SOFIATOPIA developed over several decades from a personal philosophical inquiry into a freely accessible corpus of web studies and books.
Its history records successive attempts to bring critical thought, scientific knowledge, and transpersonal experience into a coherent relation without reducing one to another.
Identity
Wim van den Dungen is a Belgian philosopher and independent author.
He is the founder and editor of SOFIATOPIA, a freely accessible philosophical research corpus.
Languages
Dutch, French, and English ; passive knowledge of German ; reading competence in Middle Dutch and Middle Egyptian ; basic Sanskrit.
Education
1981 : Bachelor of Applied Economic Sciences, RUCA
1983 : Bachelor of Philosophy, University Faculties Saint-Ignatius Antwerp.
1985 : Master of Philosophy, Department of Logic and Epistemology, RUG Thesis : On the Categories ‘Rationality’ and ‘Irrationality’
Additional studies included the sociology and aesthetics of music, Middle Dutch, Middle Egyptian, Sanskrit, and the hermeneutics of religious texts.
Academic Research
From 1986 to 1990, he worked as a scientific collaborator at Ghent University (RUG) on the cognitive dimensions of love mysticism, with particular attention to Beatrice of Nazareth.
Project
SOFIATOPIA was launched on April 9, 1996, as an online report of studies in philosophy and received its present name in 2002.
The website preserves provisional studies, translations, commentaries, and earlier formulations, while the books contain the more developed and stable versions of the principal arguments.
The project starts with criticism as the reflexive identification of the necessary conditions of thought, feeling, and action. The Regulae trilogy develops this as normative philosophy, articulating epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics within a common necessary architectonic.
In descriptive philosophy or metaphysics, immanent is distinguished from transcendent : the former offers an arguable but non-testable, process-based interpretation of the world, whereas the latter concerns what exceeds conceptual cognition.
Studies in Ancient Egyptian sapience, Buddhadharma, mysticology, transpersonal philosophy, and neurophilosophy assist this central philosophical undertaking.
Resistance to External Direction
The work has been developed in resistance to institutional, doctrinal, commercial, and political direction, while remaining informed by academic research and open critical inquiry.
Selected Publications
The Regulae trilogy on truth, beauty, and action ; Critique of a Metaphysics of Process ; Existence and Choice ; In Togetherness ; and studies devoted to Buddhadharma (Emptiness Panacea) and Ancient Egyptian texts (The Egyptian Gentleman, Renewal and Ascension).
A fuller publication record is available through the publications and bibliography pages.
Contact
philo@sofiatopia.org
