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Assembling Lonergan’s Heart
Get PDFThis series of Assembly essays seeks to make a beginning on the structured dialectic task specified so compactly by Lonergan in section 5 of Chapter 10 of Method in Theology. I discussed how the series might be developed at the end of the Preface
The Absolute in History: The Philosophy and Theology of History in Schelling’s Late Philosophy; The Ages of the World (1811); Philosophy of Revelation (1841-42) and Related Texts
No full textTwo new translations of Schelling and a classic piece of German Schelling scholarship have appeared in succession in the past three years. In 2018, a translation of Walter Kasper’s seminal 1964 study, The Absolute in History: The Philosophy and Theology of History in Schelling’s Late Philosophy came out. In 2019, Joseph Lawrence’s translation of the 1811 edition of The Ages of the World appeared. And in the spring of this year, a complete translation of the Paulus edition of The Philosophy of Revelation was published by Spring Publications. English readers no longer have any excuses for not knowing what happened to Schelling’s thought after the 1809 Freedom Essay
What Are Your Expectations in Doing Comparative Interpretation?
Get PDFThis essay is an extended invitation to reflect on what you expect comparative interpretation to accomplish.1 Its purpose is to challenge your understanding and practice in comparing different viewpoints on some common issue. Do you think your development in understanding and practice can accelerate indefinitely? Do you, instead, expect it to level off, even come to a halt, because you have concluded that competing interpretations often reflect fundamental, irreconcilable differences between schools of thought or between different moral-religious traditions?Part I describes some expectations about comparative interpretation and asks you to make them explicit “objects” of your attention. Part II offers some guidance in identifying your own expectations. It also tackles the difficult question of the criterion: What is the basis for the judgments and decisions that produce developmental rankings of interpretations? Part III asks where you stand in relation to eight expectations about basic issues in comparative interpretation. The invitation to formulate your stances is an invitation to work out your own expectations about expectations, your own viewpoint on viewpoints
Editor's Introduction
Get PDFIn his 2001 “Introduction: The Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis,” Mike Shute recounted how the journal came about and what its aim would be. The idea for the journal emerged from a series of conferences in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1997, 1999, and 2000. Those conferences focused on Lonergan’s macroeconomic dynamics, the relevance of this analysis to issues of social justice, and the long-term challenge of transforming methods and approaches prevalent in the contemporary academy. After the final conference, the decision was made to move forward with the journal, and the three articles published in volume 1 came from individuals who participated in the conferences and the discussion leading up to the decision to launch the journal
Reinterpreting the Motor Car Analogy in Bernard Lonergan’s "For a New Political Economy"
Get PDFEconomics as a discipline and as a social science and practice is very hard work to practice well. Many economists are in fact very conscientious in their practice. My own approach to the critique and study of economics has been based, at least in part, upon an adaptation of the Socratic method from the history of philosophy which, in the first instance, can be read as negative, critical, and skeptical. This aspect of philosophy quickly appealed to my desire for independent thinking as a young student, especially in its capacity to expose the ignorance of those who presented themselves as authoritative experts, … to expose what the expert does not know and even further where there may be the pretense of knowledge when in fact there is none. This of course doesn’t mean, in the Socratic tradition, that the critical philosopher or incisive skeptic has more knowledge, but rather he/she may only be discovering the ‘holes’ in the expert’s knowledge without necessarily knowing what might fill that hole. This, as in the story of Socrates, can lead fatefully to serious trouble with the powers that be in any institution or society. This certainly can be the case when from a philosophical perspective one proceeds to criticize the limitations of a venerable and admittedly powerful discipline such as economics
Ending Water Scarcity In The Desert: Is It A Mirage? Examining Desalination Technology As A Solution For Water Scarcity In Israel
Get PDFThis paper examines contemporary efforts to end water scarcity in the Israeli state. Although the supply of water was initially envisioned as a responsibility solely of the state and took on an almost religious importance, developments over the last 15 years have elevated the role of the private sector, through the use of Public-Private Partnerships, in building new desalination plants and other required infrastructure, filling a role formerly held by the state. Although the amount of potable water in Israel has increased, too much focus has been placed on increasing water supply, while initiatives to decrease demand for water have been largely neglected. Negative externalities stemming from the country's embrace of desalination technology, including damage to marine environments, have been largely ignored as well.
Speculative Geology
No full textWe are not at peace with nature now. Whether it is the record-setting rain on the east coast or the raging wildfires in the west, distant news of melting permafrost or bleaching coral reefs, or the unexpected eruption of Mount Kilauea a few miles from here, things seem increasingly, and increasingly violently, out of control. I would like to suggest that there are resources in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie we can use in the twenty-first century to help us think differently about both the power of nature and our own relationship to it. Although Schelling saw himself, and was seen by many, as antagonistic toward the mechanical science of his own time, it would be a mistake—and a missed opportunity—to see his view as a mere Romantic reaction. It is a speculative rethinking of the idea of nature itself that finds a place for even those phenomena which seem most distant and alien. Schelling described his philosophy of nature as “speculative physics” both to distinguish it from what he calls the dogmatic or mechanistic model of nature, and to announce a new approach to natural science, concerned with the original causes of motion in nature (SW III: 275). Since every “natural phenomenon … stands in connection with the last conditions of nature” (SW III: 279), speculative physics can bring us to an understanding of nature as a system. Geology presents an illuminating case of this approach, as can be seen from Schelling’s characteristically enthusiastic introduction to a paper published by Henrik Steffens in Schelling’s Journal of Speculative Physics (Zeitschrift für speculative Physik) on the oxidization and deoxidization of the earth.1 After praising Steffens’ work on a new and better founded science of geology, Schelling reflects darkly on the too long dominant mechanical approach to geology. However, a new light has dawned, he declares, and as is well known, there are two ways forward—one can proceed from the lowest to the highest processes, or from the highest to the lowest. Steffens has elected the first method, and promises to connect the most general chemical processes to the “highest dynamic forces” (SW IV: 509), including the most powerful, the volcanic
Editor's Preface
Get PDFWhat did Lonergan have in mind while laying out the structure of dialectic? Could the procedure be at the heart of mediating “between a cultural matrix and the significance and role of religion in that matrix”? This volume presents the results of five dialectic exercises that began in the spring of 2019. They mark a beginning and a possible turning point. The preface links the significance of the procedure to the spontaneous question of a little girl who would like to hear the story of everything
Assembling the Science of Interpretation
Get PDF“Interpretation is to be scientific.” Those five words of Lonergan weave beautifully into my proposed sublation of Chapter 17 of Insight in the context of an effective engineering of progress that would gently blossom into the strange leap to eschatological neuromolecular reality.2 But here we are not pushing for a grasp of such a millennial-long global venture. We are, rather, trying to get the community around Bernard Lonergan to begin to take his project and his optimism seriously. Our effort is in continuity with two previous Assembly ventures but is quite independent of them: these introductory remarks settle that independence by indicating the basic strategy