Articles, Lectures, and Notes

This archival section contains previously published articles that are not readily available as well as articles never published, e.g., lectures given on various occasions. Some of the occasional lectures that might have been included were not, indeed they were dumped by McShane, as were various bundles of notes. What is left is what he considered seriously helpful to those who are struggling towards an explanatory heuristic. 

(Please note that in most of the articles and lectures written after 2010 there are hyperlinks to works hosted on an earlier version of this website. All of those essays are now available on this website and can be easily found using the search bar.)

Mathematical Physics: Statics” Lecture notes prepared for a yearlong course on mathematical physics, a first year honors course in University College Dublin, 1959-1960.

Mathematical Physics: Dynamics” Lecture notes prepared for a yearlong course on mathematical physics, a first year honors course in University College Dublin, 1959-1960.

Lonergan’s ‘Circulation Analysis’: A Discussion” is a typescript from a tape made at the Thomas More Institute, Montreal, November 4, 1979. Taking part in the discussion were Eric O’Connor, Michael Gibbons, Philip McShane, and Eileen de Neeve. Nicholas Graham made the transcription.

Towards a Luminous Darkness of Circumstances: Insight After Forty Years” was originally written in 1998 for presentation at Universidad Javeriana, Bogota, Colombia, where it has been translated and published.

Lonergan and the Philosophy of the Lower Sciences, a discussion of theoretic and metatheoretic displacment written in 2002, with an appendix on organic systematics.

Ways to Get Into Functional Collaboration was written for participants and observers of the functional specialties on-line seminar that began in January 2011.

Arriving in Cosmopolis was the keynote address at the First Latin American Lonergan Workshop, Puebla, Mexico, June, 2011.

Llegando a Cosmópolis is a Spanish translation of “Arriving in Cosmopolis,” the keynote address at the First Latin American Lonergan Workshop, Puebla, Mexico, June, 2011.

For the Joy Set Before Us of Effective Field-fostering Reviewing,” Himig Ugnayan, A Theological Journal of the Institute of Formation and Religious Studies (IFRS), vol. XVI (2015-2016), special edition. Reshaping Christian Openness: A Festhshrift for Fr. Brendan Lovett, MSSC.

Preface to Economics for Everyone,” (3rd edition, 2017).

A Paradigmatic Panel Dynamic for (Advanced) Students (of Religion)” was written in the autumn of 2017 in anticipation of the panel discussion “Recycling Method in Theology” at the West Coast Methods Institute, Loyola Marymount University, April 21, 2018. An appendix provides a correspondence with the co-editor of Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies.

Interpreting a Fragment of Lonergan” was written in the autumn of 2018 for the Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis. This essay contains some generic points about the crisis in interpretation, some pedagogical points about “Economic Process” (CWL 15, 12–14), and an attempt to do the second functional specialty in regard to this two-page fragment.

Sixes and Sevens: The Need for Cyclic Thinking” is a two-part essay written in December 2018. The first part focuses on the need for creative recycling (“crecycling”) of the book Sustainability and Peaceful Coexistence for the Anthropocene, while the second part is a ten-step crecycling of Insight chapters 6 and 7. The two essays were later published in Seeding the Positive Anthropocene (Axial Publishing, 2022), pp. 89-107.

Method in Theology ASAFACT” was written in June of 2019. This short essay suggests what might be done and what should be skipped in the decade 2020–2030 “to bend, yourself and others, towards the emergence of a seeding community of an effective engineering of, e.g., climate change and kindness, and de-monification” (4).

Method Going Mainstreet: Deliberated Backfirings,” the appendix to Interpretation from A to Z (Axial Publishing, 2020), is a C9 essay “reaching out on the plane of commonsense meanings” (184). Throughout the essay, McShane boldfaces the word deliberation and invites the reader to assemble this appendix essay and position oneself regarding suggestions about what is needed in the decades 2020-2050.

On the Stile of a Crucial Experiment,Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy and Education, vol. 31, no. 3 (2020), 327–344.  This essay is an invitation to an encounter, one described by Lonergan in Method in Theology chapter 10 as “an objectification of subjectivity in the style of the crucial experiment” (CWL 14, 237).