An Introduction to Bernard Lonergan

Book excerpt: 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.