surprised

[jaray...@aol.com]

Hi,

I'm surprised that no one here picked up or commented on the new book on Husserl which, in effect, points to Lonergan where was coming from, where he picked up his notion of intentionality (which he did modify), etc. Again, the link is at

https://international.la-croix.com/news/god-of-the-continental-philosophers/11943?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=e-mail&utm_content=09-03-2020&utm_campaign=newsletter_crx_lci&PMID=0964dbe689e61e205168552536593154

An excerpt:

"While the church was engaged in a battle against the forces of "modernism" at the turn of the century, a small group of neo-scholastics sought to bridge the gulf between medieval and modern, Catholic and secular thought.

These "progressive neo-scholastics," as Baring calls them, found their man in Edmund Husserl, who had himself studied with Franz Brentano, a priest steeped in the scholastic tradition. What attracted these Catholics to Husserl was his theory of intentionality—the notion that human consciousness is always consciousness "of" something.

This appealed to Catholics because it appeared to open a way beyond the idealism of modern philosophy since Kant, which had threatened to undermine the possibility that human beings could possess an objective knowledge of realities outside the mind, including God.

Husserl's phenomenology seemed to offer a solution to this problem. His promise to return "to the things themselves" sounded to many Catholics like a vindication of medieval scholasticism, which stressed that human beings have the capacity to objectively know reality independent of the mind.

This led some Catholics to dub phenomenology a "new scholasticism."

By pointing "beyond" modern philosophy, they hoped that phenomenology could also serve as a path "back" to medieval thought, so that one might begin from the perspective of modern philosophy and end up somewhere closer to Thomas Aquinas." End quote  John

[Catherine Blanche King]

John:

Can you recognize the inside/outside (in-here/out-there) philosophical assumption working in the excerpt from your note below?

"This appealed to Catholics because it appeared to open a way beyond the idealism of modern philosophy since Kant, which had threatened to undermine the possibility that human beings could possess an objective knowledge of realities outside the mind, including God.

"Husserl's phenomenology seemed to offer a solution to this problem. His promise to return "to the things themselves" sounded to many Catholics like a vindication of medieval scholasticism, which stressed that human beings have the capacity to objectively know reality independent of the mind."

Whoever wrote the text is assuming the same false "split" that is problematic with the Kantian idealism that they, themselves, are trying to critique.

Catherine

---

From: jaraymaker via Lonergan_L <loner...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, March 9, 2020 2:28 PM
To: loner...@googlegroups.com <loner...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [lonergan_l] surprised

 

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[jaray...@aol.com]

Catherine,

The history of philosophy might be compared to a history of a  disease and proposed cures. Lonergan, as we are now discussing in the slow read, has provided his own remedy. In Insight, L does not accept Husserl's "abstract-looking", but in MiT he is more nuanced in his approach to Husserl. He notes Husserl's debt to Brentano. Brentano was a key figure in the transition from scholasticism to modernity.

Gernerally speaking, bodily diseases provide their own complicated scenarios, witness the now ravaging pandemic.

I posted the REVIEW of Baring's book called

Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy

which argues that Catholic scholars allied with phenomenology because they thought it mapped a path out of modern idealism―which they associated with Protestantism and secularization―and back to Catholic metaphysics. Baring traces the resonances of these Catholic debates in postwar Europe. 

You ask me:

Can you recognize the inside/outside (in-here/out-there) philosophical assumption working in the excerpt from your note below?

"This appealed to Catholics because it appeared to open a way beyond the idealism of modern philosophy since Kant, which had threatened to undermine the possibility that human beings could possess an objective knowledge of realities outside the mind, including God.

"Husserl's phenomenology seemed to offer a solution to this problem. His promise to return "to the things themselves" sounded to many Catholics like a vindication of medieval scholasticism, which stressed that human beings have the capacity to objectively know reality independent of the mind." End quote

 

You note by way of comment-critique: " Whoever wrote the text is assuming the same false "split" that is problematic with the Kantian idealism that they, themselves, are trying to critique." End quote.

 

As to the "assumption" you point to, THAT, of course is the critical point addressed, for example in our slow read. Epistemology, the relation between we as subjects trying to come to objective knowledge is extremely complicated. 

 

I do not vouch for the passage you quote written by the reviewer. In a way, our discussion of Piketty reflects a parallel challenge, i. e.  adequately situating contemporary influential writers, as they themselves have been influenced by such writers as Dilthey, Weber, Heidegger and a host of other thinkers.  I did note a few days ago how I addressed the Kantian problematic in my dissertation. 

 

L concludes his chapter 13 of Insight on the "Notion of Objectivity" by referring to "a principal notion of objectivity: the experiential, the normative, and the absolute." He adds, p. 408, "Our notion of objectivity begs no question....If true judgments are never reached, there arises the relativist position that acknowledges ONLY experiential and normativity." Then come the four chapters on metaphysics. 

 

The immediate question is whether and how Baring's book faces the issue. He does refer in passing to Lonergan, as I noted earlier, 

 

John

---

From: jaraymaker via Lonergan_L <loner...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, March 9, 2020 2:28 PM
To: loner...@googlegroups.com <loner...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [lonergan_l] surprised

Hi,

I'm surprised that no one here picked up or commented on the new book on Husserl which, in effect, points to Lonergan where was coming from, where he picked up his notion of intentionality (which he did modify), etc. Again, the link is at

https://international.la-croix.com/news/god-of-the-continental-philosophers/11943?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=e-mail&utm_content=09-03-2020&utm_campaign=newsletter_crx_lci&PMID=0964dbe689e61e205168552536593154

An excerpt:

"While the church was engaged in a battle against the forces of "modernism" at the turn of the century, a small group of neo-scholastics sought to bridge the gulf between medieval and modern, Catholic and secular thought.

These "progressive neo-scholastics," as Baring calls them, found their man in Edmund Husserl, who had himself studied with Franz Brentano, a priest steeped in the scholastic tradition. What attracted these Catholics to Husserl was his theory of intentionality—the notion that human consciousness is always consciousness "of" something.

This appealed to Catholics because it appeared to open a way beyond the idealism of modern philosophy since Kant, which had threatened to undermine the possibility that human beings could possess an objective knowledge of realities outside the mind, including God.

Husserl's phenomenology seemed to offer a solution to this problem. His promise to return "to the things themselves" sounded to many Catholics like a vindication of medieval scholasticism, which stressed that human beings have the capacity to objectively know reality independent of the mind.

This led some Catholics to dub phenomenology a "new scholasticism."

By pointing "beyond" modern philosophy, they hoped that phenomenology could also serve as a path "back" to medieval thought, so that one might begin from the perspective of modern philosophy and end up somewhere closer to Thomas Aquinas." End quote  John

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[Catherine Blanche King]

Hello John . . . okay . . .  

. . . the more I read and discuss Lonergan's work, the more I realize just how big the "cure" to the philosophical disease we find ourselves in really needs to be. Though certainly true in our time, however, the idea of a cure has a bit of a merely psychological "ring" to it. And we don't want the patient to die from the cure itself, least not if self-applied.  But first a cure must include the abandonment of the absolute need for control of the unfettered Absolute, and the constant running interference for Doctrine taking the place of openness to mystery and our place in relation to it.

However, perhaps we might want to recognize it also as a call to a huge paradigm shift that includes philosophical development (as only possible in our time) as well as self-correction of old and uncritically-accepted ideas-turned-assumptions .  .  . . I was commenting on the quote in your note that revealed, once again, the existence of those assumptions (the same as in Kant's writings). It's that same in-here/out-there set of assumptions that are operative in that quote. As long as those assumptions inform one's thought, and though completely logical, all else is just more spiraling downward, sort of like digging down into the same hole, even though it's not where the treasure is buried.

But the conversation reminds me of the below quote where Lonergan writes in Insight:  

"Against the objectivity that is based on intelligent inquiry and critical reflection,

there stands the unquestioning orientation of extroverted biological consciousness

and its uncritical survival not only in dramatic and practical living but also in

much of philosophic thought" (2000, p. 410).

Regards,

Catherine

 

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From: jaraymaker via Lonergan_L <loner...@googlegroups.com>

S}ent: Tuesday, March 10, 2020 12:13 AM

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[jaray...@aol.com]

Catherine and all,

we carry on here with the Herculean task you hint at. Would that Lonerganians could find a united way to achieve that task. I just submitted how Matt Lamb (who was my mentor at Marquette but then turned very conservative) dealt with the Herculean issue. Piscitelli, your mentor, had his own approach.

I do think Husserl as influenced by Brentano is one important pioneer. As noted in the article on Husserl, many attempts, Catholic, secularist have been, are being made.

If only the Lonergan world could "collectively" develop the functional specialties. It is so easy for scholars to get blind-sided and get stuck in their own alley ways. Getting GEM-FS accepted in other than English-speaking academic circles is another challenge. Yes, paradigm shift(s),

John

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[Richard Moodey]

Hi John,

I had intended to reply to your posting of Sarah Shortall's review of Edward Baring's Converts to the Real, but something distracted me (don't remember just what), and I never got back to it. What stood out for me was this paragraph:

Meanwhile, a generation of French philosophers was introduced to phenomenology through the study circle that Gabriel Marcel hosted in the 1930s, whose participants included such luminaries as Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricœur.

I had spent many hours with Marcel's writings, but never knew about this study circle. I'm glad to know of it, even though I'm not sure just what I will make of it.

I also think the review, and the book, help put Lonergan's work into historical perspective. I don't know whether or not that will change anything I say about different aspects of the body of writings he has left us, but the additional information about Catholic thinkers of the time and their reactions to Husserl will almost certainly enter into what I think about the time that Lonergan was engaged in the study that eventually led to Insight.

Regards,

Dick

[jaray...@aol.com]

Dick and all,

As to the four men listed in the subject, at this link one finds very pertinent info that serves as good background to Lonergan's own evolution:

http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/historyofscience/2012/10/25/reflection-bolzano-and-brentano/

"On October 17, Professor David Luft gave a lecture entitled “Philosophy and Science in Nineteenth-Century Austria: Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848) and Franz Brentano (1838-1917).”  The theme of Professor Luft’s talk was to give Bolzano and Brentano more credit and attention than they normally receive among English speaking historians and philosophers.  Bolzano warrants such attention because his analytic methods end up indirectly influencing Anglo-American philosophers in the twentieth century, while Brentano inaugurated the other major twentieth century philosophical tradition of Continental philosophy by establishing phenomenology.

Bolzano’s work was all new to me.  His main interests were in the philosophical foundations of mathematics and the natural sciences which he addressed in Theory of Science (1837).  How Bolzano approached philosophy was greatly influenced by Immanuel Kant such that Professor Luft noted he as been called the “Austrian Kant.”  Bolzano sought to further differentiate Kant’s distinction between the subjective and objective.  To do so, he could spend several pages clarifying particular words, like “concept” or “intuition.”  To establish scientific knowledge on firm ground, Bolzano separated logic from other mental processes.  His concept of “propositions in themselves” exemplified this through their objectivity and non-reality, which Professor Luft described as their only being consisting of their being true and not dependent on mental processes.

I had previously come across Brentano as the teacher of Edmund Husserl, but had not known the content of his work to the extent that Professor Luft provided.  Brentano wrote very little, Psychology from and Empirical Standpoint (1874) being his most important work, and has been better known as a great teacher.  Besides Husserl, his students included Sigmund Freud and Christian von Ehrenfels, both important in the history of psychology, which Brentano saw as the science of the future.  He based his research, in part, on Aristotle’s work On the Soul, advocating a psychology based in perception and experience of ones own mental phenomena.  These observations could take place only through memory, since, as Professor Luft pointed out, it is hard to observe the mental process occurring that contribute to a mental state such as anger while one is angry.  Brentano’s psychological method, which focused on describing what could be empirically observed of mental phenomena, led him to avoid developing any significant theory of the unconscious.  These theories would become more the work of his students, especially Freud.

While Bolzano and Brentano sat at the beginning of two different philosophical traditions, they still held some things in common.  Both had been Catholic priests.  Advocating for the equality of all people as well as teaching that Christ was concerned with both the inward and outward conditions of the individual helped Bolzano gain enemies who would have him fired from the University of Prague.  Brentano similarly held beliefs that countered Catholic dogma.  He would leave the Church of his own accord after opposing papal infallibility.  For Professor Luft, the most important similarity between Bolzano and Brentano was their slow and careful methods which ultimately led them in different directions." End quote

*Andre Hahn pursued his Ph.D. in History of Science at Oregon State University   (John)

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[Doug Mounce]

I'll add that Bolzano is proposed to have had some influence on Frege.  His later inheritance, in regard to Lonergan, might be found in Kripke's work. 

There is no mathematical substitute for philosophy.  Saul Kripke 1976

Sandra Lapointe (ed.), Logic from Kant to Russell: Laying the Foundations for Analytic Philosophy

In review, James Pearson from Bridgewater State writes,

"The final value of this volume that I wish to highlight is establishing that Frege's views did not emerge ex nihilo. Ever since the famous confrontation between Dummett and Sluga [Andrew Beards has a 2007 article that centrally addresses Dummett's view of reality], the influence of philosophers and mathematicians upon Frege has been a matter of scholarly debate. A number of these papers fuel Sluga's contention that various insights we credit to Frege had been anticipated by others, or existed in nascent form in their work. Lapointe, for instance, champions Bolzano as an unjustly neglected innovator, arguing that we are positioned to appreciate "the magnitude of Bolzano's proposed change" if we properly grasp the Kantian school of logic to which he was responding (105). Decompositional analysis and the theory of deduction were intimately connected for the Kantians, meaning that Bolzano's critique of the first necessitated significant work on the second. Although his assessment of concepts in terms of substitutability rather than containment is relatively well known, achieving as it does a broader way of applying the analytic/synthetic distinction to judgments than the Kantian approach, Lapointe details the novelty of Bolzano's logic. Bolzano employed two notions of deduction, one (deducibility) corresponding to what we would call truth preservation, and a second (ground-consequence) capturing the necessity of this process. Among the interesting effects of this separation (that we are now used to bringing together in our contemporary conception of logical consequence) is that, for Bolzano, nothing (rather than everything) is deducible from a contradiction, and logic becomes non-monotonic. She closes by amplifying her introductory historiographical remarks. Despite the tendency of some recent scholars, superficial pronouncements such as that Kripke's views were shaped by Russell and Wittgenstein are merely "part of an attempt to position oneself in some putatively worthy lineage" (118), and although Frege's logic is the more familiar, it is unjust to quickly dismiss Bolzano's as anti-Kantian, and unworthy of further study."

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[Richard Moodey]

Hi Doug,

I agree with Kripke's assertion that there's "no mathematical substitute for philosophy," but want to add that the history of philosophy also is no substitute for philosophy. Let me extend the analogy. Both "doing" math and "doing" history can lead to philosophical questions, but "doing" philosophy differs from doing these other two kinds of inquiries. I believe that this follows from Lonergan's statements about philosophical method. Self-appropriation is absolutely essential. A mathematician can begin the process of self-appropriation by asking: What am I doing when I'm engaged in mathematical inquiry? Etc. A historian can begin self-appropriation by asking: What am I doing when I'm engaged in historical inquiry? What am I knowing when I'm doing those things? How do I know that's knowing? 

This history of philosophy is in this respect no different from the history of anything else. As long as I'm asking and answering questions about who influence whom, to what degree and in what respect, I'm not using philosophical method, even of the influencers and influenced are themselves philosophers. I say this, not to trivialize the history of philosophy, which is a very interesting kind of history. I say it to emphasize what I consider to be Lonergan's characterization of the radical difference between philosophical method and the methods of other sciences and disciplines.

Best regard,

Dick

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[Richard Moodey]

Hi Doug,

I read this bracketed text as your insertion: "[Andrew Beards has a 2007 article that centrally addresses Dummett's view of reality]," but if it isn't my comment still holds. It is that Dummett doesn't "view" reality. To say that he does is to use the language of the basic counterposition. It would be more consistent with Lonergan's epistemology to say that Beards's article centrally addresses what Dummett says about reality. To say things about reality isn't to view reality. It is, rather, to formulate acts of experiencing, understanding and judging. Looking is just one kind of perceiving, one dimension of experiencing.

Dick

On Wednesday, March 11, 2020 at 1:54:43 PM UTC-4, Doug Mounce wrote:

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[Richard Moodey]

On Wednesday, March 11, 2020 at 1:54:43 PM UTC-4, Doug Mounce wrote:

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