Background
De Koninck, Charles was born on July 29, 1906 in Torhout, Belgium.
De Koninck, Charles was born on July 29, 1906 in Torhout, Belgium.
His family emigrated to the United States in 1914, but Charles returned to Belgium where he studied Classics at the Collège Notre Dame in Ostend and studied Chemistry and Physics at the École Normale in Torhout. followed by three years reading Philosophy (1925-1928). Returned briefly to the United States and studied at the University of Detroit but came back to Belgium to study at Louvain in 1932. Received his doctorate in philosophy in 1934 with a thesis on the Philosophy of Sir Arthur Eddington.
Invited in 1934 to Laval University, in Quebec City, where he stayed for the remainder of his life: Dean of the Faculté de Philosophie, 1939-1956.
Aristotelian and Thomistic ideas were central to De Koninck’s work, but he developed them in novel ways to support his view that nature is richer than we tend to think. He believed that there is a core of universal moral truths but its essence is such that it demands wide tolerance of human beliefs and of ways of life. He was Professor of the Philosophy of Nature at Laval, and his own notions about the theory of knowledge—always the main interest to which he returned—stemmed chiefly from his reflections on science. His view of scientific practice was originally strongly influenced by Sir Arthur Eddington and later by Alan Turing's notion of calculation. He believed that science, although soundly based on its own ground, could not give us an adequate concept of nature, and that traditional metaphysical questions remained relevant. Armour (1987, 1991) has found early intimations of the environmental movement in some of De Koninck’s work and has explored and tried to explain some seeming conflicts between his philosophy of science and his writings on religion. De Koninck had a considerable impact in English Canada as a philosopher of science and in Quebec as a philosopher of religion and a political thinker. Through his many graduate students his influence spread to the USA. In English Canada his Hollow Universe ( 1960) attracted an audience which wanted to reconcile science and religion, and its main theme—that science is a set of abstractions intelligible and valuable in themselves for pragmatic purposes but inadequate to the whole range of human experience- -drew him a wide audience. He was a staunch defender of federalism, political liberty and pluralism, who nevertheless retained a reputation for religious orthodoxy at a time when the Catholic Church was widely accused of supporting authoritarian government.