Empowering Bernard Lonergan's Legacy

Toward Implementing an Ethos for Inquiry and a Global Ethics

By (author) John Raymaker

Not available to order

Publication date:

07 December 2012

Length of book:

212 pages

Publisher

UPA

ISBN-13: 9780761860310

Empowering Bernard Lonergan’s Legacy offers an interdisciplinary approach to Lonergan’s work. It presents a series of five “feedback matrices” to situate his work within a historical context. The matrices also serve to establish foundations for an interdisciplinary ethics and a method for interreligious dialogue. “Feedback” and “matrix” are key, but previously unstressed, notions in Lonergan’s work. The book’s final two collaborative feedback matrices could best be implemented in a proposed international Lonergan association. Raymaker argues that without such an association, Lonergan’s breakthrough method cannot reach its interdisciplinary and collaborative potential. One of Lonergan’s most important achievements was his development of foundations for the sciences, ethics, and interreligious dialogue. One can best empower Lonergan’s legacy through a correct understanding and implementation of how the data of human consciousness affects all human knowledge and activities.

List of Illustrations
Foreword By Philip McShane
Introduction xv
Part I Historical And Intercultural Backgrounds
Lonergan’s Notions of “Matrix” and “Feedback”
Chapter 1 Generalized Empirical Method (GEM) as Possible “Feedback Matrices”
First Historical Feedback Matrix: Situating GEM’s Mediating, Transformative Roles
Chapter 2 Two Further Feedback Matrices: Historical Implications
Metaphysical Equivalence and the Limitations of Various Analyses
A Second Historical Feedback Matrix: How Lonergan (GEM) Goes Beyond Aquinas
Third Historical Feedback Matrix: How Lonergan (GEM) Reconciles Galileo, Pascal, and Einstein
Part II An Ethically Empowering Foreground Coordinating Lonergan’s Legacy
Chapter 3 Transitional Issues in Evaluating Holistic-GEM-FS Collaboration
Chapter 4 Implementing the Functional Specialties in Two Phases
Fourth GEM-Fs Feedback Matrix: Functional Collaboration And Grounding Ethics
A First Complementarity-Dialectical Phase: Grounding GEM Operations
Transition to Fig. 3b’s Second Cooperative Dialectical Phase
Chapter 5 Fifth Feedback Matrix: A Structured IGEMA
Operating as a Collaborative FS Feedback Matrix to Implement the Human Good
Conclusion
Appendix I: GEM-Buddhist Dialectical Foundations
Appendix II: GEM Economics
Appendix III: Feedback Matrices’ Transformative Roles and Mathematical Analogies
Index

Various contemporary books and movements, especially in ecology, point us towards the need for structures of action. . . . Raymaker has a precise ethical and intellectual perspective to offer.