The Living Cosmopolis is dedicated to publishing essays,
articles, book reviews, and general information that "spring from
the deep well of the creative minority."
Higher
and Lower Viewpoints and Beings in the Metaphysics of Bernard Lonergan
David
Fleischacker, Ph.D.
Lonergan’s notion of the generic relationship between any
lower and higher viewpoints and lower and higher levels of being is a notion
that enters into many of his writings. He sometimes varies the language
depending on context, and speaks of the natural to the supernatural, the
infrastructure to the suprastructure, or the sublated to the sublating, though
he essentially means the same thing. As a notion, it is really part of a
metaphysics, since it regards a generic intelligibility of being within our
universe. I think one of his best
summaries of the relationship between higher and lower orders is found in Method
in Theology, in the notion of sublation.
Lonergan’s definition of it is worth quoting,
[Full
Version]
The
Experience of Being and the Horizon of Being
Giovanni
Sala, SJ, translated by Br. Dunstan Robidoux and Mr. Roland Krismer.
Transcendental method already
has a history within Neo-scholasticism, and its characteristics have recently
been recounted by Otto Muck S.J. In the reditus ad subiectum
[turn to the subject] which is central to transcendental method, consciousness
plays an obviously important role. All
authors-who try to come to a critical understanding of human cognition and
metaphysics with this method-attend to the structure of human consciousness,
with its dynamism and its significance for knowing and for all the activities of
the human spirit. The goal of our
reflections here is to articulate the meaning of consciousness within the
philosophical problematic that has been systematically developed by Emerich
Coreth and Bernard Lonergan in terms of the transcendental method.
[Full
Version]
Economics:
As If Local Community Mattered
by Bruce Anderson
Introduction
Slogans such as “think globally, act locally” and
“small is beautiful” were popular in the 1970s. Since the 1990s it
has become fashionable to talk about subsidiarity, democracy, civil
society, and sustainable development. However, the question that does
not seem to have a satisfactory answer is “What would economics be
like if local community really mattered?” My short answer is that
economics should be locally-oriented, empirically-rich,
normatively-focused. In
this article I want to explore what this would mean.
[Full
Version]
The Drama of the Separation
of Faith and Reason (Fides et Ratio).
Giovanni Sala, SJ, translated by Donald E. Buzelli
1.
Two forms of knowledge
In a strictly philosophical context, reason and faith are
distinguished as the two fundamental forms of human knowing: a knowledge
immanently generated as the result of one’s own experience, understanding
and judgment, and a knowledge attained when one relies on the veracity of
another and accepts that other’s knowledge as one’s own.
Here we wish to reserve the word “faith” for this second form of
knowledge as it occurs specifically within the religious sphere, and in
particular for knowledge of the “mysteries hidden in God that cannot be
known unless they are revealed by God himself” (DS
1795). Hence, we can follow the
Encyclical "Fides et Ratio [Faith
and Reason]"
(FR) and call this second form of
knowledge as it occurs in every other sphere “knowledge by believing”.
[Full
Version]
LONERGAN
AND THE FOURTH LEVEL OF INTENTIONALITY
Terry J. Tekippe and Louis Roy, OP
In his later thought, as is well known, Lonergan
made deep and significant shifts in his approach to morality.
More than in the earlier work, he emphasizes feeling, value
and the transcendence of doing over knowing.
If in the earlier work he embraces a basically Thomist
schema of the relations between knowing, choosing and feeling, in
the later work he appeals to Scheler and von Hildebrand for an
intentional approach to feeling, values and love.
[Full Version]
FROM
THOMAS AQUINAS TO BERNARD LONERGAN
Giovanni Sala, S.J., translated by Donald
E. Buzzelli
It may be useful to begin at once with a clarification: In this
paper I do not intend to present the thought of St. Thomas and
that of Lonergan separately, and then compare them.
Instead, I intend to discuss some of the relationships that
Lonergan’s philosophical and theological thought has with the
thought of St. Thomas. The
studies of Thomas that Lonergan conducted for more than a decade
led to a profound appropriation of the medieval master’s
thought, but this obvious continuity did not fail to bear new
fruit in the disciple, who was living in a cultural context that
was seven centuries later.
[Full
Version]
IN LOVE WITH THE UNIVERSE:
a brief introduction to the work of Bernard Lonergan
Sr. Mary of the Savior,O.P.
Farmington Hills, MI
Nowhere in the current beautiful and
insightful novellas about the contemplative life will we find their central
characters turning the pages of Lonergan's Insight or carrying in their
pilgrimage knapsacks a copy of his Method in Theology.
Are we -- or the authors we are reading -- missing something? Is Lonergan's work suitable nourishment or
accompaniment for a contemplative life?
[Full Version]
Savants
and Learning
Phyllis Wallbank
I watched very recently a
fine documentary on what used to be known as 'Idiots Savants'.
These are very exceptional children who never develop much
beyond the age of about five, but who have one exceedingly
extraordinary gift usually in drawing or music or a branch of
mathematics.....
[Full
Version]
Insight after 40 years
Philip McShane
"Cervantes - a patient
gentleman who wrote a book - has been sitting in the Elisian
fields for three centuries and gazing sadly around, awaiting the
birth of a grandson capable of understanding him"
I begin this essay, suitably yet
accidentally, on May ninth, the birthday of Jose Ortega y Gasset.
It is a suitable day, for I am writing in celebration of the
appearance of Bernard Lonergan's Insight in Spanish. It is
marvellously accidental: while I had, through yesterday, been
gearing up to this essay entwining the hopes of Ortega with the
achievement of Lonergan, only this morning did I begin Rockwell
Gray's biography of Ortega and so discover the birthdate. Finally,
the beginning is suitably accidental. Perhaps you are, at this
moment of your Spanish or English reading, thinking that the
beginning, so far, is just foolishly circumstantial? But then, I
would invite you to pause with Ortega to ask, "What are
circumstances?", to envisage you and I "existing in a
landscape of things, in a set of circumstances", to reach for
the Quixotic impossible dream that "every circumstance is
enclosed by a broader one", that " in reality everything
surrounds us".
[Full
Version]
