DESCRIPTION: Norbert Alfons Luyten (1909-1986) was a Belgian philosopher, Dominican, professor of natural philosophy and philosophical anthropology at the University of Friborg. He was the university's rector from 1956 to 1958. Luyten promoted the dialog between natural sciences, philosophy and religion. In terms of philosophy and theology, he was a proponent of Thomism. The aforementioned article is written in a similar vein. The author refers to the findings of natural sciences on the subject of man, including K. Lorenz, J. Monod, T. de Chardin, J. Eccles. At the same time, he argues that what is understood as the method of natural sciences does not provide full knowledge about man and his complexity. "The examples cited clearly show that research in the natural sciences, which deals seriously with the ‘phenomenon of man’, must come across specifically human dimensions that cannot be grasped by means of an overly narrow physical method. However, we are constantly threatened by the 'postulate of objectivity', which, elevated to the status of dogma, attempts to force man into a framework of objective-physical explanations. Then, however, we are faced with the well-known dictum 'the worse for the facts' and philosophy of the idealistic type becomes an opponent of the natural sciences. This approach is certainly not scientific. More 'scientific' is perhaps the impartial acceptance of everything that the natural sciences have to say about man, in order to build the most comprehensive picture of man possible on the knowledge thus obtained” (p. 142). The article was translated into Polish by a former employee of the WFCh UKSW, Prof. Bernard Hałaczek.
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