The Writings of Charles De Koninck: Volume 1

The Philosophy of Charles De Koninck

The Philosophy of Charles De Koninck Leslie Armour Charles De Koninck devoted his philosophical career to answering three of the questions which have most exercised contemporary men and women: How can we understand the growing chasm between our scientific world pictures and the world as it appears to common sense? How can we understand the power of modern science and accept its insights while maintaining our most central and traditional religious beliefs? And how can we maintain the responsibility and dignity of the individual without undermining the communities in which we live and without denying the scientific accounts of human nature? Many philosophers have tackled these questions, but De Koninck was one of the relatively few to do so while denying himself the right to change the terms of reference. He wanted, that is, to retain his religious faith and not, as perhaps Whitehead did, to create a new religion. He wanted to accept science as it really is and not insist on redefining its functions and practices . And he wanted to maintain commonsense notions of human responsibility and to defend human dignity as it was understood by ordinary men and women around him. A priori, there is no reason why the philosopher should not, if he deems it wise, question the terms of reference and propose new religions or new tasks for scientists. De Koninck’s significance lies partly in the fact that he did try to answer the very questions which intelligent men and women were asking and continue to ask. It seemed clear to him in any case that any intelligent enquirer would conclude that science was one of the great human achievements. And his religion was to him a matter of unshakeable faith. Both religion and science were to be enquired into,but each had claims which a philosopher was unlikely to overturn.Human responsibility and the dignity that went with it seemed to him beyond reasonable question. The problem,   | Leslie Armour therefore,was to understand both of these so that religion and science did not destroy one another in a fruitless war and so that human freedom was not bought at the expense of the community and the community was not sustained at the cost of human dignity.I think,within his terms of reference,that he came as close as anyone has to answering these questions and that, while his philosophy has many loose ends, it is capable of substantial development. . The Structure of Charles De Koninck’s Philosophy It is a commonplace that Charles De Koninck was a philosopher of science and a religious man, but it would be almost as true to say that he was a philosopher of religion and a man of science. For, despite his long and complex involvement with ecclesiastical affairs in Quebec and despite the fact that bishops in Quebec and senior church bureaucrats in Rome both sought his advice and took it seriously, he was by no means a figure of conventional piety. If he had a quarrel with contemporary science, it was that mathematical physics, in pursuit of its legitimate policy of abstraction, sometimes forgets the richness of the facts of experience on which it is founded.De Koninck came to Laval University in Quebec in  from Louvain, where he had written a doctoral dissertation in the philosophy of science, and he came as Professor of the Philosophy of Nature. He was to become Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, and would write on moral, political, and social theory as well as religious meditations. But science and its relation to nature remained always at the centre of his thought. Students find it curious—even paradoxical— that a man who not only devoted himself to the study of the intellectual foundations of modern science but whose writings show all the usual marks of a “man of science” should also have played an important part in the discussions which led up to the promulgation of the dogma of the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary. That promulgation, which took place in , was seen as an embarrassment to many Catholic intellectuals; even those who welcomed it often did not relish the thought of explaining it to outsiders. But De Koninck (though he once said in print that he understood their embarrassment ) felt no unease whatever. The problems posed by this dogma both illustrate and are symbolic of the tension between science and religion in the last half of the twentieth [3.149.255.162...