Bibliographic record
Abstract
As with many thinkers of his generation, the Canadian philosopher and theologian Bernard Joseph Francis Xavier Lonergan, SJ (b. 1904–d. 1984), sought to overcome the limitations of the traditions of thought that he inherited. Although a Catholic theologian by profession, he found it necessary to also think through major issues posed by modern philosophy, science, modern mathematics, the historical condition of humanity, economics, ethics, art, and education. He became best known for his theory of knowledge in the decades immediately following the publication of his masterwork, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957). However, the discovery of his numerous unpublished writings following his death in 1984 required a major rethinking of his project. In light of those discoveries, his work on the theory of knowledge has come to be understood as one contribution to his broader effort to find an adequate way to think about and respond authentically to the human condition as historical. As he once put it, “All my work has been introducing history into Catholic theology.” He was dissatisfied with the static metaphysical context of the scholastic philosophy he was taught as a young man, as well as with the historicism that was adopted by many thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He refined his ideas in numerous unpublished essays, written both before and after the publication of Insight, that addressed the questions of historical process, knowledge, method, and responsibility. He has long been mistakenly categorized as a “transcendental Thomist,” and therefore rejected as a subjectivist and antirealist by many Thomist authors and teachers. It is certainly true that Lonergan was deeply indebted to the thought of Thomas Aquinas, but his studies found in Aquinas a theory of knowledge and a kind of realism that was, and still is, at odds with other prevailing Thomist interpretations. Prior to his two studies of Aquinas, he was already deeply influenced by his readings of Plato, John Henry Newman, Hegel, and Marx. These thinkers prepared him to find in Aquinas ideas that earlier scholars had overlooked—ideas that he would develop into his own unique treatments of knowledge, science, the natural world, history, truth, goodness, and God. He taught at the University of Toronto (Regis College), the Gregorian University (Rome), Harvard University, and Boston College.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.105 | 0.064 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".