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Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977) was a Dutch legal scholar by training, who by vocation was a philosopher, and the founder of a new approach called, the philosophy of the cosmonomic idea.
Dooyeweerd attempts to provide a philosophy which accounts for not only the differences between one thing and another, but also, between one thinker and another. He shows the remaining need of a consistent and radically Christian philosophy, and proposes his as a model. Following Abraham Kuyper, and other, earlier neo-calvinists, Dooyeweerd claims that all thinking is governed according to fundamental assumptions.
The basic presuppositions he refers to, from his Christian perspective are disclosed as being religious in nature. The radically religious commitment, or "religious ground-motive", impels every thinker to submit all of his thoughts to its influence, so that all things seem to fit into the scheme determined for him by his prior commitment, his most basic beliefs. From thinker to thinker, as these presuppositions differ between them, people view the world differently from one another. Thus, there is a basic "antithesis", a source of irreducible differences, which must be accounted for as a foundational issue, in any complete philosophy; and, this antithesis is religious in nature.
Borrowing language and concepts from a wide variety of philosophical schools, especially from the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, Dooyeweerd builds on this foundation of a supposed "antithesis", to make distinctions between one kind of thinking and another, theorizing that diverse kinds of thinking disclose diverse kinds of meaning, and that this meaning corresponds in some way to the actual state of affairs.
Dooyeweerd developed an explanatory framework of "modal aspects", concerning diverse kinds of meaning which are disclosed in the analysis of every existent thing. He suggests that there are exactly 15 of these modal aspects, which bear an analogical relationship to one another, and finally to the thinking self. And, the self has an analogical relationship to God.
The majority of Dooyeweerd's published works appear only in Dutch. However, his magnum opus, De Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee, has been published in English as, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. The esoteric terminology and concepts have limited Dooyeweerd's direct influence; however, his indirect influence through others (e.g., Cornelius Van Til) has been more considerable.
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