Critical Realist Essays
By David Oyler
Bernard Lonergan (December 17, 1904 – November 26, 1984)
These essays draw on a number of influences with the goal being the development of an explanatory model that applies to the organism, brain, mind, psyche and consciousness. The three major influences for the philosophy of consciousness are Husserl, Polanyi and Lonergan. Husserl lays out the field of cosncisousness and introduces ways to catergorize its elements and to relate them to one another. Though he characterized his work as descriptive, I argure that it really is explanatory. I suspect his descriptive bent is patially a reaction to the "explanatory sciences' of physics and chemistry which the naturalists used as their models for science and tried, as much as they could to use their methods to understand consciousness, an effort still underway today. Description is taken to relate directly to experience, which, in turn may be taken as being reality. While what s experienced may be real, to equate it with reality is to embody elements fof niave realism in your philosophy, something that Husserl, as all idealists have, struggled mightily to overcome. are not primarily expositions of Critical Realism as presented by Bernard Lonergan in Insight: A Study of Human Understanding and other works, though sometimes they are expository. Rather they address topics in a manner consistent with critical realism. Most were presentations at the West Coast Methods Institute conferences at Santa Clara University and Loyola Marymount University.
| Name | Format | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Critical Realism’s Contribution to the Science of Mind | Word | ||
| Experience and Consciousness | Word | ||
| Immediacy and Mediation in Husserl | Word | ||
| Neural Architecture and Extroverted Consciousness | Word | ||
| The Personal and the Social | Word | ||
| The Openness of Structure | Word | ||
| Health as Self Actualization | Word | ||
| Supervenience and Enablement | Word | ||
| The Primacy of Performance | Word | ||
| The Unity of Consciousness | Word | ||
| Wholes and Hierarchies | Word | ||
| Potency and Structure | Word | ||
| Cosmopolis and Business | Word |