Emeritus Faculty

The Institute’s first professor, who taught systematic philosophy from its founding year until 2001. Understanding Our World: An Integral Ontology (1984) set out the categorial framework much of ICS’s later work argued with and built on.

Joined the faculty in 1968 and has practised as a psychotherapist since 1982. In I Pledge You My Troth and The Beautiful Risk he trades mastery for love, and reads relationship itself as the site of healing.

A pioneering voice in Reformational aesthetics. Rainbows for the Fallen World (1980) gave a generation of Christian artists a way to square their faith with their vocation, and is still the book people arrive at ICS having read.

“The motive driving me to work especially on this subdivision within the history of philosophy was not the expectation of arriving at the originary source of my own systematic…”— D.H.Th. Vollenhoven, “The Consequential Problem-Historical Method”

“The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.”— Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”— Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 1973

“[M]ore and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”— Matthew Arnold, The Study of Poetry