The historical roots of systematic distinctions

Abstract

My first explicit acquaintance with philosophy as a scholarly discipline followed from a question to my father about the slogan of the French Revolution - liberty, equality and fraternity. His answer and the books he advised me to read not only piqued my interest in philosophy but also generated many more questions. I was especially impressed that everything in our everyday experience actually function in all aspects of reality. But I was also wondering where these distinctions and insights originated from in the first place. Were these totally new insights or did they relate to the history of philosophy? It soon became clear that the distinction between aspects and entities and between various aspects indeed reflect earlier insights ("moments of truth") found in the history of philosophy and also in the various special sciences. This then guided the current investigation into the historical roots of systematic distinctions. The pivotal role of the first four aspects of reality as distinguished by Dooyeweerd occupies a key position in this analysis. Although Greek philosophers did not develop a theory of modal aspects, they already wrestled with the meaning of number, space, movement and (physical) change. The development from Pythagoreanism to the philosophy of being of Parmenides explored important interrelations between number and space, followed by the ideas of Heraclitus regarding eternal flux which implicitly explore the meaning of the kinematic and physical aspects of reality. This awareness of constancy and change exerted an influence on the substance concept and it produced solid immanent criticism both on historicism and reductionism. Modal abstraction appears to be a key element of the distinctiveness of scholarly thinking. Cassirer closely approximated key elements of the idea of a modal aspect where he argues that in order to avoid an infinite regress we have to accept certain "original functions" that cannot be derived from each other (it almost sounds like defending the biblically-informed idea of sphere-sovereignty). This insight at once opens the way to type laws and the legitimate role of experimentation (correctly emphasized by positivism). The last section of the article examines a case where an alleged "moment of truth" turns out to be a moment of "un-truth". The biblical starting point of Christian scholarship results into a non-reductionist ontology which safeguards scientific thinking from theoretical distortions and antinomies.