Charles De Koninck

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Charles De Koninck
Born(1906-07-29)29 July 1906
Torhout, Belgium
Died13 February 1965(1965-02-13) (aged 58)
Rome, Italy
Alma materCatholic University of Louvain
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolThomism
Main interests
Philosophy of nature, political theory, philosophy of science, Philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, logic, theology

Charles De Koninck (29 July 1906 – 13 February 1965) was a Belgian-Canadian Thomist philosopher and theologian. As director of the Department of Philosophy at the Université Laval in Quebec, he had decisive influence on Catholic philosophy in French Canada and also influenced Catholic philosophers in English Canada and the United States. The author of many books and articles in French and English, he contributed to a variety of philosophical fields including natural philosophy, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and political philosophy, but he also wrote on theology, especially Mariology.

As the founder of the so-called Laval School of philosophy, De Koninck was the mentor of many philosophers, including Ralph McInerny, who published an English translation of De Koninck's collected works.

Life

De Koninck was born in Torhout, Belgium, the son of Louis De Koninck and Marie Verplancke, both natives of Torhout. In 1914, De Koninck family emigrated to the United States, where Louis De Koninck worked as a builder and contractor in Detroit, Michigan.[1]

In 1921 Charles was sent back to Belgium to complete his education. In Belgium he first went to school in Ostende, where his main interests were mathematics, chemistry, and physics, but where he also read widely in Latin, Greek, Dutch, and English Literature.[2] He then studied philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain, where he became a Thomist. After a spell at the University of Detroit, he returned to Louvain and earned a doctorate summa cum laude with a dissertation on Sir Arthur Eddington's philosophy of science.[3]

In 1934, De Koninck went to the Université Laval in Quebec, where he became a full professor the following year, a position which he held for the rest of his life.[3] Between 1939 and 1956 he was dean of the faculty of philosophy at Laval.[4]

A member of the Royal Society of Canada, De Koninck and his family hosted and entertained many notables in their Quebec City residence, among them Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and his fiery writer-artist wife, Consuelo Suncín during their five-week stay in the province in the spring of 1942. The De Konincks' precocious eight-year-old son, Thomas De Koninck, whom Saint-Exupéry met, may have served as an inspiration for the extraterrestrial visitor of his most famous novella, The Little Prince.[5]

Philosophy of Nature

De Koninck devoted a good portion of his philosophical work to the philosophy of nature. A youthful predilection for the sciences and mathematics was cultivated alongside his studies in the humanities. Undergraduate studies in philosophy in Belgium were supplemented by frequent time spent at laboratories with friends and teachers.[6] De Koninck’s graduate career at Louvain led him to write a dissertation under Fernand Renoirte, himself a philosopher of science, on the philosophy of Sir Arthur Eddington.[3] His dissertation attempted to parlay between classical Thomistic philosophy and Eddington’s philosophy of science, shaped by recent developments in relativity theory and quantum theory.

While De Koninck’s initial view of the relationship between philosophy and the experimental sciences followed a separatist line akin to that of Jacques Maritain, a later development in his thinking portrayed the modern sciences as “dialectical extensions” of metaphysics and, more proximately, the philosophy of nature.[7] Over the course of his career, De Koninck published articles addressing overlapping issues in classical Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy and quantum indeterminism, the biological sciences, the foundation of mathematical physics, and the philosophy of mathematics. The most accessible introduction to his thought in the philosophy of nature and science are his Whidden Lectures of 1959, published as a collection titled The Hollow Universe. In the three lectures, De Koninck addresses the philosophical foundations, content, and implications of three modern scientific inquiries: modern mathematics (“The World of Symbolic Construction, or Two is One Twice Over”), physics (“Mental Construction and the Test of Experience”), and biology (“The Lifeless World of Biology”). The epilogue to the book, “Reckoning with the Computers,” extends the theme of the hollow universe from the realm of mathematics, physics, and biology to the account of man himself. Scholar Leslie Armour maintains that “our place as knowing beings suggests to De Koninck that nature and knowing beings are so designed as to go together, and so designed as to be unintelligible without one another.”[8]

Common Good Controversy

Along with Henri Grenier and Louis Lachance, De Koninck was a prominent Thomist critic of personalism.[9] De Koninck's book On the Primacy of the Common Good: Against the Personalists criticized personalist thinkers for claiming that the common good ought to be subordinate to the private good of persons. De Koninck did not name the personalists whom he had in mind, but Yves Simon and I. Th. Eschmann assumed that he was thinking of Jacques Maritain. Yves Simon agreed with De Koninck's rejection of the subordination of the common good to the person, but denied that it applied to Maritain. Eschmann, on the other hand, defended the subordination of the common good to the person and claimed that this was in fact taught by Maritain.[10]

Main books

  • Le cosmos, Québec, Pro Manuscripto, 1936.
  • Ego Sapientia, Montréal/Québec, Fides/Éditions de l'Université Laval, 1943 (translated in Spanish).
  • De la primauté du bien commun contre les personnalistes. Le principe de l'ordre nouveau, Montréal/Québec, Fides/Éditions de l'Université Laval, 1943.
  • La piété du Fils, 1954.
  • The Hollow Universe, London, Oxford University Press, 1960 (translated in Spanish and reedited in French at the Presses de l'Université Laval).
  • Le scandale de la médiation, Paris, Nouvelles Éditions latines, 1962.
  • Tout homme est mon prochain, Québec, Presses de l'Université Laval, 1964.

References

  1. ^ De Koninck (2008), p. 69
  2. ^ De Koninck (2008), pp. 70–71
  3. ^ a b c De Koninck (2008), p. 71
  4. ^ The Canadian Encyclopedia: Charles De Koninck by Elizabeth A. Trott Archived June 8, 2011, at the Wayback Machine retrieved on 6 january 2010
  5. ^ Normand Provencher, Thomas De Koninck: l'homme aux 1001 questions
  6. ^ De Koninck (2008), pp. 70–71.
  7. ^ Brungardt (2016), pp. 1–24.
  8. ^ Leslie Armour, “The Philosophy of Charles De Koninck,” in: De Koninck (2008), p. 23.
  9. ^ Marie Martin-Hubbard, “Incursion personnaliste chez les thomistes canadiens-français des années 1930 et 1940 : l’exemple de François Hertel ”
  10. ^ Ralph McInerny, Art and Prudence, ch. 6.

Sources

  • Pierre-Alexandre Fradet (ed.), "Propos sur l'image de Charles De Koninck. Extraits d'une causerie à la Société des lettres (sans date) et d'un cours de philosophie donné à l'Université Laval (1936)", in Nouvelles Vues, issue 17, winter-spring 2016 : http://www.nouvellesvues.ulaval.ca/no-17-hiver-2016-cinema-et-philosophie-par-s-santini-et-p-a-fradet/documents/propos-sur-limage-de-charles-de-koninck/
  • John G. Brungardt, “Charles De Koninck and the Sapiential Character of Natural Philosophy,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 90.1 (2016): 1–24. doi:10.5840/acpq20161570.
  • De Koninck, Thomas (2008). "Charles De Koninck: A Biographical Sketch". In McInerny, Ralph (ed.). The Writings of Charles De Koninck: Volume I. University of Notre Dame Press. pp. 69–97. ISBN 978-0-268-02595-3.
  • The Writings of Charles De Koninck. Volume One (edition and translation), with an introduction by Leslie Armour and a biography by Thomas De Koninck, Notre Dame, Notre Dame University Press, 2008
  • The Writings of Charles De Koninck. Volume Two (edition and translation), Notre Dame, Notre Dame University Press, 2009
  • Bibliography of the writings by Charles De Koninck : http://www.charlesdekoninck.com/bibliography/

External links

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