Bernard Lonergan's critical realism, isomorphism, and metaphysics of proportionate being in “Insight”: An encounter with the critical problem of knowledge
Abstract
This dissertation is presented as an attempt to accurately explicate and rigorously justify B.F. Lonergan's critical realism and its consequent explicit metaphysics of proportionate being that together and implicitly contain a rigorous and factually justifiable formulation of a solution to the critical problem of our objective knowledge of reality, with respect to (a) its concrete possibility (as to whether it is possible) and (b) its antecedent conditions for the same possibility (as to how it is possible), as it is found in his philosophical magnum opus, i.e., Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. The initial two thirds of the dissertation present such explications of the text of Insight's Chapters 1--15, where we can find the various pronouncements most relevant to the critical problem, in order to provide the present author, in the remaining one third of the dissertation, with the firm foundations to formulate what are meant by both Lonergan's critical realism and its consequent metaphysics as its solution, and to enable him to grasp its theoretical and factual justifiability. In this explication and justification, we understand that critical realism refers to the precise, 2nd-order philosophical determinations of the meanings of such fundamental notions as (i) the real, (ii) knowing, and (iii) objectivity, to be found in Insight's Chapter 14: "The Method of Metaphysics," § 1 The Underlying Problem, based on the antecedent and successive, phenomenologically descriptive and scientifically explanatory, and thus "critical" (as in critical realism), clarifications of the notion of (ii) human knowing, to be found within such various 1st-order cognitional contexts as modern mathematics, modern science, and common sense, in order to rigorously formulate and justify, in the end, the integral meaning of the precise notion of our (iii) objective (ii) knowledge of (i) the real. The analytic principle of isomorphism between the structure of such (ii) knowing and the correlative structure of (i) the real through (iii) objectivity, in critically deriving Lonergan's (i) realist metaphysics of being proportionately from the antecedently determined structures of the same (ii) knowing already found in mathematics, science, and common sense, is rigorously justified as the essential moment in implementing Lonergan's critical realism "as" his explicit metaphysics of proportionate being that is already identified with (i) the real.
Subject Area
Philosophy
Recommended Citation
Shimada, Yutaka, "Bernard Lonergan's critical realism, isomorphism, and metaphysics of proportionate being in “Insight”: An encounter with the critical problem of knowledge" (2006). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI3216925.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI3216925
