The Challenge of Lonergan’s Thought: The Reach of Critical Realism

In challenging us to be conscious of our own subjectivity, Bernard Lonergan set out an updated mode of Aristotelian epistemology that took insights from every major philosophical tradition of the modern era. This book explains how that unique positioning makes his ideas perfectly placed to bridge the divide between analytic and continental philosophy. Andrew Beards uses Lonergan's approach not only to understand the many connections between analytic and continental traditions, but to engage with them in new and creative ways. Throughout, he puts Lonergan into conversation with other leading thinkers like St John Henry Newman, G. E. Moore, Friedrich Nietszche and L. M. Chauvet, drawing on Lonergan's own direct engagement with their philosophies to underscore the wide-ranging significance of his transcendental method.

Table of Contents:
Preface Chapter 1: Newman, Lonergan and the dialectic of epistemology I Chapter 2: Newman, Lonergan and the dialectic of epistemology II Chapter 3: The Irreducibility of the Good: G. E. Moore and Bernard Lonergan Chapter 4: Chapter 4: Epistemic Traction: Critical Realism, Quine and Gila Sher Chapter 5: F. Nietzsche: A Master of Modern and post-modern suspicions Chapter 6: Cathedrals of Light: Chauvet after Heidegger Chapter 7: Method in Theology a half century on Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Andrew Beards is lecturer and tutor at Allen Hall Seminary, where he teaches on the Pontifical degree course offered with St Mary's University, Twickenham. He is the author of Objectivity and Historical Understanding (1997), Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytical Philosophy (2008), Insight and Analysis (2010), Philosophy the Quest for Truth and Meaning (2010), and Lonergan, Meaning and Method (2018).

Review :
The breadth of Beards' engagement with 19th century and contemporary philosophers – from Newman to Heidegger, from Nietzsche to G. E. Moore and Gila Sher - demonstrates the depth of Bernard Lonergan's epistemic foundations. Aware of these depths, Beards is also aware of the heights to which Lonergan aspired and attained in connecting St. Thomas's explicit appreciation of theology as a science with the foundations he excavated and made explicit in the Verbum articles and Insight. Beards continues to be a trustworthy contemporary custodian of Lonergan's legacy. From Lonergan's understanding of judgment comes a critical realism that guides not only our own comprehension, but shapes the way in which we can evaluate the judgements put forward by others as answers to difficult questions. Beards's Challenge of Lonergan's Thought directs us to think about how good judgment comes from evidence: how it is centered on our apprehensions of proof. In this volume Dr. Andrew Beards carefully develops and dialectically contrasts a number of leading philosophers and theologians in the frontiers of cognitive theory, epistemology, metaphysics, meta-ethics, and theology with Bernard Lonergan's critical realism revealing a potency to bring together many disparate movements into an emergent, differentiated, and dynamic collaboration. This is a clear, refreshing, and engaging collection of essays.