Filosofische beschouwingen

 Introduction The scientific work of Charles Darwin, Ludwig Boltzmann, and Ilya Prigogine shares a common explanatory form, even though each worked in a different domain. Charles Darwin explained the adaptive fit and diversification of living beings through heritable variation, struggle, and natural selection; Ludwig Boltzmann explained thermodynamic behavior by relating macroscopic regularities to the statistical behavior of molecular populations; Ilya Prigogine showed that open systems far from equilibrium can generate stable, organized patterns through irreversible processes and fluctuations. What unites them, therefore, is not a single theory, but a common style of explanation: in each case, order is not imposed from outside by a designer or guaranteed by timeless essences, but arises from the dynamics of many interacting elements over time. Charles Darwin Charles Darwin’s significance is philosophical as well as biological. His theory of natural selection provided, as the Stan...

 Introduction The contingent, contestable, and institutionally limited character of constitutions and laws is not an accidental defect of political life. It follows from the kind of thing law is and from the kind of beings we are. Scientific laws, on standard philosophical accounts, aim to describe regularities or necessities in nature; human laws, by contrast, are part of a normative order that depends on social facts, institutions, interpretation, and enforcement. Constitutionalism itself is the project of legally limiting political power, while the rule of law names a set of formal and procedural ideals - clarity, publicity, stability, prospectivity, and regular administration - through which such limitation is pursued. Human constitutions therefore do not stand outside history like laws of physics; they are artifacts of collective agency, designed to govern persons who disagree, speak imperfect languages, pursue conflicting ends, and wield power under conditions of uncertainty....

Introduction R. G. Collingwood ’s mature philosophy is often read through two interconnected theses: (i) inquiry is irreducibly question-governed (a statement’s meaning and standing depend on the question to which it is offered as an answer), and (ii) every mode of inquiry rests on presuppositions that are not themselves straightforwardly testable propositions. In An Essay on Metaphysics (1940) Collingwood radicalizes these theses into a program for “reforming” metaphysics: metaphysics is not an ontology of supersensible entities, but a reflective, historically informed discipline whose subject matter is the absolute presuppositions that make determinate questions - hence determinate sciences and practices - possible. In this essay I (1) make an attempt to articulate the contemporary significance of Collingwood’s approach and (2) reconstruct the fundamental philosophical principles advanced in An Essay on Metaphysics , with special attention to presuppositional analysis and Collingwoo...

Introduction “Social and economic development” and “geopolitical position” are not neutral metrics: each presupposes a conception of freedom, agency, and legitimate power. Civic republicanism, classical political liberalism, and classical socialism offer three distinct normative grammars for evaluating development and the standing of a polity in a world structured by markets, states, and transnational power. Civic republicanism identifies freedom with non-domination - secure independence from arbitrary power—whether public or private. Classical political liberalism gives priority to a presumption in favor of liberty and demands justification for coercive authority; it typically emphasizes rights, rule of law, and a protected sphere for individuality. Classical socialism, in its paradigmatic Marxian forms, understands liberal “rights” and capitalist markets as producing formal political emancipation alongside material dependence , and condemns capitalism for exploitation and dominatio...

Introduction The 1919 eclipse expeditions associated with Arthur Eddington  (1882-1944) did not deductively prove general relativity in any strict logical sense; rather, they supplied a historically potent instance of empirical corroboration for a theory that redescribed the basic structure of space, time, and gravitation. Philosophically, the episode matters because it (i) made the geometry of spacetime look like an empirical issue rather than a fixed background framework, (ii) sharpened questions about how observation confirms theory when data analysis is method-dependent, and (iii) helped reorient metaphysical realism away from everyday intuition and toward mathematically articulated structure. The eclipse thereby became a hinge-point for twentieth-century debates about the a priori, conventionalism, and scientific objectivity. Many thanks to the philosophy lessons at the  University of Antwerp  (Belgium). 1. What the eclipse result actually established The eclipse pr...

Introduction Hannah Arendt is “popular” (i.e., recurrently appropriated, debated, and taught) across traditions that otherwise disagree about metaphysics, revelation, and the foundations of ethics. That cross-appeal is not accidental. Arendt’s project is architecturally political - concerned with the conditions under which human beings can appear to one another, speak, judge, and act together - yet it is also existential and moral, because it treats responsibility, evil, and the fragility of agency as central philosophical problems. Her work therefore lends itself to two different but compatible receptions: Christian philosophers often find in Arendt a rigorous, non-pious retrieval of theological motifs (creation, new beginning, forgiveness, neighbor-love) that can be translated into political philosophy without collapsing into confessional doctrine - precisely the kind of “publicly intelligible” grammar that political theology and Christian ethics frequently seek. Secular humanist ph...