Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation: Essays in Reformational Philosophy by Lambert Zuidervaart (review)

Although the philosophical "school" of reformational philosophy goes back to nineteenth-century pastor, academician, and politician Abraham Kuyper and matured in the early twentieth century, it is still a living movement in contemporary philosophy. The book Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation by Lambert Zuidervaart provides evidence for that. In the beginning of the book, Zuidervaart is quite open about his purpose with this book: not merely to present and defend ideas that were developed by Herman Dooyeweerd and Dirk Vollenhove, two major founding fathers of reformational philosophy but also to use them as sources of inspiration to develop new ideas, thereby not hesitating to show the weaknesses and shortcomings in their writings, but always with the positive intention to learn from them and seek for better ways of conceptualizing issues such as the nature of existence and knowledge.

Zuidervaart has structured this collection of articles according to three "generations" in reformational philosophy. The first generation is that of Dooyeweerd and Vollenhove. The second generation is that of Hendrik Hart, Zuidervaart's philosophical teacher, Calvin Seerveld, James Olthuis, and Albert Wolters. It is a pity that the relation between their thinking and that of the first generation does not become very clear in the articles of this part, as he mainly opposes them with other philosophers like Theodor W. Adorno, Max Scheler, and Ernst Cassirer. What names he had in mind for the third generation does not become entirely clear in his introduction to Part Three, but, in the articles, we find names like Jonathan Chaplin and Henk Geertsema. Geertsema, surprisingly, is the only Dutch philosopher in the second and third generation that serves as a discussant for Zuidervaart. Thus, we do not get to see names like Hendrik van Riessen or Egbert Schuurman, who were significant second generation philosophers and contributed primarily to the domain of the philosophy of technology. Also we miss the whole recent development of the normative practice model, as developed by Jan Hoogland, Gerrit Glas, and Henk Jochemsen. Maybe these names will feature in a next volume, as Zuidervaart indicates that this book is the first volume in a series.

The author truly does what he promises; he presents a fair picture of what Dooyeweerd and Vollenhove brought forward and emphasizes the great originality of their thinking. At the same time, he skilfully analyses some important inconsistencies and suggests ways to "repair" these while still doing justice to the original intentions of the founding fathers. His deepest concern about the original writings by Dooyeweerd and Vollenhove is that they fail to take into account the historical and social dimension in philosophical conceptualization. Dooyeweerd and Vollenhove believed their concepts were "absolute" in that they did not depend on historically changing conditions or social influences. Although second generation philosophers in reformational philosophy have acknowledged some of the limitations in Dooyeweerd's and Vollenhove's writings, in Zuidervaart's view, they have remained too much in this realm of timeand context-independent conceptualizations. Zuidervaart realizes that he was criticized for his own more radical distance from the founding fathers, and in Part Three, in particular, he defends his position while showing that he still sees himself as a reformational philosopher in the full sense.

In the course of the book, we get to see some of the most important ideas in reformational philosophy. In particular, the non-reductionist way of thinking in this "school" becomes clear, and, on this subject, there is still an important contribution in debates on, for instance, the nature of science. Zuidervaart also sketches where reformational philosophy differs from reformational epistemology, as represented by, for example, Alvin Plantinga and Nicolas Woltersdorff. These individuals seem to be more optimistic about the possibilities for true knowledge of God, while Dooyeweerd and Volenhove were more cautious to make claims about that because they saw God's position as being above the laws of our rationality and that making God the object of our knowledge...