Andrew Beards is an internationally renowned scholar who specialises in the philosophy and theology of Bernard Lonergan. Among his various writings are Objectivity and Human Understanding (1997), Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytical Philosophy (2008) and Philosophy: The Quest for Truth and Meaning (2010). The present book is a collection of nine essays published previously but which he hopes hereby will reach a wider audience. Each essay in its own way makes a contribution to the general conversation in philosophy and to Lonergan studies in particular. Beards caps this fascinating anthology with a brief Epilogue in which he offers some further reflections to bring things up to date. At the end of the book, there is an extensive and useful index of authors and themes.
The essays are grouped around five themes: knowing and consciousness, the philosophy of language, post-Continental philosophy, philosophical ethics, and philosophical theology. Although the subject matter is demanding, Beards's lucid prose and occasional wit, together with his confident mastery of the subject, helps the reader to glide through. Hugo Meynell, who directed his doctoral thesis and to whom this collection is dedicated, rightly observes that Beards's erudition is ‘formidable’ yet his style ‘serene, limpid and unpretentious … a model for philosophical exposition’.
Many scholars bemoan the lack of engagement between Lonergan's thought and that of other philosophers and theologians. In the present collection, Beards attempts to help remedy this; his provocatively pro-Lonergan stance – never naively espoused but always carefully established – should lure many scholars from other traditions into the debate. Indeed, his fundamental thesis is that to deny or negate the basic position outlined is to eschew or to contradict the actual operational structure of human knowing, willing, and loving.
In the earlier essays such as ‘Self-Refutation and Self-Knowledge,’‘John Searle and Human Consciousness,’‘Übersicht as Oversight: Problems in Wittgenstein's later Philosophy,’ and ‘Anti-Realism and Critical Realism: Dummett and Lonergan’, Beards wades into analytical philosophy in order to engage with Mackie, Hintikka, Wittgenstein, Searle, MacIntyre, Dummett, Quine, and Putnam. He deploys to brilliant effect Lonergan's account in Insight of the self-appropriated structure of the subject, using it as a critical tool, a kind of X-ray machine, to expose both the valid positions as well as the counter-positions present in the other philosophies.
At the same time, he makes applications of Lonergan's thought that advance Lonergan scholarship. For instance, in the essay ‘MacIntyre, Critical Realism and Animal Consciousness,’ he brings together disparate remarks in the Lonergan corpus in order to contrast animal and human ‘knowing’. Using Insight – as well as an appeal to his own experiences with the family dog, Bella – Beards ably dismisses the claim made by some that what differentiates humans from animals is language, rather than such intentional operations as raising questions, having insights, and making judgements.
Beards is well versed not only in Anglo-American philosophy but also in recent continental thought. In ‘Badiou's Metaphysical Basis for Ethics,’ he discusses the current revival of metaphysics in the continental tradition in the light of an extensive, albeit critical, exploration of Badiou's anthropology. In ‘Moral Conversion and Problems in Proportionalism,’ he argues convincingly from a critical-realist viewpoint how utilitarian, consequentialist, and proportionalist thinking in ethics is the result of flawed epistemologies such as idealism and relativism. In this essay, he also ventilates the fascinating issue of Lonergan's reaction to Humanae Vitae and his stance on contraception.
The final two essays constitute something of a tour de force. In ‘Christianity, Interculturality and Salvation: Some Perspectives from Lonergan,’ Beards begins with an analysis of Lonergan's much vaunted assertion of the shift in Western culture from classicism to historical mindedness. Lonergan, he avers, was not offering an explanatory account: he was painting with broad brush-strokes, something many commentators fail to observe. This is why Lonergan does not really develop what Ratzinger has underlined: that the Church herself is a cultural subject such that the task of inculturation is always one of ‘inter-culturation,’ At the same time, Beards ingeniously shows how Lonergan's richly nuanced account of conversion as intellectual, moral, and religious, would confirm Ratzinger's mistrust of Rahner's ‘anonymous Christian’ thesis. Using the example of Helen Keller, referred to by Lonergan in Method, Beards maintains that conversion to Christ is not merely a cognitive shift (from implicit or unthematic knowledge to explicit and thematic) but something far more life changing, nay, dramatic.
Many Rahnerian scholars presently contest the interrelationship of Rahner's philosophy and theology, arguing that his theology can be ‘free-wheeling,’ without his philosophy. Beards is thus not alone in finding aspects of Rahner's philosophy problematic, but he argues that problems with Rahner's philosophy do indeed lead to problems with his theology. In this respect, the final essay in the collection, ‘Rahner's Philosophy: A Lonerganian Critique’, is important. In his analysis of Spirit in the World and Foundations of Christian Faith, Beards uses Lonergan's impressive account of cognitional and volitional operations to mount a devastating critique that leaves Rahner's philosophy vanquished, both by its oversight of insight – its inattention to basic human psychology – and by its uncritical and selective assumption of elements of neo-Scholastic philosophy. It is precisely here that Lonergan's method becomes a critical tool once again as Beards shows how for Rahner ‘being conscious’ and ‘knowing’– so clearly delineated and differentiated in Lonergan – are often equated, appearing on occasion to be used interchangeably. One consequence of this is to undermine his celebrated notion of the Vorgriff, the pre-apprehension of Being, or implicit knowledge of God. In a sparkling account appealing to Chapter Sixteen of Insight, Beards shows how this oversight impacts upon Rahner's anthropology, and in particular, his account of the survival after death of the human spirit or soul.
This book will be controversial. Yet despite its penetrating analysis, Beards always shows a deep respect for his interlocutors. It is this that makes this wide-ranging collection applying Lonergan's thought to various philosophies well worth the effort.
