An Introduction To The Philosophy Of Bernard Lonergan

This is an introduction to the philosophy of a Christian thinker of the 20th century. The author pursues his thesis through mathematics, empirical science, common sense, depth psychology and social theory, into metaphysics, ethics and natural theology.

"Bernard Lonergan's insight, one of the great philosophical works of the twentieth century, is a challenging book for any reader. Bernard Lonergan: An Introductory Guide to Insight provides readers with a first reading guide, emphasizing what is truly essential and central to Lonergan's work. It allows readers to make their way through a first reading by providing a summary of each chapter and questions for reflection."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Bernard Lonergan was a mid 20th century Canadian philosopher and theologian. This book aims to help form a basis for inquiry into Lonergan's achievement in his new approach to the great philosophical questions: what do I do when I know something? (cognitional theory), why is doing that 'knowing'? (epistemology) and what do I know when I do that? (metaphysics).Lonergan deals with these questions somewhat more deeply in his major works, Insight (1957, 1992) and Method in Theology (1972, 2017). Here he invites one to discover in oneself the dynamic structure of one's own cognitional and moral being and in doing this, one finds an operative procedure that is not open to radical revision. In fact, Lonergan has unearthed a dynamic, conscious framework for creativity, a method that grounds all investigation that is intelligent and critical. It is a resource that is transcendental in that it is the concrete and dynamic unfolding of human attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness and responsibility, and this unfolding occurs whenever one uses one's mind in an appropriate fashion.This method, for investigators too, is new in its finding eight tasks that are distinct and separable stages in the single process from data to results and can be adapted to any subject in which investigations are responding to past history and are to influence future history.

Bernard Lonergan's ambitious study of human knowledge, based on his theory of consciousness, is among the major achievements of twentieth-century philosophy. He challenges the principles of contemporary intellectual culture by finding norms and standards not in external perceptions or reified concepts, but in the dynamism of consciousness itself.

This collection of essays, addresses, and one interview come from the years 1966-73, a period during most of which Bernard Lonergan was at work completing his Method in Theology. The eighteen chapters cover a wide spectrum of interest, dealing with such general topics as 'The Absence of God in Modern Culture' and 'The Future of Christianity,' narrowing down through items such as 'Belief: Today's Issue' and more specialized theological and philosophical studies, to one on his own community in the church ('The Response of the Jesuit ...') and the illuminating comment on his great work Insight ('Insight Revisited'). This book is a reprint of the first edition published in 1974, edited by William F.J. Ryan and Bernard J. Tyrrell of Gonzaga University, Spokane. The editors contribute an important introduction in which they emphasize that Lonergan's central concern is intentionality analysis, and that two major themes run through the papers: "first, the clear emergence of the primacy of the fourth level of human consciousness, the existential level, the level of evaluation and love; secondly, the significance of historical consciousness. These papers, then, besides the unity they possess by appearing within the same seven year period, share a specific unity of theme."

In Deference to the Other brings contemporary continental thought into conversation with that of Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984), the Jesuit philosopher and theologian. This is an opportune moment to open such a dialogue: philosophers and theologians indebted to Lonergan have increasingly found themselves challenged by the insights of thinkers typically dubbed "postmodern," while postmodernists, most notably Jacques Derrida, have begun to ask the "God question." While Lonergan was not a continental philosopher, neither was he an analytic philosopher. Concerned with both epistemology and cognition, his systematic and hermeneutic-like proposals resonate with the concerns of philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, and Kristeva. Contributors to this volume find insight and affiliation between Lonergan's thought and contemporary continental thought in a wide-ranging work that engages the philosophical problems of authenticity, self-appropriation, ethics, and the human subject.