Autor: Byrne, Patrick H.

Buch: Beitrag zur Konferenz: World Views: Environment, Culture, Religion 7: 1-2 (March 2003)

Titel: Ecology, Economy and Redemption as Dynamic: The Contributions of Jane Jacobs and Bernard Lonergan

Stichwort: Evolution: Lonergan - Darwin; Materialismus - Intelligibilität

Kurzinhalt: While Lonergan's account is evolutionary in the broad sense, he carefully distanced himself from Darwin's version of evolution and the reductionistic, materialistic biases that characterize much of neo-Darwinian thought.

Textausschnitt: Ib Those efforts reached a mature culmination in his classic work, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. There he gradually develops his account of the dynamic processes of the created order, characterized by what he called "emergent probability." While Lonergan's account is evolutionary in the broad sense, he carefully distanced himself from Darwin's version of evolution and the reductionistic, materialistic biases that characterize much of neo-Darwinian thought. In Lonergan's view, materialism assumes that ultimate reality is known through sensation, especially through sight and touch (i.e., the "real" as what resists physical contact). By way of contrast Lonergan argues that what is known through sensation is only a component of reality; it is intelligibility (what is known through human insight and judgment) that is the heart of the natural reality. Natural science, he argues, is fundamentally concerned with discovery of the intelligible relationships and orders that make up the natural world. Where a materialistic worldview regards something like physical impact as the ultimate explanatory cause, Lonergan argues that it is intelligible relatedness that explains why things are as they are and why they behave as they do. Nowhere is this more evident than in Lonergan's account of "emergence." In the following paragraphs I offer a brief sketch of Lonergan's account of "emergent probability." (Fs)