vollenhoven, these questions were often reduced to the label of "synthetist thought", the presumed synthesis of a pure Christian ideational system, problem by problem, with the contaminants of a purely antithetical pagan, atheist, or humanist position. Klapwijk took up a careful attention to Vollenhoven's blind spots on these important issues, making the larger burden of Vollenhoven more accessible. As additional professors were added to the Faculty of Philosophy over the years at VU, a line of thinkers using Vollenhoven's Method continued to develop, so that not only did Chairs in the Faculty grow in number, but Chairs devoted to the history of philosophy increased in number and specialization. In the Chair devoted to the Presocratics and Classical Greek philosophers, Dr Abraham Bos has become world-renowned for his re-writing the book on Aristotle, principally by exhuming the popular philosophical writings by which Aristotle continued to be known after his philosophical works disappeared for a few centuries. The works of Aristotle which were quoted, sometimes at length, by Cicero and many others, have been exhumed by Bos and subjected to philosophical analysis and evaluation. This development stresses the importance of the addressee of a given work by a philosopher, not least of all Aristotle. Such a consideration berings literary, rhetorical, stylistic, and genre issues into the proper concerns of philosophy proper.

Two scholars of immigrant families to Canada who had studied under H. Evan Runner at Calvin College (Grand Rapids, Michigan) journeyed back to their country of birth to the Free University to study philosophy under Vollenhoven, and while writing their dissertations received employent in the Center for Historical Documentation at VU. They are again Netherlanders, returned former emigrants. They continued to work in the Documentation Center, using it as a base to further knowledge of Vollenhoven's Consequent Problem-Historical Method. Dr Anthony Tol is one; he had an avenue of interest based in Vollenhoven's attention to mathematics, as well as Vollenhoven's overall work at developing his Method for the entire history of Western philosophy. Dr Kor Bril is the other; in addition to his work in the Center's Archives, Bril more than any other over twenty years brought to fruition the publication of Vollenhoven's Schematic Charts (later, Dr P. J. Boonstra also helped in this project). Dordt College Press which is seeing several titles of Vollenhovian scholarship through to publication in the Spring of 2005.

South Africa

Three South Africans who studied under Vollenhoven must be named as well, Dr D. F. M. Strauss who is the world's leading expert on this philosophy's modal-scale theory; Dr Elaine Botha, known for her philosophy of metaphor; Dr Bennie van der Walt, an outstanding activist-scholar who headed the Centre for Reformational Studies at the University of Potchestroom (now North-West University), and pushed along that university's adaptation to the post-apartheid opportunities for Christian higher education in Africa. Dr Ponti Venter is a law scholar at the main campus in Potchefstroom of North-West University, who teaches in the midst of dynamic changes throughout South Africa's legal system.

North America

The first person among the newer generation to be noted for his use of Vollenhoven's consequent problem-historical method (CPHM) in the United States is John VanderStelt who had studied theology under G. C. Berkouwer at VU, but had attended Vollenhoven's lectures and read the philosopher's books, much of them available for years in mimeo editions in Dutch. With Berkouwer's retirement, VanderStelt who was already teaching philosophy at Dordt College (Sioux Center, Iowa), decided to write his dissertation using Vollenhoven's method in an inter-disciplinary way and geared to his American milieux. The dissertation for the University of South Africa (since Berkouwer in the meantime had retired and his successor was unfamiliar with VanderStelt's thematic) was enititled Philosophy and Scripture. A Study in Old Princeton and Westminster Theology (1978); the volume was part of the author's personal process of intellectual indigenization, as well as an important scholarly contribution.

In the North American situation, the two main exponents today of Vollenhoven's consequent problem-historical method (CPHM) are Dr John Kok of Dordt College, who wrote his dissertation on Vollenhoven's early development; and Dr Robert Sweetman (ICS, Toronto), who holds the H. Evan Runner Chair in the History of Philosophy, who is a Medieval philosophy specialist, and who brings an incipient theory of discourse to a gap in the archtectonics of this school of historical-philosophical thought. Sweetman stresses that beyond the Schematic Charts, there is the task and opportunity of writing historical narrative, a matter which becomes a problem of concern in itself. Philosophy and its history are always written in genres, styles, and in historical narratives of philosophy, in which considerations of voice, plot, characters, and metaphory all come into play in the realisation of the narrative structure.

The story of the slow but steady diffusion in North America of Vollenhoven's influence, along with Dooyeweerd's, remains to be told. The issue of translation of the Schematic Charts and other works of Vollenhoven into English and Spanish in particular, remains a priority task.

Footnotes

1. Post by Jan de Koning from the discussion list at the American Scientific Affiliation on his experience with Vollenhoven.
2. Biography of Ernst Cassirer
3. J. Stellingwerff Vollenhoven's biographer,
4. "Report of Divergences I" by Vollenhoven.
5. Schematic Charts

References

• John H.Kok. 1992. Vollenhoven: His Early Development, Dordt College Press: Dordt.
• Anthony Tol. 1978. In memoriam: Dirk Hendrik Theodoor Vollenhoven. Philosophia Reformata 43: 93-100.
• Al Wolters. 1979. On Vollenhoven's problem-historical method. In Hearing and Doing: Philosophical Essays Dedicated to H. Evan Runner. John Kraay and Anthony Tol (eds). Wedge: Toronto.

External links

• Vollenhoven Association
• Vollenhoven studies
• Vollenhoven resources
• Vollenhoven's History of the Presocratic Philosophers translated by H. Evan Runner

Persondata
Name	Vollenhoven, Dirk Hendrik Theodoor
Alternative names
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Date of birth	November 1, 1892
Place of birth
Date of death	1978
Place of death