Wouter Oudemans

Theodorus Christiaan Wouter Oudemans (born October 30, 1951 in Amsterdam ) is a Dutch philosopher .

activity

Oudemans was Associate Professor of Philosophy at Leiden University from 1991 to 2006 . He is currently a lecturer there. De Groene Amsterdammer called him Heidegger's ventriloquist in the Netherlands in 1997 . In addition to Heidegger, Oudemans devotes himself to philosophers such as Plato , Aristotle , Descartes and Nietzsche . At the center of his debates with these philosophers is the method of philosophical thinking.

Think

The crisis of philosophy

Does it make sense to be a philosopher today? - This question, with which Oudemans begins his book Echte Filosofie , remains decisive for his way of thinking. According to him, philosophy has fallen into a fundamental crisis because it lacks a method of its own.

According to Oudemans, it once started with a pathos: concern for the whole of man and the world. From the beginning, philosophy was a process (technê) to find passages through barriers (aporias) between thinking and the world. The wellness house of technology has finally closed the gap between man and the world and freed people from worrying about the whole. Oudemans denies that there are still philosophical aporias today.

In his view, today's academic philosophy serves as a loincloth in the scientifically driven university. It also keeps the machinery of magazines, seminars, congresses, talk shows and articles running.

Philosophers, according to Oudemans, are in a bind. Either they make claims that survive or die fighting for the truth, then they are scientists. Or they evade scientifically organized experience, then their statements cannot be checked and are therefore mystical. This creates an indifferent exchange between unverifiable opinions that has nothing to do with what is.

Oudemans asks: is it possible that a transformed thinking emerges that abandons the old philosophy as a quasi-scientific method? In what way would this thinking speak and how would it be tested?

Philosophology and real philosophy

Oudemans speaks of the crazy tea society of philosophy : You sit at a large, trans-temporal table and exchange opinions with Plato , Descartes and Kant . Both historical and systematic philosophy thrived on the belief in a permeable, catachronic space for dialogue. To that extent they are both metaphysical .

In Oudemans' book Echte Filosofie , the philosophical tradition is supposed to have a different say. Words rule the thinking of the great philosophers and, more powerful than the thinkers themselves, have left traces in their texts - and it is still the same words that moved our thinking. According to Oudemans, philosophers are points of concentration of meaning: in them, meanings gather and promise themselves that appear and disappear independently of human intentions.

The big reduction

Oudemans calls our present age that of great reduction . The great reduction takes place in two phases. A first and a second mechanical revolution.

In the first mechanical revolution, marked by the names Galileo and Descartes, nature is designed as mechanical and monotonous, starting from a mathematically corrected subject, the I-thinking. Human thought, however, remains a non-mechanical, spiritual entity with an unclear relationship to mechanical nature.

According to Oudemans, the great reduction will be completed in the second mechanical revolution, initiated by the rise of Darwinism. Now life and thinking are also included in mechanics: human reason turns out to be a product of variation and selection, no less an adapted survival tool than the eye or the wing.

For Oudemans, the great reduction does not simply mean a scientification or rationalization of the world. In it, first and foremost, fundamental words would lose their meaning or change - words such as reason , ratio , meaning , idea , but also state , sacrifice , world , God . Oudemans sees the great categorical distinctions from which philosophy used to draw its meaning disappear: nature and art, matter and spirit, thing and being, being and being.

However, he does not practice any cultural criticism. The reduction is not a regrettable loss, but suggests that words are not instruments in human hands. People didn't know whether words spoke or not.

Talking about and talking about

In science something is talked about, about an object. Philosophy cannot be compared with it. She does not talk about , but about something, namely from the non-human horizon of meaning that surrounds all of our thoughts and actions. This speaking of is not propositional, but naming.

According to Oudemans, the real philosophy yet to come is the search for the most fundamental words that create the horizon of science and technology - words like information , replication , selection . You do not try to make this horizon an object, but remain in it and still keep it in view. Your concepts are included in the horizon - as is the identity of the reflective.

Works (selection)

• De verdeelde mens. Ontwerp van een philosophical anthropology. Dissertation. Meppel: Boom 1980.
• Over de natuur van mensen. Inleiding in de philosophical anthropology. With RD de Jong. Alphen aan den Rijn: Samsom 1983.
• Tragic Ambiguity. Anthropology, Philosophy and Sophocles' Antigone. With A. Lardinois. Leiden: EJ Brill 1987.
• De horizon van Buitenveldert. Gesprekken over cultuur en techniek. With A. Heumakers. Amsterdam: Boom 1997.
• Disenchantment of thought or the farewell to Onto-Theology. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot 1998.
• Real philosophy. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker 2007.
• Omertà. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker 2008.
• In kind. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker 2012.

Web links

• Filosofie.info - Dutch and German online publications by Wouter Oudemans
• Wouter Oudemans at the University of Leiden