I mentioned in my last post that we should be cautious about the
demand for usefulness. If the task is a genuine one, and I believe seeking to
give a coherent theoretical account of the diversity of God's creation is
such a task, then it will bear fruit. It may not be immediate and
obvious, but we can expect some contribution to human flourishing. Now I would
suggest that if an explicitly Christian philosophy, developed before the advent
of digital computers, was able to bring insight into the study of information
systems, then that would suggest that it had something worthwhile to it. If this
philosophy could be presented in a way that acknowledged it's rootedness in the
Christian faith, and yet could appeal to a wide audience so that a leading academic
publisher was willing to print it, then we should sit up and take some notice.
Andrew Basden has taken Herman Dooyeweerd's philosophy and done just that. See his latest book Foundations of Information Systems.
Steve Bishop has a great two part interview with Andrew. Here's a snippet:
I want to leave behind a means by which people can understand Dooyeweerd and his usefulness. That is primarily why I wrote the book. It explains Dooyeweerd's philosophy to a degree that I think people would be able to work from even if I wrote nothing more, and it discusses how Dooyeweerd's philosophy can do two things in each of five areas. One is to provide a foundational understanding of each area. The other is to engage with discourses in the area - over 50 of them. I don't want to reject or replace the ideas on which each discourse centres, but to affirm what is valid, critique the underlying presuppositions, and enrich the ideas, all using Dooyeweerd and the foundational understanding I have constructed.
Read the interview here:
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