What is this website about?

My view is that Adam Smith got it right when he noted that pin-making could be made more efficient by dividing the work intelligently.

“The division of labour, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a proportional increase in the productive power of labour” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations).

But what about the pen? Intellectual labour has been dividing and divided throughout the past five hundred years in a way that fosters isolated (and often irrelevant) specialization. Is there another way of moving forward in the search for relevant understanding, patterns of genuine progress?

That is what this website is about. It is about a revolution in the way those committed to intellectual labour collaborate.

But the revolution is a quiet revolution: it is about a revolving of ideas that would recycle the ideas that contribute to progress. Every area of inquiry is unwittingly struggling towards such a revolving. The website aims at bringing unity and efficiency and light into that struggle. It points towards a collaboration that would link our efforts together so that, instead of each zone and sub-zone of inquiry tunneling along alone, there would be a towering of significant meanings, a twister of truths, a vortex of growing understanding of human possibilities.

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Public Challenging Method Board

“A Paradigmatic Panel Dynamic for (Advanced) Students (of Religion)”
Appendix: Correspondence with Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies

Tinctures of System

Rescuing Lonergan: A Series of Vignettes

Interpretation

Disputing Quests

What's new?
2nd edition, 2021

"On the Stile of a Crucial Experiment"

Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy & Education, vol. 31, no. 3 (2020), 327-344

Questing2020

Seven essays to encourage sharing questions about collaboration in the forward specialties.

LO and Behold

A new series, begun in October 2019, focuses on “Dialectic: the Structure,” the key final paragraph of section 5, chapter 10 of Method in Theology.

"Method in Theology: ASAFACT"

Æcornomics

Æcornomics 1: That the Word Be Made Fresh

Æcornomics 2: The Pedagogy of Trading Between Nations


Æcornomics 3: A Common Quest Manifesto

Æcornomics 4: Sorting Out Superposed Circuits

Æcornomics 5: Structuring the Reach towards the Future

Æcornomics 6: I Started a Joke

Æcornomics 7: International Trade: Beginnings
"Sixes and Sevens: The Need for Cyclic Thinking"
Openers of the Positive Anthropocene

Available on Amazon

Preface to the 2017 Edition

An Interview with the Author


Fordham University lectures on Lonergan's Economics (videos)

1. “This Is Worth a Life”

McShane begins by quoting Stephen McKenna, who, when he discovered Plotinus and pondered the possibility of translating the Greek into English, said “This is worth a life.”  He then introduces the challenge of identifying the basic variables of economics as an empirical science, providing examples from the emergence of the elementary sciences.

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With Éamonn de Valera, 1968

Éamonn de Valera was the only leader of the 1916 Easter Revolution in Dublin not executed by the British. The photo of McShane and de Valera was taken in 1968 while de Valera was still President of Ireland.

Nashik, India, 2010

McShane gave the keynote address, and led discussions, for a three-day conference on economic theory in Nashik, India. McShane used examples from his father’s bakery business to introduce the distinct basic and surplus circuits in a dynamic exchange economy.

With Bernard Lonergan, 1971

This photo of Bernard Lonergan and McShane was taken during the summer of 1971 in Dublin. At the time Lonergan was lecturing on Method in Theology at the Milltown Institute.

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