Critical Realist Essays

By David Oyler

Bernard Lonergan (December 17, 1904 – November 26, 1984)

Dave

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 is experienced may be real, to equate it with reality is to embody elements of niave realism in your philosophy, something that Husserl, as all idealists have, struggled mightily to overcome. A fourth major influence is Piaget who provides a structuralist model of operations that applies equally to biological and psychological explanation. These are not 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 are based on presentations at the West Coast Methods Institute conferences at Santa Clara University and Loyola Marymount University.

Name Format
Dialectic and the Emergence of Explicit Metaphysics PDF   Word
Things, States and Enablement PDF   Word
Self and Subject PDF   Word
The Operational Situation PDF   Word
Critical Realism’s Contribution to the Science of Mind   PDF   Word
Experience and Consciousness PDF   Word
Freedom for Self Transcendence PDF   Word
Immediacy and Mediation in Husserl PDF   Word
Neural Architecture and Extroverted Consciousness PDF   Word
The Personal and the Social PDF   Word
The Openness of Structure PDF   Word
Health as Self Actualization PDF   Word
Supervenience and Enablement PDF   Word
The Primacy of Performance PDF   Word
The Unity of Consciousness PDF   Word
Wholes and Hierarchies PDF   Word
Potency and Structure PDF   Word
Cosmopolis and Business PDF   Word