Philip McShane
- University College Dublin (Bachelor of Science)
- Heythrop College (S.T.L.)
- Oxford University (D.Phil)
Philip McShane (18 February 1932 – 1 July 2020) was an Irish mathematician and philosopher-theologian. Originally trained in mathematics, mathematical physics, and chemistry in the 1950s, he went on to study philosophy from 1956 to 1959. In 1960, after teaching mathematical physics, engineering, and commerce to undergraduates, and special relativity and differential equations to graduate students, McShane began studying theology. He did his fourth year of theology in 1963 and in 1968 began reading economics.
In a period that spanned over sixty years, McShane published numerous articles and twenty-five books.[1] His publications range from technical works on the foundations of mathematics, probability theory, evolutionary process, and omnidisciplinary methodology, to introductory texts focusing on critical thinking, linguistics, and economics. He also wrote essays on the philosophy of education. Beginning in 1970, he participated in and helped organize a number of international workshops and conferences addressing topics such as "ongoing collaboration,"[2] reforms in education, and communicating the basic insights of two-flow economics.[3]
Two Festschrift volumes were published to honor McShane, one in 2003[4] and the second in 2022. In the first, eighteen individuals contributed essays, and, at the request of the editor, McShane submitted an essay as well.[5] He also replied to the eighteen contributors in the essay "Our Journaling Lonelinesses: A Response.”[6] In the second Festschrift, twenty-four individuals wrote essays remembering and honoring McShane,[7] who was nominated for the Templeton Prize in 2011 and 2015.
Life and education
McShane was born in Baileboro, County Cavan.[8] When the McShane family moved to Dublin, Philip went to O'Connell School. He continued his education while training as a Jesuit at University College Dublin (BSc and MSc in relativity theory and quantum mechanics), St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg (Lic. Phil), Heythrop College (STL) and Campion Hall, Oxford (D.Phil.).[9] He lectured in mathematics at University College Dublin (1959-1960) and in Philosophy at the Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy (1968-1973).
McShane entered the Jesuits in September 1950 and spent two years in spiritual formation.[10] In 1952, in spite of having "acquired a 'broken head,' which meant he was unable to study, or even to do any serious reading, he was also allowed to risk a very challenging programme of mathematics, mathematical physics, physics and chemistry."[11] Eleven years later, after completing a B.Sc., an M.Sc. in relativity theory and quantum mechanics, and a Licentiate of Philosophy, he was ordained a Jesuit priest.
In 1956, McShane "shifted from graduate studies of mathematics and physics that included such works as the classic Space-Time Structure by Erwin Schrödinger,"[12] and embarked on what would be a lifelong venture of reading and appropriating the works of Bernard Lonergan, initially through a careful study of Lonergan's Verbum articles,[13] followed by a startling study Insight.[14] In the years that followed, he co-authored (with Garret Barden) Towards: Self-Meaning and wrote Music That Is Soundless. In the mid-1960s, he studied at Oxford University, where in August 1969 he successfully defended his doctoral thesis "The Concrete Logic of Discovery of Statistical Science," which soon after was published as Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence.[15] After the First International Lonergan Conference in Florida 1970, McShane took on the task of editing two volumes of the papers presented at that event.[16] In 1972, he decided to leave the Jesuits.[17]
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In 1975, along with Conn O'Donovan, McShane founded the Dublin Lonergan Centre, in Milltown Park, Dublin.[18] In 1979, he served as visiting fellow in religious studies at Lonergan College, Concordia University, Montreal. In his course, McShane encouraged students to work through the exercises in his introductory book Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations.[19] From 1974 until 1994, McShane taught philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. When he retired from teaching in 1995, he began writing prolifically.[20] After retiring, McShane also accepted invitations to speak at international conferences and workshops. He gave keynote addresses at gatherings in Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America.
In the last years of his life, McShane wrote about the negative Anthropocene age in which we live and a future positive Anthropocene age of luminous collaboration.[21] In Questing2020, his final series of essays, he wrote of the possibility of human collaboration mirroring the psychic adaptation of starling murmuration.[22] When McShane died in July 2020, colleagues and former students around the globe paid tribute to him. A theologian from Africa described him as akin to an "African elder,"[23] another as someone who "gave counsel to think long-term, in terms of centuries rather than years or even decades,"[24] and a third as "someone I could always be myself around, even when I was angsty, anxious, or depressed … a friend, mentor, professor, and family member all at once."[25] A former student described "being amazed, when I asked him some questions, at his generosity—he tore out a chapter of something he was working on and gave it to me there and then."[26]
Influences
By his own account, McShane was humbled as a young man by the works of Chopin and fortunate to have discovered Descartes' achievement in geometry.[27] He wrote about "the luck of working with Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh in graduate studies of mathematical physics in the mid-fifties."[28] He also studied and had a keen appreciation for Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics, especially the third lecture.[29] McShane was fond of and often quoted the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Patrick Kavanaugh. "Having music in his genes,"[30] he often referred to particular pieces of music. For example, the quiet emergence of five notes that grow to dominate Bruckner's 8th symphony was symbolic for him of the slow emergence of effective global collaborartion. "Bruckner's 8th has been symbolic for me of the climb to effective functional scientific collaboration: a five note echo trickling in at the beginning of the second movement and finally taking over the symphony: so, we trickle in at, we hope, the beginning of the second movement of the Anthropocene."[31]
In his "story of history,"[32] McShane referred to the works of Karl Jaspers, Arnold Toynbee, and Eric Voegelin and identified an axial period of "fragmented consciousness, a transition between what Lonergan calls the two times of the temporal subject."[33] There are references to the teachings of the Buddha, the music of Beethoven, and the works of James Clerk Maxwell in Bernard Lonergan: His Life and Leading Ideas.[34] In an essay written for a conference on peaceful coexistence,[35] he cited Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Aurora Leigh" and William Shakespeare's Henry IV, and referred to Archimedes' "leap of inventiveness" when he created a hydrodynamic screw to raise water. In the same essay, he referred to Ezra Pound's image of a vortex as symbolic of a global community "committed to a science of cosmic care ... redeeming time from the mad destructive greed of the 'civilized' majority of the present global population."[36]
Various women influenced and shaped McShane's worldview. His extensive writings on the "Interior Lighthouse"[37] were inspired by Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle.[38] McShane resonated with the English novelist and poet Mary Ann Evans, who went by the name of Georg Eliot. He regularly cited this line from the middle of Eliot's Middlemarch: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity.”[39] McShane cited more than a dozen times the lyrics of songs on Sinead O'Connor's album Faith and Courage in Lonergan's Standard Model of Effective Global Inquiry.[40] His appreciation and admiration of greatness extended to the performances of Serena Williams and Venus Williams on the tennis court,[41] the lifework of Nadia Boulanger, who was very much on McShane's mind when he wrote Process in the late 1980s,[42] and to “Molly Bloom’s long Gospel-speech,”[43] which McShane cited time and again. In his writings on economics, he regularly cited the British economist Joan Robinson, who was well known for her disagreement with standard economics, especially American economics.[44] He also referred to the work of Jane Jacobs, with whom he corresponded.[45]
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In a lecture introducing the economic analysis of Lonergan at Fordham University in January 2000,[46] McShane quoted Stephen McKenna. When McKenna discovered the writings of Plotinus in his late 30s, he pondered the possibility of translating The Enneads from Greek into English and decided "this is worth a life." It could be said that McShane made a similar decision when he discovered the works of Bernard Lonergan. He described the "central contribution" of his doctoral thesis in these terms: "It is an attempt to establish on a wider basis of contemporary mathematics and science the position of B. Lonergan on the nature of randomness, statistics, and emergence."[47] Thirty years after completing his thesis, McShane edited for publication Lonergan's economic manuscript For a New Political Economy,[48] and two years later Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism.[49] He regularly referred to the final two chapters of the latter as a resource for trying to identify and come to grips with both the ontic and phyletic aspects of the "existential gap."[50]
For more than 60 years, McShane diligently read and reread Insight: A Study of Human Understanding,[51] and is arguably the leading interpreter of this compendious work. In the essay "Insight and the Trivialization of History," he described having been "enormously fortunate in coming to Insight in 1957 after graduate studies in general relativity and quantum electrodynamics."[52] In 2011, McShane was recognized for his contributions to Lonergan studies at the West Coast Methods Institute's 26th Annual Fallon Memorial Lonergan Symposium at Loyola Marymount University.
Capacities, needs, and interests
Towards an Adequate Weltanschauung[53]
The cultivation of an adequate worldview was a focus of McShane's early writings, and remained so throughout his life, although in the later years of his life he would write of Praxisweltanschauung.[54] In his rather peculiar doctoral thesis,[55] McShane aimed to reorient the philosophy of science away from general considerations towards a reflection on scientific praxis, again, through a two-fold attention of the mathematician, physicist, biophysicist, and biochemist. He claimed that the world view "emergent probability"[56] is a verifiable, anticipatory heuristic that is not "abstract" in the pejorative sense of the word.
The Weltanschauung thus given is not a set of abstract propositions or a speculative metaphysics, but a structured anticipation. Moreover, that anticipation may not be the methodical anticipation of the results of just one science, but an integrated anticipation of the results of a hierarchy of sciences, such indeed as our inclusive principle of emergent probability provides.[57]
Regarding the publication of his Oxford doctoral thesis, McShane wrote that "the book might well have been subtitled Towards an Adequate Weltanschauung."[58] This claim might appear odd, even exaggerated, given the questions he dealt with in his thesis—ostensibly specialized questions in the philosophy of math, physics, biophysics, and biochemistry. McShane's position, stated in the original preface, is that a viewpoint on the relationship of physics to chemistry and chemistry to botany is part of an adequate worldview. "Without that thought one lacks a basic component for the conception of world process. The present work deals with the central element and the heuristic conception of world process."[59]
In Music That Is Soundless (1969), he wrote about what he considered a core component of a comprehensive worldview: our human capacity and need for conversations, or what he called "Bud A,"[60] a "bud in our birth that clamours in solitude."[61] The book is an invitation to attend to "the conversation that we are" (Hölderlin) by asking self-attentively: "When was I last understanding, understood? When did I last speak? When did I last listen?[62]
At the heart of the worldview that McShane wrote about, taught, and advocated is the human capacity and need for a particular doubling. We humans are capable of having conversations about conversations while asking ourselves what happens when we are truly understanding, listening, and speaking.[63] Patient contemplation can lead us to a better understanding of understanding, a better listening to listening, and a better speaking of speaking. Regarding the basic question, When was my last real conversation? "one may honestly find that one has little or no data,"[64] especially if cultural conditions are not favorable to real conversations: "Ten thousand people, maybe more / People talking without speaking / People hearing without listening."[65]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Mibox2.jpg)
In the introductory book Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations (1975), which might have been subtitled "Towards an Adequate Worldview,"[66] the double focus took the form of an invitation to appropriate, in as much detail as possible, the "inner"[67] dynamics of the process of understanding why, for example, the rule for getting square roots actually works. McShane included some simple diagrams in this book to help the reader appropriate, or "self-taste," what-ing (chapters 2 and 3), is-ing (chapters 4 and 5), what-to-do-ing (chapter 6), believing (chapter 7), symbolizing conveniently and judiciously (chapter 8), and exploring potentialities for living through the arts (chapter 9).[68] In the final chapter of this book, McShane made the remarkable claim that a change of framework, or point of view, is both possible and desirable if humans are to survive. But there is a Catch-22: "The need for change in point of view is thoroughly clear only from a changed point of view."[69]
In the Epilogue to Music That Is Soundless, McShane wrote that "to raise with seriousness the question, What is understanding? is to venture into a quest of scientific dimensions."[70] What 'scientific dimensions' meant to him in 1968 was mediated by his study of relativity theory and quantum mechanics at University College, Dublin (1952–56). In both his doctoral thesis and "Image and Emergence: Towards and Adequate Weltanschauung"[71] (one of two papers he wrote for an international congress that took place in Florida in 1970), McShane was traveling along what he would later call "Butterfield Way."[72]
The study of organic development
Organic development had been a topic of interest for McShane in the 1960s, and in fact was a possible topic of his thesis. "I recall especially wanting to see could I lift the biological logic of someone like Woodger into a full genetic logic."[73] What he knew would have been a "lengthy aside"[74] in the doctoral thesis, became one of his central interests around 2005, when he took a serious interest in development, in part because of Robert Doran's question "What is systematic theology?"[75] In the spring of 2008, McShane decided to write a series of essays to better read a single paragraph in Insight about three steps for studying organic development. A first step is to descriptively differentiate different parts of an organism;[76] a second step is to accumulate a group of insights relating various parts to events and operations; and
a third step is to effect the transition from the thing-for-us to the thing-itself, from insights that grasp described parts as organs to insights that grasp conjugate forms systematizing otherwise coincidental manifold of chemical and physical processes. By this transition one links physiology with biochemistry and biophysics. To this end, there have to be invented appropriate symbolic images of the relevant chemical and physical processes.[77]
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McShane identified the three-step procedure for studying organic development as perhaps the most obscure challenge for scholars with an interest in the works of Lonergan.[78] He would add to the obscure challenge by adding the word self to the sentence to highlight the starting point of a study of the developing human: "Self-study of an organism begins from the thing-for-us, from the organism as exhibited to our senses."[79] He referred to the need to bring the study of human development under heuristic control as "a missing link."[80]
In Interpretation from A to Z (2020), McShane was still focused on the methodological study of organic development.[81] The central problem was and is the genesis of a genetic viewpoint that will replace "daft reductionism that chatters away about genes and information theory."[82] In this, the last book published in his lifetime, he referred to the challenge as "the up-grading of Aristotle, whose flaw is merely his time in history."[83] In chapter "J ~ Inventing Techniques," he wrote that the invention and implementation of convenient and appropriate symbolic images is "the honest starting place of a genuine science of humanity," an "issue that has to be faced in the contemporary reality"[84] of what he called aggreformism, a word he coined in 1969 to refer to a sublation of Aristotelian hylemorphism. The contemporary need is to create an ethos of inventing convenient symbols and reading, for example, the semicolons in the expression f (pi ; cj ; bk ; zi ; um ; rn)[85] or another appropriate symbolic expression. In either case, the symbolism protects those studying development from "substituting pseudo-metaphysical mythmaking for scientific inquiry."[86] McShane wrote that "the semicolons point to the complex solution to the root problem hierarchy theory—aggreformism—a problem that baffles the systems theorists—when they notice it—and the followers of Bertalanffy."[87]
Two-flow economics
In 1968 McShane began reading Lonergan's 1944 manuscript "Essay in Circulation Analysis" and made his first attempt to present the material in the summer of 1977. By his own account, he "estimated that [he] had spent twenty hours on each page of the manuscript over a period of about five years."[88] On various occasions and in various countries—including Australia, Canada, India, Korea, Mexico, and the U.S.—he presented the key issues underlying the significant transition from the Marxist, neo-Marxist, Keynesian, and neo-Keynesian analyses to an empirically verifiable analysis.[89] In January 2000, McShane gave a series of lectures on Lonergan's economics at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus in New York City.[90] Ten years later, he was invited to give the keynote address and lead discussions at a three-day conference on economic theory in Nashik, India.[91]
In his published works on economics, McShane explored different facets of what he called “a triple paradigm shift in economic thinking” that he attributed to Lonergan.[92] One shift is to a theory of two-flow dynamic analysis that will replace one-flow static analysis. With a bow to Schumpeter, McShane identified this shift as “a theory of economics dynamics that definitely crosses the Rubicon.”[93] A second shift is to an emerging framework of global collaboration that, in good time, will subsume all disciplines, all fields of study.[94] The third shift is “towards a deep and precise plumbing of the depths and heights of human desire and imagination.”[95]
McShane drew the following analogy to identify the shift to two-flow economics. Newton reached for a theory of motion that would unify the physics earthly motions and celestial bodies, something that was beyond both Kepler and Galileo. In a sense, he reduced two types of motion to one. The leap to two-flow economics is one that does not reduce, but differentiates, for example between the consumption of a submarine sandwich bought at the local delicatessen and the “consumption” of the meat slicer used to make the sandwich. “Instead of Newton’s great leap to get two into one, we have a great leap of getting one into two.”[96]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/Key_economic_diagrams.png/220px-Key_economic_diagrams.png)
The basic oversight that permeates the current study and implementation of economic models is the failure to identify a split in the productive process, one that needs to be made before adding variables such as banks, taxes, and international trading. “There is a type of firm that is pregnant with consumer goods: think of the restaurants in Chinatown or Little Italy. There is also the type of firm that is in the business of providing, say, varieties of large cooking ovens in restaurants all over the borough.”[97] Melding two firms into one has been institutionalized by publishers, research universities, and even papal initiatives over a period of more than 200 years. McShane refers to this as “a staleness of perspective and a settled non-scientific attitude that has haunted economic studies for centuries.”[98] He claimed that the perspective and attitude haunts the diligent research of Thomas Piketty and James Galbraith, as “the drive represented by these and other groups who hover round the issue of inequality of income is not sufficiently scientific in its classificatory backing to escape my extremely odd view that their efforts do not escape the category of statistically-infested journalism.”[99]
McShane's view is that the search for new data to cast light on old questions—for example, whether new inequality metrics are needed and how inequality of household incomes might be estimated—must clear-headedly and consistently keep in mind “the fact that there are two types of firms, a simple local analysis that nevertheless leads to there being pretty well two of everything.”[100] Without identifying two-firms, different phases of economic development,[101] and the possibility of dynamically balanced cross-over payments between two distinct economic circuits,[102] intimations of improvements in standards of living without economics slumps[103] tend to sound like pie in the sky, while analyses of national and transnational exchanges tend to be “grossly unhelpful.”[104]
Towards efficient global collaboration
An emergent need to "Turn to the Idea"
In various writings, McShane cited the work of Arnie Næss, the father of “deep ecology.” In 1989, while in Oxford writing Process: Introducing Themselves to Young (Christian) Minders, “detecting, leaning into India, of history’s effort to educate us, I was astonished to find his [Næss's] detecting of a parallel structure of cosmic deliberation.”[105] Thirty years later, while writing “Structuring the Reach Towards the Future” for The 3rd Peaceful Coexistence Colloquium in Helsinki, Finland (June 2019), he returned to Naess's work for the first time since he had read it thirty years earlier in Oxford.[106]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/77/Staircase_Diagram.jpg/220px-Staircase_Diagram.jpg)
McShane maintained that Næss was on to something, for example, when he wrote: “Applied to humans, the complexity-not-complication principle favours division of labour, not fragmentation of labour.”[107] The challenge is to discover and implement a way to intervene effectively in intertwined cycles of natural-historical processes.[108] The web of intertwined processes currently presents humans of all colors and creeds with a myriad of challenges that include biodiversity loss and species extinction, water scarcity, unemployment, and children’s health and education. It is no mean problem if one is mindful of the needed restart in economics, not to mention other areas in need of reformation such as education.
Beginning in the late 1960s, McShane wrote about this “turn to the idea”[109] of dividing up labor, citing the influence of Bernard Lonergan,[110] who also wrote about dividing up intellectual labor after puzzling about how that might be done efficiently for more than thirty years. In Method in Theology, after briefly describing a conception of method as an art and second conception of method as a successful science, where “science means natural science” and “theologians often have to be content if their subject is included in a list not of sciences but of academic disciplines,”[111] he described the needed “turn to the idea” of efficient collaboration in these words: “Some third way, then, must be found and, even though it is difficult and laborious, that price must be paid if the less successful subject is not to remain a mediocrity or slip into decadence and desuetude.”[112]
The idea is to divide up the labor of caring for the cosmos “functionally,” so not along the lines of disciplinary silos, but along the lines of “distinct and separable stages in a single process from data to ultimate results.”[113] The various stages, steps, or specializations are essentially open and reciprocally dependent successive partial contributions to communicating to “the almost endlessly varied sensibilities, mentalities, interests, and tastes of [humankind].”[114]
McShane wrote about the needed turn sketched by Lonergan's in the 1969 Gregorianum article in various works.[115] In chapter 5 of The Allure of the Compelling Genius of History, he compared Lonergan's breakthrough discovery to the invention of Hedy Lamarr of a torpedo-guidance system, a system which depended on what she called “frequency hopping.” “In that chapter [5], an article of 1969, Lonergan came ‘to invent a fundamental wireless technology,’† which will slowly come to thrive in post-modern technologies of guidance and communication.”[116]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/53/First_Latin-American_Lonergan_Conference.jpg/220px-First_Latin-American_Lonergan_Conference.jpg)
One of McShane’s contributions to implementing transdiciplinary collaboration was to identify disciplinary “sloping.” In the essay "Slopes: An Encounter," he wrote that "as the disciplines move up from research through interpretation to history and to dialectic, there is a convergence of data and interest."[117] He wrote the following about Lonergan's breakthrough to restructuring of theology, indeed of all areas of study—a point that Karl Rahner caught and made[118] against those who might claim the prescribed eightfold division of labor is strictly theological method:
Now he had found it, so to speak, on a string, in a String Theory of the Cosmos of meaning. The scattered beads of disciplinary sweat could be seen now as strung together sweetly. The jumble of theology’s fragmented areas – Scripture studies, doctrines, history, dialectical and pastoral scholarship – strung together in a circle of eight handing-round efforts.[119]
In his keynote address “Arriving in Cosmopolis,” which McShane wrote for the First Latin-American Lonergan Workshop in Puebla, Mexico, June 2011, he estimated the numbers of specialists—identified by Lonergan as researchers, interpreters, historians, dialecticians, foundational (persons), doctrines or policy (makers), systematizers, and communicators—efficiently collaborating around the globe when the earth's total population reaches 10 billion. In the same essay, he placed what is called the Standard Model in physics within a larger standard model of global collaboration, one that situates the dynamics of physics within a dynamics of human progress.[120]
The structure of dialectic
While McShane identified the implementation of genetic method as Lonergan's most obscure challenge to his disciples, he identified dialectic as his clearest challenge,[121] though by no means the easiest. It is hard to say how many tens of thousands of words he wrote about the structure of dialectic,[122] which he described as a “shocking, brilliant, innovative, invitation."[123] To arrive at an approximation, one would need to consider various website essay series,[124] as well as published articles and chapters in books.[125] As with other areas of focus and interest, McShane's prodigious writings and teachings on the structure of dialectic call for the kind of creative research and communal recycling that he did his best to initiate.
In an attempt to communicate the challenge popularly and without footnotes, McShane wrote three chapters on dialectic in Futurology Express. There he described dialectic as a mix of private and public tasks of dialectic elders who are flexible, “like the flexibility of a great tennis player meeting the oddest of volleys,”[126] and who have “minds grasping for the flickers of integral human goings-on.”[127] He related this to the task of Comparison, one of six italicized words in Lonergan's terse description of the structure of dialectic. He adds that those doing Comparison are competent in scientific understanding and autobiographically appreciative of the lengthy, patient messing around required to become intelligently competent, as opposed to merely technically competent. “The issue is the personal cultivation of what is called authentic nescience.”[128] Dialectic becomes radically public when dialecticians “lay their cards on the table,” check one another by asking basic questions, even about themselves, and strive for a hard-won consensus on “what might be called an idealized version of previous reaches of humanity, showing the past something better than it was.”[129]
In a book published posthumously, McShane identified dialectic as needed “to link Aristotle’s three [data, theory, verification] with Drucker’s [policy, planning, executive strategies] and fill out the elements in Næss.”[130] He claimed that what is missing and desperately needed by those concerned about sustainability and survival is methodical deliberation about deliberation. “Deliberating over Archimedes’ deliberation is to push us towards a radical effective shift in our view of the disorientations of industrious humanity.”[131]
McShane’s invitation to contemporaries to lay their cards on the table regarding their personal views on serious understanding reached a humorous, brutally honest, and possibly disturbing high point in one of his final essays, “On the Stile of a Crucial Experiment.”[132] In the first paragraph of this essay, he recalled a scene from the film Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a shootout when Virgil and Morgan Earp called out members of a group of outlaws called The Cowboys. "It was a calling-out of the usual sort in Western films, with the good guys and the bad guys clearly identified."[133] In the last paragraph of the essay, McShane did his own calling-out:
There is, then, my simple calling out, which is just a repeat of Lonergan’s: this is the technique of discomforting intersubjectivity that is capable of “providing a statistically effective form for the next cycle of human action.”[134] There is my broader calling out: I challenge you to check—that word in its many senses—your biased corralled stile-sitting against serious understanding.[135] Both my simple call and my broader call-out is to global humanity and not just to Lonergan students, but I have sung out that joke abundantly already.[136]
Engineering progress
The proposed “turn to the idea” of beautiful, efficient global collaborators intending “cumulative and progressive results,”[137] with a sub-group “bearing fruit”[138] in local communications, clashes with notions of “pure science” as opposed to “applied science,” and notions of “hard sciences” as opposed to arts, humanities, and social sciences. These notions tend to dominate both popular culture and academic praxis. The first set of contrasting notions, which was popularly expressed in the American television sitcom The Big Bang Theory,[139] still permeates many a worldview. The second set permeates current divisions of majors, departments, and schools in higher education. It also permeates efforts to use “strictly” or “purely scientific” criteria to establish a precise meaning of Anthropocene,[140] and to pin down where and when the purported new geologic epic began. The ongoing effort to locate a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (informally known as "golden spike") on the part of the Anthropocene Working Group assumes a methodological divide between scientists, humanists, social scientists, and others.[141] It would seem that "aesthetic loneliness" is on the periphery of scientific method while scientific wonder is on the periphery of a liberal arts education.[142]
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In various places McShane traced the implicit or explicit views to Aristotelian notions of speculative and practical science.[143] It is an age-old belief and expectation that contrasts practice (from Ancient Greek πρᾶξις [prâxis]—human doing and action, the conduct resulting from deliberations and the choices humans make), theory (from Greek θεωρία [theōria]—contemplation, speculation), and making (from Greek ποίησις [poiēsis]). For Arisotle, praxis differs from theory, making, and the technology used in producing what is made.[144] While both theory and practice involve thinking, the former aims at "speculative" or "theoretical" knowledge of what is unchanging, while the latter aims at practical, less precise knowledge of human actions.[145] It would have made no sense to Arisotle to ask if there were fundamental questions about nature (from Greek φύσις [physis]) whose solution depends on the character of the individual studying nature.[146]
To shake up and out a rather odd meaning of “metaphysics,”[147] as well as what he described as “a psychology conservatively grounded in a certain facticity of the past,”[148] McShane replaced the word metaphysics with futurology,[149] later with engineering.[150] He envisaged a globally shared Praxisweltanschauung of engineering progress, an “adequate geogenetic heuristics of history.”[151] In the last essay of the Æcornomics series, titled “Engineering as Dialectic,” he wrote optimistically of “some few people who will face the details of seeding the slow, serious, self-sacrificing ‘resolute and effective intervention in this historical process.’”[152]
With regard to a possible shared Praxisweltanschauung, McShane regularly posed this question: “Do you view humanity as possibly maturing—in some serious way—or messing along between good and evil, whatever you think they are?”[153] Expressing and defending one's position effectively moves one beyond Weltanschauung to Praxisweltanschauung, even if one's view is that theory and praxis are as different as carrying out specialized research at CERN and signing and implementing the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse emissions and limit global warning to 1.5 °C. Furthermore, expressing and defending one's view about the future of humanity autobiographically, and in the company of others doing the same,[154] is an intimation of doing dialectic, which requires brutal honesty, for example, about one's view regarding the place of heuristic structures and convenient symbolisms in engineering progress.[155]
Criticism
Language, style, and clarity
One criticism of McShane's work was that the language he used, the neologisms he created, and the style of his writings were unnecessarily obscure and were off-putting for some readers whom, at times, he addressed directly: “I will not in fact be talking here about systems of philosophy. I will be talking about the reader, you, and asking you to attend to yourself, to ask yourself certain simple questions, to reach elementary answers.”[156] Time and again, he encouraged his readers to take our eyes of the page while reading and cited what Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space about reading a house or a nest with one's eyes off the page.[157] His colleague and long-time friend Conn O’Donovan recalled reading the typescript of Plants and Pianos in 1971 and “thinking that McShane’s written expression was not as precise as it might be, that he was beginning to let language run away with him.”[158] Some thirty years after reading that typescript, O’Donovan asked:
Was I then witnessing in McShane the emergence of a deliberate, self-consciously new approach to language and meaning? Was he perhaps deciding to allow language to run away with him, but somehow under his control, and not to allow himself to be controlled by already controlled meaning? Was this a key moment in the development of his own special kind of creative scholarly writing?[159]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/In_Memoriam_Philip_McShane_%281932-2020%29.png/220px-In_Memoriam_Philip_McShane_%281932-2020%29.png)
Another colleague wrote in his tribute to McShane that while he “could be very orderly and disciplined in his writings and lectures, not infrequently in later years both types of his presentations were sprinkled with verbal novelties, asides, puns, jokes, and other unusual elements. Some colleagues find that this style facilitates their understanding, but others find that it impedes it.”[160] A younger colleague wrote in his contribution to the same Festschrift that “soon after Method was published [1972], Phil seized on Lonergan’s notion of ‘linguistic feedback’ and its essential role in advancing self-appropriation, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. For years, he practically flogged the theme of linguistic feedback.”[161] An example of such feedback is replacing the letter “c” with the letter “k” in the word heuristic or pocket.[162]
One of the most extensive published criticisms of McShane's language, style, and clarity occurred in 2001 before the publication of Lonergan's Phenomenology and Logic, which McShane edited and introduced. One of the readers invited by the University of Toronto Press to review McShane's editor's introduction and appendix had significant reservations and asked him to rewrite the appendix or eliminate it altogether.[163] The reader questioned his “intent on mystifying” what is “already familiar to every competent phenomenologist,” and added that “Lonergan himself, in this reader’s opinion, was not in the least inclined towards esotericism or mystification.”[164]
In his reply to the reader, McShane wrote that his efforts to contextualize the volume were aimed at “saving it from haute vulgarization,”[165] or what he would sometimes call negative haute vulgarization—the clear, direct expression that “Joey” had hoped to find in the editor's introduction. He also recalled a favorite quote from Samuel Beckett, about direct expression:
Here is direct expression−pages and pages of it. And if you don't understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. This rapid skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of salivation. The form that is an arbitrary and independent phenomenon can fulfill no higher function than that of a stimulus for a tertiary or quartary conditioned reflex of dribbling comprehension.[166]
Had McShane gone too far or, perhaps, not far enough? While writing about the short-term challenge of implementing a child-friendly pedagogy pivoting on the "Childout Principle,"[167] he acknowledged that a key challenge was to do something requiring a cultural shift and a new language: “You might begin to write yourself and the world with a new alphabet, in a new language. ‘The alphabet writes the world, and the world comes to pass through the alphabet: writing and world coexist in a state of feverish rapture that defies language.'"[168]
Idiosyncratic economics
In 1977 McShane applied to the Canada Council for a grant to work on economics. One of the assessors of his application wrote: “What we have here is a case of two idiosyncratic theologians trying to do idiosyncratic economics. The probability of this being fruitful is not zero, but it is not much higher.”[169] Thirty years later, when McShane addressed an audience at University Seoul, a professor in the audience denied anything idiosyncratic or original in what McShane was presenting and remarked “it is all in Mankiw,”[170] referring to Gregory Mankiw’s introductory economics textbook and blockbuster bestseller Principles of Economics.[171] More recently, the Australian economist Paul Oslington has written a critique of Lonergan’s economics that includes a critique of McShane for “overselling” Lonergan's economics in the editor's introduction to For a New Political Economy.[172]
McShane considered the basic insights of two-flow economic analysis empirically verifiable and accessible to high school students.[173] He did, however, recognize that it would not be easy "to change a recipe that is 200 years old."[174] In addition, he identified a needed correction to a mistake he had made in the area of the pedagogy. In his 2019 essay “Finding an Effective Economist: A Central Theological Challenge,” McShane described his mistake in these words:
Looking back now with wonderful hindsight, we [Lonergan and he] were making the wrong moves. We should have put his request of 1968 in the context of the eighth functional specialty’s follow-through that I call C9. The mood of statistically-effective outreach should have dominated both my two 1977 presentations and his six years of teaching.[175]
What McShane described as "the mood of statistically-effective outreach" refers to teaching as communications, a type of direct discourse that is related to but distinct from the indirect discourse of research, interpretation, and history. Direct communications − which invites, persuades, and cajoles students, colleagues, friends, and neighbors to makes sense out of distinct flows of basic and non-basic (surplus) goods and services − might generate "backfires,"[176] for example when a bright students asks what an IS/LM curve (also known as the IS/LM model) is and why it is not viable for real economic analysis.[177] While McShane wrote introductory texts, including the preface to the 2017 edition of Economics for Everyone inviting the serious reader to imagine "the concrete reality of, say, a small bakery in its dependence on firms that supply its needs,"[178] he also recognized the need for "massively innovative primers that would meet millennial needs, 500-page texts of empirically rich, locally oriented, normatively focused non-truncated writing."[179]
Breaking with tradition
An implicit criticism of McShane breaking with tradition occurred during the planning stages of the conference “Revisiting Lonergan’s Anthropology” that took place in Rome in November 2013.[180] The organizers of the event did not invite him to take part in the event, either by giving a talk or by participating in one of the various panels. McShane, who was never interested in founding a “a little school of Lonergan at the Gregorian”[181] or at some other Jesuit university in North America, published a critique of the conference in Rome, which for him symbolized what he called Lonerganism.[182]
I have, in recent years, made quite clear my disagreement with that tradition that now prevails in Lonergan studies, of avoiding the challenge of functional collaboration. Indeed, of not noticing, ignoring, avoiding—whatever—that the question, “What does Lonergan mean by functional collaboration?” has not been taken seriously by the group. I thus give a definite meaning to the boldfaced word whatever by my title: the group seems—indeed quite evidently is—intent on muzzling the scientific Lonergan.[183]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/Cij_Matrix.jpg/220px-Cij_Matrix.jpg)
Like Lonergan, McShane took seriously what Butterfield wrote about the scientific revolution "outshining everything since the rise of Christianity and reducing the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom."[184] Both men advocated the development and implementation of apt symbolism and heuristic structures.[185] This had and continues to have what might be called an "electrifying" effect upon those in academic disciplines that seem to thrive without implementing symbolism and heuristics. “Whether it is Cij or W3, the symbolism reminds, cajoles, and forces the authors not to sit comfortably on the fence between commonsense eclecticism and scientific collaboration.† The symbols, you might even say, are a way of electrifying that fence.”[186]
With respect to his and others’ efforts to shift towards the idea and the reality of functional collaboration, which requires some form of communal implementation, McShane knew it would be a form of learning by doing. Since the needed division of labor is not continuous with much of current academic practice, he expected that the adventure[187] in the decades to come would be so-so at best. It was for this reason that McShane would quip: “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”[188] He had a leading role in organizing various “doings,” one of them an international conference in 2014 that resulted in the publication of a volume of essays[189] in which each of the twelve authors implemented the same four-part structure: Context, Content, Hand-On, and Final Reflections. He wrote the following evaluation of the volume of essays published in 2016:
We stumbled away, as best we could, from the ethos of academic disciplines. We pretended to be “at the level of the times,”† as any wise doctorate student does in a doctorate thesis. But none of us were. Further, part of the paradox of luminosity and adult growth is that elder members of our group were regularly better tuned to “all that is lacking”†† than younger members. I, then, more than others, knew what a shabby shot we were having at getting the show on the road.[190]
Two years later, McShane participated in a round table discussion of Method in Theology at the West Coast Methods Institute at Loyola Marymount University. In preparation for the conference, McShane had written an essay proposing a paradigm for panel discussions, what he called “a full heuristic paradigm.”[191] He submitted his essay to Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies, which had previously published five of his essays.[192] The referee's report sent to him was succinct and did not recommend publishing the essay, as those "involved in 'Lonergan studies' need insights as much if not more than prophetic exhortations."[193] In his reply to the co-editor of the journal, McShane did not take issue with the use of the word prophetic to describe his essay, but he underscored that prior to Lonergan's discovery of the dynamics of functional collaboration in 1965, he had “clearly shifted the norms of the usual trivial comparison-work to the control of a genetic sequence of prior efforts to understanding whatever.”[194] The rejection of McShane's essay for publication inspired him to write the series of essays Public Challenging the Method Board.[195]
From time to time, McShane described his own efforts as “random dialectics,” so not the structured encounter that he wrote about at length and only experienced in the “proto-dialectic”[196] exercises in the last year of his life. Over the years, he invited colleagues to step forth and indicate publicly where and how he had gone astray reading Insight and Method in Theology. The response was what he called “disgusting non-scientific silence.”[197]
While McShane admitted having benefitted from a certain kind of luck in his education, he also realized that some of his works were simply “too far out” and did not expect to see much success in his lifetime.[198] Most contemporaries in philosophy and theology had not worked with Markov tensors or thought to use Greek symbols to imagine the longitude and latitude of Luther or Descartes on an expanding globe of meaning.
"Toynbee's A Study of History can be regarded as an attempt at a great Markovian reduction of the historical process to a very few variables and very large subdivisions and the consequent description of the process by a multiple Markov tensor of manageable rank.”† My own imaging shifts this tensor into an earth-sphere expanding out along a radial axis t—this helps to glimpse—think longitude and latitude for θ and Φ—my meaning of θΦT. Think of the θΦT weave of pairs like Antioch and Alexandria, Luther and Lainez, Descartes and Dilthey, whatever.[199]
McShane's long-term optimism regarding the emergence of a creative minority caring for the globe was and is consistent with the worldview "emergent probability," which was the focus of his doctoral thesis. In the Preface to the 2nd edition of the book version of his thesis, which McShane wrote in the fall of 2012, he cited a long passage from Insight where Lonergan wrote that the possibility of a recurrence scheme beginning to function shifts from a product of fractions to their sum when any one of the events (A or B or C or ...) of the scheme occurs.[200] He concluded the Preface with these words: "The cyclically-summed actualities can, over millennia, shift from Poisson distribution to a Normal and normative law, giving supreme plausibility to a Tower of Able of serious intimate† understanding grounding, literally, a plain plane of radiant life in the next million years."[201]
References
- ^ For a complete list of published articles and books, please see Philip McShane CV.
- ^ This was the slogan of the International Lonergan Congress in Florida (1970). McShane edited two volumes of papers from this conference.
- ^ Letters Supporting Philip McShane’s Nomination for the Templeton Prize.
- ^ "Special Issue: Festschrift for Philip Mcshane," Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis, vol. 3 (2003).
- ^ "Implementation: The Ongoing Crisis of Method," Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis, vol. 3 (2003), pp. 11–32.
- ^ “Our Journaling Lonelinesses: A Response,” Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis, vol. 3 (2003), pp. 324–42.
- ^ “In Memoriam: Philip McShane (1932–2020),” originally published in print form in Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy & Education, vol. 33, no. (2022), was republished in the Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis vol. 15 (2022).
- ^ Philip McShane The First Forty Years by Conn O'Donovan, Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis 3 (2003): 33-54.
- ^ Philip McShane Atlas of Irish Mathematicians.
- ^ O'Donovan, Conn (2003). "Philip McShane: The First Forty Years". Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis. 3: 37.
- ^ Conn O'Donovan, "Philip McShane: The First Forty Years," p. 34.
- ^ See Interpretation from A to Z (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2020), p. 9.
- ^ "The Concept of Verbum in the Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas" was originally published in Theological Studies 10 (1946) 349-92; 8 (1947)35-79, 404-44; 10 (1949) 3-40, 359-93. These articles were published as Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, ed. David B. Burrell (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967; London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1968), later as Volume 2 of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, eds. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (University of Toronto Press, 1997).
- ^ "Schrödinger's great book, sweated over in details of tensor scribbles during the year 1955–56, left me quite inadequately prepared for Insight 's fifth chapter on Space and Time." Interpretation from A to Z, p. 9.
- ^ Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence, the original manuscript of McShane's D.Phil. thesis, was first published in 1970 by Macmillan and University of Notre Dame Presses. McShane elaborated on the challenges of defending his thesis in the Preface to the Second Edition of Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2021), pp. lii-lxi.
- ^ McShane, Philip, ed. (1972). Foundations of Theology: Papers from the International Lonergan Congress 1970. University of Notre Dame. and McShane, Philip, ed. (1972). Language, Truth, and Meaning: Papers from the International Lonergan Congress 1970. University of Notre Dame.
- ^ In an essay written some thirty years after making this decision, McShane reflected on his years as a Jesuit by first recalling a question posed by Bernard Lonergan in the essay "Healing and Creating in History" (CWL 16, 94-103): "Which is worse: being disoriented by the clever and wicked or by the righteous and stupid? The topic is massive, and at present I am merely skimming over one aspect: the Christian righteousness that goes with the retreat of the Church from progress in understanding. It is a retreat that Lonergan summed up in conversation with me in Easter 1961 with his remark about 'big frogs in little ponds.' It was manifest to him during his years of training as it was to me in my 9 own Jesuit years." Field Nocturne 41, "What are we up to?" at page 3.
- ^ The Lonergan Centre Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy.
- ^ Terrance Quinn recounts this request of McShane in "Beginnings with Philip McShane: A Progress-Oriented Tribute, Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis, vol. 15 (2022), p. 141.
- ^ There are just under two million words in McShane's twenty-eight essay series written between 2001 and 2020. Some of these series were working notes for his published articles and books. He regularly referred to these "website essays" in published works.
- ^ McShane, Philip; Duffy, James; Henman, Robert; Quinn, Terrance (2022). Seeding the Positive Anthropocene. Vancouver: Axial Publishing. pp. 115–137. See also pages 3-5, 25-27, 71-72, and 104-105.
- ^ These essays are available at: Questing2020.
- ^ Cyril Orji, University of Dayton, Ohio, In Memoriam
- ^ Ken Melchin, Saint Paul University, In Memoriam
- ^ Mila Ghorayeb, Vancouver, Canada In Memoriam
- ^ Brendan Purcell, University of Notre Dame, Australia In Memoriam.
- ^ See McShane, Philip. "The Redress of Poise: The End of Lonergan's Work". at page 2.
- ^ The Allure of the Compelling Genius of History (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2015), p. 253.
- ^ "I have spent more time and energy in my life on Feynman's volumes on Quantum Theory [vol. 3 of those mentioned in note 23, p. 175 of Bernard Lonergan: His Life and Leading Ideas] than on any other book except Insight." FuSe 16, Contexts of Functional Dialectic, n. 3, p. 3.
- ^ Conn O'Donovan, Conn O’Donovan: “Philip McShane: The First Forty Years,” Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis vol. 3 (2003), p. 46. O'Donovan wrote that "his father was a very competent fiddler and he also played an instrument or instruments in the police band. He [McShane] had formal music lessons for several years, but he says that he only began to learn music when he gave up the lessons."
- ^ "Crecycling Sustainability," Seeding the Positive Anthropocene, n. 12, p. 96. This essay is also available as the first part of "Sixes and Sevens: The Need for Cyclic Thinking," a two-part essay McShane wrote in December 2018. In the first part, he focused on the need for creative recycling ("crecycling") of the book Sustainability and Peaceful Coexistence for the Anthropocene, while the second part is a ten-step crecycling of Insight chapters 6 and 7.
- ^ “Middle Kingdom, Middle Man: T’ien-hsia i jen,” in Searching for Cultural Foundations (University Press of America, 1984), pp. 9-10. McShane cited this long passage in A Brief History of Tongue (Halifax: Axial Press, 1998), pp. 39-42.
- ^ A Brief History of Tongue, p. 42. The relevant text on the two times of the temporal subject is B. Lonergan, The Triune God: Systematics, CWL 12, 401-409.
- ^ Lambert, Pierrot; McShane, Philip (2013). Bernard Lonergan: His Life and Leading Ideas. Vancouver, B.C.: Axial Publishing. There are references to the teachings of Buddha on pages 3, 7–9, and 117; references to Beethoven on pages 23, 38, 101, 115, 117, 128, 192, and 222; references to Maxwell on pages 168, 175-178, and 186.
- ^ The essay "Structuring the Reach Towards the Future," written for the 3rd Peaceful Coexistence Colloquium, Helsinki, Finland, June 2019, was later published as chapter 7 of Seeding the Positive Anthropocene. The essay is available on McShane's website as Æcornomics 5,
- ^ Æcornomics 5, "Structuring the Reach Towards the Future", at pp. 4-5. The beginning of a note to the word civilized reads: "Lurking in my essay there is a sense that we are no more civilized in this millennium than a sunflower is after a week's weed-pressed growth." Note 15, page 5.
- ^ See, for example, Questing2020B, "Interior Castle ; Interior Lighthouse." A search of "Interior Lighthouse" on McShane's website generates over 80 results.
- ^ In the 2016 essay HOW 5, "Searching for Avila, John, Jesus, Stein, Lonergan, Moi Intime, Etc. Etc.," McShane wrote about interpreting The Interior Castle within the context of chapter 17 of Insight. See pp. 8-21.
- ^ New York: Norton, 1975, p. 135. McShane quoted this passage in various essays, articles, and books. See, for example, "A Paradigmatic Panel Dynamic for (Advanced) Students (of Religion)," at page 5 and Process: Introducing Themselves to Young (Christian) Minders," at page 62.
- ^ There are more than a dozen references to this album in chapter 14. "Communications: An Outreach to Lonergan Students"of Lonergan's Standard Model of Effective Global Inquiry.
- ^ On page 2 of Field Nocturne 14, "The Central Humane Meta-Insight," McShane fantasized about "the global game of tennis being so lifted that, say, one hundredth of the global population would be genuinely up to facing that first serve. We would have then, not one hundred top players, but, yes, one hundred thousand. Not just a single Wimbledon sister act, but many."
- '^ "I recall once more Nadia Boulanger. She is floating between coma and sleep on her death bed. Leonard Bernstein comes to visit and, surprizingly, is recognized ... "cher Lenny ..." Bernstein reports: "Then I heard myself asking: Vous entendez la musique dans la tetē?' Instant reply: 'Tout le temps. tout le temps.' This so encouraged me that I continued, as if in quotidian conversation: 'Et que'est-ce que vous entendez, ce moment-ci?' I thought of her preferred loves. 'Mozart? Monteverdi? Bach? Stravinski? Ravel?' Long pause. 'Une musique ... [very long pause] ... ni commencement ni fin ...'" Process, p. 178. The inner citations is from Leonard Bernstein, Findings (London and Sydney: MacDonald and Co, 1982), p. 353.
- ^ The Allure of the Compelling Genius of History, p. 211, referring to Molly Bloom’s long soliloquy at the end of James Joyce's Ulysses, in particular to the climatic seven “yesses”. See also the end of note 200 below.
- ^ "It is time to go back to the beginning and start again." Joan Robinson and John Eatwell, An Introduction To Modern Economics, (London and New York: McGraw Hill, 1973), p. 52. McShane cited this passage at the beginning of chapter 1 "Baskets & Handfills," Economics for Everyone (3rd ed. 2017), p. 1.
- ^ "I recall that great lady, Jane Jacobs, writing to me about Economics for Everyone, that she didn't fully understand the analysis, but that it was a relief to see that the stock market was neatly displaced out of the circuits of economic exchange." Æcornomics 4, "Sorting Out Superposed Circuits", n. 18, p. 4.
- ^ McShane, Philip. "Fordham Lectures on Economics".
- ^ Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence (2nd ed. 2021), p. lxiv.
- ^ Lonergan, Bernard J. F. (1998). For a New Political Economy. Vol. 21 Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Toronto [Ont.]: Published by University of Toronto Press for Lonergan Research Institute of Regis College.
- ^ Lonergan, Bernard J. F. (2001). Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism. Vol. 18 Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Toronto [Ont.]: Published by University of Toronto Press for Lonergan Research Institute of Regis College.
- ^ Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, CWL 18, 281-84, 298, 306.
- ^ Lonergan, Bernard J. F. (1992). Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. Vol. 3 Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (5th, rev. and augmented ed.). Toronto: Published for Lonergan Research Institute of Regis College, Toronto, by University of Toronto Press.
- ^ "Insight and the Trivialization of History," Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy & Education, vol. 28 no. 1 (2017), p 123.
- ^ The German word Weltanschauung is typically translated 'worldview' a calque (or loan translation) of Weltanschauung, composed of Welt ("world") and Anschauung ("perception" or "view")..
- ^ Beginning in the early 2000s, McShane highlighted a way, or procedure, to manage the question-begging word adequate. What an adequate worldview looks like depends upon one's worldview. His writings about, and partial implementation of, a particular procedure for dealing with differences in horizons are discussed below in the section "The Structure of Dialectic."
- ^ In the preface to the first edition of the book, McShane identified the challenge of writing the thesis. First, he was setting up a discussion between different schools of philosophy. Secondly, he was trying to orient philosophy of science away from general considerations towards a reflection on randomness in mathematics and physics. Thirdly, he wrote for those interested in understanding the complementarity of classical and statistical methods and added scattered reflections on the foundations of geometry and the significance of recurrence schemes in and for an adequate worldview. (lxii-lxiv) At the request of his readers, McShane suppressed what would later be published as chapter 8 "Foundations of Statistics" in Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence. See the Preface to the second edition (2021), p. lv.
- ^ See Insight, CWL 3, 126-151. In the essay "The Historical Reach of Lonergan's Meaning" (Compass: A Jesuit Journal, spring 1985), McShane intimated the transformative contribution this world view could make to fields such as botany and zoology: "The middle sciences are bogged down in reductionist imaginings and Darwinian obscurities regarding units and patterns of evolution: Lonergan's relevant focus is on a thematic of schemes of recurrence at all levels, within an explanatory perspective on emergent probability, underpinned by a precise heuristic analysis of genera and species, grounding uniquely a needed clarity." (3)
- ^ Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence, 2nd ed. (2021), p. 214.
- ^ Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence, 2nd ed. (2021), p. lxiv.
- ^ Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence, p. lxiv.
- ^ See McShane's Editor's Introduction, Music That Is Soundless, pp. 1–5.
- ^ This phrase appears on the back cover of Music That Is Soundless, where McShane cited the poem "Songs between the Soul and the Bridegroom," by John of the Cross (1542–1591). The last two lines of the poem: "The music without sound / The solitude that clamours."
- ^ Music That Is Soundless, p. 7. In a footnote McShane wrote that the word last is not superfluous. "Its use is related both to the strategy of attention to a concrete particular (See B. Lonergan, Insight, Longmans Green and Co, 1957, 249 [CWL 3, 274]), and to the rhythm of the question." ('This rhythm is a mysterious trait that probably bespeaks biological unities of thought and feeling which are entirely unexplored as yet.' Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribners, 1953), note 2, pp. 136-137.
- ^ Like the word adequate, the word truly is question-begging. See note 54 above.
- ^ Music That Is Soundless, p. 8. McShane added on the same page: "Some people pay their psychiatrist $100 an hour to attempt conversation – no one should presume that they themselves achieve it every day." Some years later, commenting on our human capacity and need to vibe with other humans, McShane wrote that personal relationships can be destabilizing, in a positive way: "We relate personally when our wonder is lifting us beyond the present, when it makes the present mysterious and freshens it with hidden needs and green capacities." Introducing Critical Thinking (Cape Breton, NS: Axial Publishing, 2005), p. 123.
- ^ "Sounds of Silence" (1964) by Simon & Garfunkel. "Have you, perhaps, fallen among thieves, serial killers as I called them once, teachers who lead and led you away from the longing to embrace the universe understandingly?" McShane, Field Nocturne 41, "What are we up to?" at page 4.
- ^ McShane likely settled on the subtitle "Self-Axis of the Great Ascent" because of references to Robert Heilbroner's The Great Ascent: The Struggle for Economic Development in Our Time.
- ^ From the viewpoint of what McShane called "extreme realism" or "radical existentialism," the "myth of the eyeballs"—the real is known by taking a good look "out there" or "in here"—disappears. He treated the topic in an introductory manner in chapter 5 of Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations, "The Inside-Out of Radical Existentialism," 35–41.
- ^ The "Structure of Wonder" diagram is on page 14; "The Human Organism" diagram is on page 36; "The Pattern of Concern" diagram is on page 43. In later writings, McShane referred to the second of these diagrams as "Mibox." See "1. Introduction" in The Future: Core Precepts in Supramolecular Method and Nanochemistry and the following three essay series: Disputing Quests, Interpretation, and Rescuing Lonergan: A Series of Vignettes.
- ^ Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations, 2nd ed. (2021), p. 77.
- ^ 2nd ed. (2005), pp. 103-104.
- ^ "Image and Emergence: Towards and Adequate Weltanschauung" is chapter 2 of Plants and Pianos: Two Essays in Advanced Methodology.
- ^ "I refer thus to a thesis of Butterfield's The Origins of Modern Science (Bell, London, 1965) regarding the centrality in cultural evolution of the move to serious explanatory understanding. It relates to the need for theoretic displacement, conversion to theory." Cantower III, "Round One Willing Gathering," n. 21, p. 7. McShane refers to Butterfield in various Cantower essays.
- ^ Cantower XXXIII, "Lonergan and Axial Bridges," n. 21, p. 10.
- ^ "There is a unity of integration and operation in the case of the organism which is recognizably different from that of the total evolutionary process. But to make precise that difference and to give an adequate methodological definition of development would involve a lengthy aside.†" Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence (2nd ed. 2021), p. 175. The note (†) reads: "Cf. B. Lonergan, Insight, chap. 8 (CWL 3, 270–295) on the notion of 'thing'; 451–487 (CWL 3, 476–511) on the notion of development.
- ^ See the Preface to Method in Theology: Revisions and Implementations, pp. viii–ix. That book was written between 2005 and 2007. McShane comments at length on chapters 7 and 8 of Doran's What is Systematic Theology? (University of Toronto Press, 2005) in Part Three: Structures and Applications, pp. 150–189.
- ^ "Study of the organism begins from the thing-for-us, from the organism as exhibited to our senses." Insight, CWL 3, 489.
- ^ Insight, CWL 3, 489.
- ^ See Field Nocturne 2, "Lonergan's Obscurest Challenge to his Followers."
- ^ See, for example, Quodlibets 3, 12, 13, 14, 16, and 18.
- ^ "The challenge is there in that shocking page of Insight [CWL 3, 489] where there occurs the phrase 'study of the organism begins...': what is said there and in the following pages is a missing link in coming to grips with modern genetic studies, the organism that is the daisy or the dog, ChrISt or the Mystical Body. "Reinventing History," chapter 10 of ChrISt in History, n. 37, pp. 9–10.
- ^ In particular, see these two chapters: "F ~ The Full Problem of Development" and "G ~ Insight's Search for Genetic Control."
- ^ Interpretation from A to Z, p. 57.
- ^ Interpretation from A to Z, n. 17, pp. 77-78. He added that there is a "larger up-grading Aristotle's view of science." (n. 17, p. 77) The 'larger upgrading' is elaborated on in the section "Engineering Progress" below.
- ^ Interpretation from A to Z, pp. 78-79.
- ^ In the original expression of this function in the Epiloge of Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations, McShane used commas, not semicolons. He remarks on the change to using semicolons as "a neat compact symbol of aggreformism: something between the comma of reductionism and the colon of vitalism," Fusion 12, "Interpretation: Method 7 lifted into Canons and Collaboration I."
- ^ Lonergan, Insight, CWL 3, 528. See also Field Nocturnes 9, "The Hearing Organism" and Field Nocturnes 10, "Noise-Infolding."
- ^ Cantower VII, "Systematics and General Systems Theory," at p. 28
- ^ "Lonergan's 'Circulation Analysis': A Discussion," p. 5.
- ^ McShane, Philip, ed. (2010). "Do You Want a Sane Global Economy?". Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy and Education. 21 (2).
- ^ Video recordings of this event are available at Fordham Lectures on Economics.
- ^ Ivo Coelho described McShane's intervention in India in his blog "Philosophical Musings"
- ^ See Economics for Everyone, p. 120. See also chapter 11, “Lonergan’s Three Major Cultural Shifts,” in P. Lambert and P. McShane, Lonergan: His Life and Leading Ideas (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2013), pp. 194–222.
- ^ Economics for Everyone, p. 120. “By the phrase, ‘crossing the Rubicon,’ I mean this: however important those occasional excursions into sequence analysis may have been, they left the main body of economic theory on the ‘static’ bank of the river; the thing to do is not to supplement static theory by the booty brought back from these excursions but to replace it by a system of general economic dynamics into which statics would enter as a special case.” Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 1160.
- ^ This topic is treated below in the section "An Emergent Need to 'Turn to the Idea.'"
- ^ Economics for Everyone: Das Jus Kapital (3rd ed., 2017), p. 120. In Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations, McShane identified this third shift as the possibility of super-vivere, “peak-living” (Maslow), the possibility of appropriating and intending “the notion of survival that is the core of you that I have invited you to question in the early chapters” (81).
- ^ Piketty's Plight and the Global Future (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2014), p. 10. In the Preface to the 3rd edition of Economics for Everyone, McShane presented four simple diagrams that add a second type of firm to the standard household to firm, single-flow diagram found in introductory economic textbooks. The same diagrams appear in Piketty's Plight and the Global Future, pp. 12-13 and Profit: The Stupid View of President Donald Trump, pp. 7-8.
- ^ Piketty's Plight and the Global Future, p. 7.
- ^ Piketty's Plight and the Global Future, p. 23.
- ^ Piketty's Plight and the Global Future, pp. 66-67.
- ^ Piketty's Plight and the Global Future, p. 68.
- ^ See chapter 2 “Flows and Surges” of Economics for Everyone, pp. 21–48.
- ^ “In a stationary economy, one without innovation or development, the crossovers balance when allowances are made for seasonal and other minor fluctuations. In that state, the crossovers are, of course, constant. But in a surge the crossovers vary, and the problem of macrodynamic equilibrium is that the crossovers must remain dynamically balanced. If they do not remain so, then one circuit is being drained in a way that might seem to benefit the other.” Economics for Everyone, p. 69.
- ^ In Economics for Everyone, McShane used “the word surge because it has no overtones such as cycle or wave has, overtones of ups-and-downs, of booms and slumps. What is envisaged is a series of lifts that end with a permanent lift to the standard of living.” (46) In For a New Political Economy, Lonergan had written (c. 1942) about the “overhead final product of cultural implements” and a “pure deepening that adds to aggregate leisure, to liberate many entirely and all increasingly to the field of cultural activities.” CWL 21, 20. See also chapter 6 “Profit I,” chapter 10 “Profit II,” chapter 14 “Complaints, COPON, and Profit III,” and Epilogue “Profit IV” in McShane, Profit: The Stupid View of Donald Trump (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2016).
- ^ Piketty's Plight and the Global Future, p. 69.
- ^ “Structuring the Reach Towards the Future,” Seeding the Positive Anthropocene, n. 10, page 3.
- ^ “It still astonishes me. ‘For Naess, Deep Ecology is not a rigid dogma, but rather a ‘platform’ that draws together supporters from different backgrounds and gives them a base from which to reassess humanity’s relationship with nature.’” “Structuring the Reach Towards the Future,” at page. 133. The inner citation is from A. Næss, “Deep Ecology and Ultimate Premises,” The Ecologist, vol. 18, no. 4/5, 1988, 128, available at: https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/ecologist/issues1980-1989.html. See also references to Næss in P. McShane, “Crecycling Sustainability” in Seeding the Positive Anthropocene, pp. 89–96.
- ^ Arne Næss, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long‐Range Ecology Movement: A Summary,” Inquiry 16, no. 1–4 (January 1, 1973), 97, https://doi.org/10.1080/00201747308601682. McShane cites this principle of Næss in “It’s Getting Better and Better, Worse and Worse” and “Crecycling Sustainability” on pages 58 and 89 of Seeding the Positive Anthropocene.
- ^ In Phenomenology and Logic, Lonergan named the problem “Resolute and Effective Intervention in the Dialectic” (CWL 18, 305-307). “What is to be done about it [historical process]? How should one go about it? In other words, if there is this objective dialectic of history, the question arises, Can we get enough knowledge of it to be practical, to exercise some control over this historical process?” (306)
- ^ The phrase Die Wendung zur Idee was coined by the German sociologist Georg Simmel, “Die Wendung zur Idee,” in Lebensanschauung: Vier metaphysische Kapitel (Munich: and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1918), 29–98.
- ^ In his 1969 article envisioning eight global groups doing eight dynamically related but distinct tasks leading to cyclic progress, Lonergan translated Simmel’s phrase “shift towards system.” “Functional Specialties in Theology,” Gregorianum 50, no. 3 (1969), 499.
- ^ CWL 14, 8.
- ^ CWL 14, 9.
- ^ CWL 14, 130.
- ^ CWL 14, 130.
- ^ See Futurology Express (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2013), The Allure of the Compelling Genius of History (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2015), Æcornomics 5, "Structuring the Reach Towards the Future," and "Towards Global Consent: Managing Conflict," in Bernard Lonergan: His Life and Leading Ideas, pp. 215-218.
- ^ The Allure of the Compelling Genius of History, p. 55. The inner citation (†) is to Richard Rhodes, Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World (Waterville, ME: Thorndike Press, 2011), 13.
- ^ Cantower VIII, at page 13. In the essay he went on to give both a priori and a posteriori reasons for his optimistic perspective on omnidisciplinary foundations.
- ^ Karl Rahner, “Kritische Bemerkungen zu B.J.F.Lonergan’s Aufsatz: ‘Functional Specialties in Theology,’” Gregorianum 51(1971), at p. 537. McShane resonated with Rahner’s view, and indeed invited those with other interests, e.g., literature, economics, linguistics, physics, or geometry, to listen to him hearing Lonergan out, so to speak. On literature, see chapter five of Lonergan's Challenge to the University and the Economy; on economics, see “Inventing Pragmatics,” chapter 3 of Pastkeynes Pastmodern Economics (Halifax, N.S.: Axial Press, 2002), 53-73 and “A Rolling Stone Gathers Nomos,” chapter 5 of Economics for Everyone; on linguistics see chapter 3 of A Brief History of Tongue: From Big Bang to Coloured Wholes (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Axial Press, 1998), 80-110; on physics, see "Elevating Insight: Physics as Paradigm Problem," Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies no. 19 (2001); on geometry, see chapter 5 of Lack in the Beingstalk (South Brookfield, NS: Axial Publishing, 2006), pp. 127-153.
- ^ Quodlibet 17, “The Origins and Goals of Functional Specialization,” at p. 4.
- ^ “Arriving in Cosmopolis,” at pp. 2-3. In the last 50 years, various authors have discerned the need to divide up tasks in order to collaborate in a number of areas. For example, Bruce Anderson, “The Evident Need for Specialization in Visual Art Studies,” Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis vol. 6 (2011), pp. 85–97; John Benton, Shaping the Future of Language Studies (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2008); Patrick Brown, “Functional Specialization and the Methodical Division of Labor in Legal Studies,” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies vol. 2, no. 1 (2011), pp. 45–65; Sean McNelis, Making Progress in Housing: A Framework for Collaborative Research (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014); and Terry Quinn, “Invitation to Functional Collaboration: Dynamics of Progress in the Sciences, Technologies, and Arts,” Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis vol. 7 (2012), pp. 94–122; The (Pre-)Dawning of Functional Specialization in Physics (Hoboken NJ: World Scientific, 2017); and “An Emergent Transdisciplinary Methodology for Effective Collaboration in Ecological Economics,” Sustainability 2023, 15 7522. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15097522.
- ^ Field Nocturne 1, "Lonergan's Clearest Challenge to his Follower."
- ^ The structure is described by Lonergan on page 250 of the original version of Method in Theology, CWL 14, 234-235. McShane commonly referred to the procedure beginning with the word “horizons” on line 18 and ending with the word “reversed” on line 33 of page 250 as “Lonergan’s 1833 Overture.”
- ^ “A Paradigmatic Panel Dynamic for {Advanced} Students (of Religion),” at p. 7.
- ^ McShane wrote about the structure of dialectic in the following series of essays: Cantowers, Sodaware, Quodlibets, FuSe, Question and Answer, Disputing Quests, Rescuing Lonergan: A Series of Vignettes, and Æcornomics.
- ^ See, for example, chapters 8 to 10 in Futurology Express; chapter 12 of The Allure of the Compelling Genius of History; chapter 3 in The Future: Core Precepts in Supramolecular Method and Nanochemistry; and chapter I of Interpretation from A to Z.
- ^ Futurology Express, p. 57.
- ^ Futurology Express, p. 58.
- ^ Futurology Express, p. 64.
- ^ Futurology Express, p. 72. The inner citation is to Method in Theology: “When he develops positions and reverses counterpositions, he will be presenting an idealized version of the past, something better than was the reality.” CWL 14, 236.
- ^ Seeding the Positive Anthropocene, p. 161.
- ^ Seeding the Positive Anthropocene, n. 6 p. 117. He added in the same note: “On the bourgeois poise in the history of economics, see Geoff Mann, In the Long Run We are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution (New York: Verso, 2017).
- ^ Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy and Education, vol. 31, no. 3 (2020), 327–344. The title of McShane’s essay was a variation on Lonergan’s description of dialectic: “Such an objectification of subjectivity is in the style of a crucial experiment.” CWL 14, 237.
- ^ "On the Stile of a Crucial Experiment," p. 327.
- ^ Lonergan, Essay in Fundamental Sociology, CWL 25, 9.
- ^ [McShane's original footnote] The deep central crisis in the study of Lonergan is reading about general bias in Insight chapter 7, “sitting on the stile” of “haute vulgarization” (CWL 6, 121 and 155) in an old style of correlationally-rich initial meanings. The problem is to take the first eight chapters of Insight seriously, as steps of the Interior Lighthouse, and to be critical of sitting on the style, writing in the style, of epistemological sophistications.
- ^ “On the Stile of a Crucial Experiment,” 343-344.
- ^ CWL 14, 8.
- ^ CWL 14, 327.
- ^ In the series Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) is a Caltech theoretical physicist who regularly chides his roommate Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki) for his work in experimental physics and his buddy Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg), who is an engineer at Caltech’s Department of Applied Physics.
- ^ See the Afterword of Seeding the Positive Anthropocene, pp. 139-157.
- ^ “It is not clear whether the formalization of the chronostratigraphic Anthropocene, should it occur, will have any impact on humanists, social scientists, and others who are not ready to engage with scientific approaches such as in chronostratigraphy and ESS [Earth System Science].” Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “The Anthropocene: Comparing Its Meaning in Geology (Chronostratigraphy) with Conceptual Approaches Arising in Other Disciplines,” Earth’s Future 9, no. 3 (2021), 18 e2020EF001896, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EF001896.
- ^ McShane challenges the first assumption and mentions the second one in "Aesthetic Loneliness and the Heart of Science," Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis, vol. 6 (2011), pp. 51-84.
- ^ For a succinct evaluation, see P. McShane “Anthropocene or anthropocene? in Seeding the Positive Anthropocene, pp. 3–5; see also the index entries under “pure science” and “statistically effective science.”
- ^ Nichomachean Ethics, VI, 4, 1140a 1–23.
- ^ The two words appear side by side in statements such as “That is a hard theory to put into practice.”
- ^ For example, for Aristotle Anaxagoras and Thales were theoretically wise (from the Greek σοφία, [sophía]), but not practically wise (from the Greek φρόνησῐς, [phrónēsis]). Nichomachean Ethics, VI, 7, 1141b 1-8. Lonergan raises the question whether resolving basic theological questions might depend on the character and development of the theologian in “Theology and Praxis,” CWL 16, 178-179.
- ^ Lonergan included “implementation” in his definition of metaphysics in Insight, CWL 3, 416.
- ^ “There is need to advert luminously to the psychology of standard academic work, including indeed Lonergan’s own psychology, in so far as it is conservatively grounded in a certain facticity of the past and in the confined molecules of the present rather than in aspiration, adventure and fantasy.” Lack in the Beingstalk, n. 6, p. 197.
- ^ See chapters 16–18 in Futurology Express, “a book that shares the same structure as Insight and weaves in chapters 5 to 14 of Method in Theology but leaves Lonergan out of the discussion until chapter 16.” James Duffy, Editor’s Introduction, P. McShane, “Religious Faith Seeding the Positive Anthropocene,” Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy & Education, vol. 40, no. 1 (2019), n. 1, p. 1.
- ^ “With the word ‘engineering’ I wish you to associate the word ‘implementation’ in Lonergan’s description of metaphysics (end of page [CWL 3] 416 in Insight). Implementation was not seriously in the ethos of theology or philosophy when Insight emerged. Fred Crowe and I joked about the flaws in his gallant index: in the case of Implementation he just missed the boat. The Lonergan community stands even now on the dock.” LO and Behold 5, “Have I a Precise Viewpoint?” n. 3, p. 2.
- ^ Interpretation from A to Z, p. 69. In a footnote he added: “For an earlier but relevant description of this geohistorical genetics see, in my series, Questions and Answers, Question 36, “An Appeal to Fred Lawrence and Other Elders,” n. 34, p. 69.
- ^ Æcornomics 17: Engineering as Dialectic," at page The inner citation is to Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, CWL 18, 306.
- ^ See, for example, The Allure of the Compelling Genius of History, pp. 147, 179, and 231.
- ^ See notes 190 and 196 below.
- ^ In “A Common Quest Manifesto,” McShane poignantly described his view of the protection that heuristics provide: “Oncovering is the challenge of heuristics: a protection of humanity’s what and Om and home in each and all from stupidity and evil.” Æcornomics 3, “A Common Quest Manifesto,” n. 42, p. 8. See also Prehumous 2, "Metagrams and Metaphysics."
- ^ Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations (2nd ed. 2021), p. 11. In chapter 19 “The Well of Loneliness” of The Allure of the Compelling Genius of History, McShane identified “the present section” as the reader (see pp. 223–234). In The Future: Core Precepts in Supramolecular Method and Nanochemistry, McShane addressed the reader time and again as a “Supermolecule.” See, for example, pp. ii, x, xiii, 1, 6–8, 38, 48, 52, 59–61, and 67–68.
- ^ Boston: Beacon Press, 1970, pp. 14, 21, 39, 47, 83. See, for example, Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations (2nd ed, 2021), n. 29, p. 85 and “Interpreting a Fragment of Lonergan,” n. 19, p. 5. In an essay written in the spring of 2016, McShane recalled “an early effort of mine (Towards Self-Meaning, with Garrett Barden, Logos Books, 1969) regarding which there was trouble with the publisher. ‘You can’t do that!’ was the reaction to nudges to “take your eyes of the page” (a phrase of Gaston Bachelard) and dance around your own minding.” HOW 5, “Searching for Avila, John, Jesus, Stein, Lonergan, Moi Intime, Etc Etc.,” n. 41, p. 11.
- ^ “Philip McShane: The First Forty Years,” Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis vol. 3 (2003), p. 52.
- ^ “Philip McShane: The First Forty Years,” p. 52.
- ^ Michael Vertin, “Remembering Philip McShane,” Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy & Education, vol. 33, no. 1 (2022), p. 151.
- ^ Patrick Brown, "Incarnate Quested Speaking: A Tribute to Philip McShane," Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy & Education, vol. 33, no. 1 (2022), p. 22.
- ^ The Redress of Poise, pp. 34 and 36. “The use of “k” instead of “c” in certain words is a trivial but relevant trick, a linguistic feedback serving to call the reader's abyss to the challenge that the statesman's ‘character is formed by the bios theoretikos. The knowledge of the best polis, thus, enters the practice of politics not as a program of reform, but existentially through the statesman whose character has been formed by Aristotelian prudential science.’” The Redress of Poise, n. 14, p. 44. The inner citation is from Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol. 3: Plato and Aristotle (Louisiana State University Press, 1957), p. 360.
- ^ The full evaluation of the reader (“Joey”) is available in Lack in the Beingstalk, pp. 108–115. The original Appendix A, which was removed by the general editors after they received "Joey"’s critical evaluation, appears as Chapter 5, “Appendix A: The Phenomenology of Geometry,” Lack in the Beingstalk, pp. 127–153.
- ^ Lack in the Beingstalk, pp. 114-115.
- ^ Lack in the Beingstalk, p. 117. See also p. 104. Lonergan had spoken about haute vulgarization in the 1962 lecture “Time and Meaning”: “There can be acknowledged both theory and common sense but the acknowledgement of theory is a devalued acknowledgement. It is simply through what the French call ‘haute vulgarization.’ People have great respect for the great theoretical name – Newton and Einstein, Aristotle and Aquinas, weren’t they wonderful people! – but they have no personal experience of the intellectual pattern of living … they are not familiar, strictly and accurately, with any field of theoretical objects … lost in some no man’s land between the world of theory and the world of common sense.” CWL 6, 121. See also “Exegesis and Dogma,” CWL 6, 155.
- ^ Samuel Beckett, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, (New York: A New Directions Book, 1972), p. 13 (first published in 1929). This passage was first quoted by McShane in Lonergan’s Challenge to the University and the Economy on page 67 and was heavily marked by Lonergan when he read the book.
- ^ "When teaching children geometry, one is teaching children children." Benton, John; Drage, Alessandra; McShane, Philip (2005). Introducing Critical Thinking. Vancouver, B.C.: Axial Publishing. p. i. The authors add that "the word geometry can be replaced with any topic, and children can be replaced with teenagers, adults, teachers, and so on."
- ^ Field Nocturne 14, "The Central Humane Meta-Insight," n. 10, p. 4. The inner quotation is from Julia Kristeva, Colette, translated by Jane Marie Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 2.
- ^ Canada Council Research Application Files, number 410-78.0018.
- ^ "A professor in the audience of my lecture to the economics department of Seoul University said that 'it is all in Mankiw.' What is in Mankiw—criticized in a book written with colleague Bruce Anderson Beyond Establishment Economics: No Thank You, Mankiw—is the usual single-flow analysis that has been the economic diet or poison of economic activity for some hundreds of years.” “An Interview with Philip McShane,” February 27, 2017, p. 1. See also Æcornomics 7, “International Trade: Beginnings,” at p. 3.
- ^ Tenth edition, Boston: Cengage, 2023.
- ^ Oslington, Paul. “The Economics of Bernard Lonergan: Context, Modeling, and Assessment," Journal of the History of Economic Thought vol. 44, no. 2 (2022), pp. 182–204. doi:10.1017/S105383722000053X. Terrance Quinn's "Regarding Oslington's Assessment of Lonergan's Economics" (2023) is to appear in Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies in 2024..
- ^ See Chapter One "A Grade 12 Introductory Class in Economics" in Sane Economics and Fusionism (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2010), pp. 17-25.
- ^ Piketty's Plight and the Global Future ends with this question: "Why change a recipe that is 200 years old?" From the screenplay of The Hundred-Foot Journey, the 2014 film of the 2008 novel by Richard C. Morais (New York: Scribner, 2010).
- ^ “Finding an Effective Economist: A Central Theological Challenge,” Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy & Education, vol. 30, no. 1 (2019), p. 104. C9 is at the bottom and top of the stair diagram above. Here McShane is talking about the top C9.
- ^ See Fusion 9, "Functional Marketeers in Economics," at pp. 4-6.
- ^ See P. McShane, Pastkeynes Pastmodern Economics: A Fresh Pragmatism (Halifax: Axial Press, 2002), pp. 67–69.
- ^ Economics for Everyone (3rd ed., 2017), p. v.
- ^ "Editor's Introduction," For a New Political Economy, CWL 21, p. xxxi.
- ^ A brief description of the event is available on the Lonergan Research Institute website.
- ^ This is the phrase Fr. Francois-Xavier Dumortier, rector of the university, used in 2010 when he invited Fr. Gerard Whelan SJ to devote time to building up a community of interest. Lonergan Project at the Pontificia Universita Gegoriana.
- ^ In his 1957 lectures on existentialism, Lonergan spoke about the possibility of original thinkers being “schooled”: “Why is it that the original philosopher does not bring about a universal and permanent difference in the history of philosophy? Why does he merely found a school?” CWL 18, 285. Some years later, in Method in Theology he described a decadent school in these words: “Such devaluation, distortion, corruption may occur only in scattered individuals. But it may occur on a more massive scale, and then the words are repeated but the meaning is gone.” CWL 14, 78.
- ^ Futurology 6, “The MuzzleHim Brotherhood,” The Everlasting Joy of Being Human (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2013), p. 53. This harsh criticism is echoed in the testimonies of John Benton, Patrick Brown, and Terrance Quinn in Divyadaan vol. 33, no. 1 (2022), pp. 15-20, 21-30, and 141-146.
- ^ Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 (rev. ed. New York: Free Press, 1965; first published, London: G. Bell, 1949), p. vii. Lonergan quotes this passage in "The Ongoing Genesis of Methods," CWL 16, p. 142.
- ^ See Lonergan, CWL 3, 42-43 and 60-91; McShane, Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence (2nd. ed. 2021), pp. 191, 196-197, and 201. See also note 155 above.
- ^ Patrick Brown, “Editors’ Introduction,” Seeding Global Collaboration, p. xix. Cij is shorthand for a matrix of differentiated conversations between persons working in distinct functional specialties. McShane described the matrix in these words: “Cij, with i and j running from 1 to 8, represents the possible conversations, face to face or through journals, etc., between the community members. It is not difficult to imagine such conversations: between a textual researcher and a historian, between a phonologist and someone with a foundational perspective on neurophysiological possibilities, between an educator and an interpreter, and so on.” McShane, A Brief History of Tongue (1998), pp. 106–107. See also The Allure of the Compelling Genius of History, (2015), pp. 187–190. The meta-diagram W3 is a heuristic for a hoped-for collaboration between specialists who have intussuscepted the hylemorphism of Insight, especially chapters 8, 15, and 16. W3 was invented by McShane on a morning of a conference at Concordia University on Lonergan’s hermeneutics in November 1986. See A Brief History of Tongue, p. 124; Pierrot Lambert and Philip McShane, Bernard Lonergan: His Life and Leading Ideas, p. 161, and McShane, Prehumous 2, “Metagrams and Metaphysics.” The inner citation (†): "On commonsense eclecticism, see Insight, CWL 3, 441-445.
- ^ In Interpretation from A to Z, McShane highlighted the adventure dimension of methodical collaboration by adding the word inventively to five precepts: “Be inventively attentive, Be inventively intelligent, Be inventively reasonable, Be inventively adventurous, Be inventively responsible. Might the one simple word, inventively, J-wrapped, change history, gown and town?” note 117, p. 207. On J-wrapping, see “J ~ Inventing Techniques,” (75-82) which McShane called “the crisis essay in the book.” (76) On the relationship of the five precepts to the eight specialized tasks, see Appendix A, Phenomenology and Logic, CWL 18, 319-321 and chapter 3 “Inventing Pragmatics” in Pastkeynes Pastmodern Economics (Halifax: NS: Axial Press, 2002), pp. 53-73.
- ^ “I amused Fr. Fred Crowe in the late 1970s by promoting the slogan ‘if a thing is worth doing, then it is worth doing badly.’ He himself at that time was nudging others by asking ‘what specialty are you in?’” Method in Theology: Revisions and Implementations, p. 20.
- ^ McShane was one of the organizers of The Sixth International Lonergan Conference, “Functional Collaboration in the Academy: Advancing Bernard Lonergan’s Central Achievement,” University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, July 2014. The papers were later published in Seeding Global Collaboration, eds. Patrick Brown and James Duffy (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2016).
- ^ Seeding Global Collaboration, p. 235. The first inner citation (†) is to Method in Theology, CWL 14, 323. The second inner citation (††) is to Insight, CWL 3, 559. In the last year of his life, McShane wrote seven essays “to provide encouraging imaging of collaboration.” See Questing2020. While he considered possibilities for “getting the show on the road” skimpy, he identified the Assembly exercises—referring to the proto-dialectic exercises begun in 2020 (see note 196 below)—as “high-level probability aggregates.” Interpretation from A to Z, n. 2, p. 165.
- ^ See McShane's reply to Patrick Byrne, "A Paradigmatic Panel Dynamic for (Advanced) Students of (Religion)," at page 15.
- ^ “General Method,” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies, 13 (1995), 35-52; “Elevating Insight: Space-Time as Paradigm Problem,” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies, 19 (2001), 203–229; “Obstacles to Metaphysical Control of Meaning,” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies, 24 (2006), 187–195; “Self-Appropriating the Inner-Parts,” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies, n.s. 1 (2010), 55–66; “The Hypothesis of a Non-Accidental Human Participation in the Divine Active Spiration,” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies, n.s. 2/2 (2011), 187–202.
- ^ A Paradigmatic Panel Dynamic for (Advanced) Students of (Religion)," p. 14.
- ^ A Paradigmatic Panel Dynamic for (Advanced) Students of (Religion)," p. 15. This is a reference to Insight. The relevant paragraphs are found in the discussion of counterpositions (CWL 3, 603–604) and the second canon of hermeneutics (CWL 3, 609–610).
- ^ Public Challengeing the Method Board.
- ^ “'Proto-dialectic' might be an apt description of what we are attempting in this ongoing series of dialectic exercises. We are strategically skipping over tasks that are, quite frankly, beyond us. These tasks are named Completion, Comparison, Reduction, Classification, and Selection."† James Duffy, "Editor's Introduction," Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis, vol. 14 (2020), p. 3. The inner citation (†) is to CWL 14, 235. To date, eleven "proto-dialectic" exercises have been published in volumes 13, 14, and 16 of the Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis. McShane participated in four of those exercises. McShane wrote this about omitting the steps after Assembly: "Without the shared scientific core as a basis of Comparison those steps would just be a comedy of errors." LO and Behold 5, "Have I a Precise View?" at page 3.
- ^ Æcornomics 3, “A Common Quest Manifesto,” final words on page 16.
- ^ He wrote in the Afterword to The Allure of the Compelling Genius of History: "Sadly, I do not expect it [Allure] to be a success: it is too far out. How it got that far out has been on my mind, and I think of the luck that seeded the climb. There was the luck of teen years immersed in Chopin, the luck of working with Lochlainn O’Raifeartaigh in graduate studies of mathematical physics in the mid-fifties, the luck of finding in 1956 Fr. John Hyde who led me towards reading Aquinas and Lonergan properly, etc., etc." (253)
- ^ Interpretation from A to Z, n. 9, p. 147. The inner citation (†) is to F.M. Fisher, "On the Analysis of History and the Independence of the Social Sciences," Phil. Sc. vol. 27 (1960), p. 156.
- ^ CWL 3, 144, the first full paragraph.
- ^ Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence (2nd ed. 2020), p. lxi. The footnote (†) reads: "The intimacy is a matter of a shared inner word, “eo magis unum” (see the final chapter of Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, CWL 2, 204–08) with a shared neurochemistry of imaged psychic tonalities. For Christian Tower-dwellers, that shared neurochemistry centres on the noise Jesus expressing the gradual ever-incomplete achievement of a field view of history. As a lead-in, see Philip McShane, “The Hypothesis of a Non-Accidental Human Participation in the Divine Active Spiration,” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies n.s., vol. 2, no. 2, (2011), pp. 187–202. Other religious groups must find their way to their specification of the sequence of meanings of history lurking in the heuristic word Comparison on page 250 of Method in Theology (CWL 14, 235). But of course here I have been writing of the Tower People. The plain plane people move differently, tower-mediated in the “Yes,” “and” of Faith, Molly’s “yes” that ends Ulysses’ each Bloomsday day’s riverrun, and a Finneganend “and”—where Finnegan beginsagain, opening loneliness to tomorrow and eternity."
External links
- Philip McShane Personal website
- Axial Publishing
- Musings Blogspot of Ivo Coelho, SDB
- Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis
- Lonergan Workshop
- Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies
- Method: Journal of Lonergan Studiesn.s.