Jacob Klapwijk

Jacob Klapwijk (born 24 October 1933, Dronrijp) studied under D. H. Th. Vollenhoven in philosophy at the VU University in Amsterdam. Klapwijk's dissertation was written on Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), the German theologian and philosopher of "radical historicality" who gave us the sociological distinction between Church, Sect and Mysticism. Klapwijk's title for this work was Between Historicism and Relativism: A Study in the Dynamics of Historicism and the Philosophical Development of Ernst Troeltsch (with a German summary). Although this important contribution has now been translated by Donald Morton, it has long been waiting for publication, due the author's desire to complete a lengthy new Introduction. In 1974 Klapwijk received a chair at the VU University in the History of Modern Philosophy, while later a Chair in Systematic Philosophy was added. His inaugural lecture was published as Dialectics of Enlightment: An Exploration in the Neomarxism of the Frankfurt School (1976).

In the field of systematic philosophy a key task that Klapwijk took upon himself was that of analyzing and criticizing most cautiously Vollenhoven's early idea of the possibility of an integral Christian philosophy unaccommodated to the ideas of Greek paganism or modern secular humanism undiluted by what Vollenhoven had called "synthesis philosophy", i.e. a mix of Gospel motifs with sophisticated conceptions of a non-Christian origin. For Vollenhoven, this synthesis quality compromises the entirety of the Patristic philosophical theology, contrary to Alfred North Whitehead's appraisal of the same era. (See also the Wiki page for Classical Christian Philosophy, a misnomer.)