On 16th May 2008, L’Osservatore Romano showed a photograph of Pope Benedict being presented with a book, a new Italian translation of Bernard Lonergan’s Insight. The mere presenting of a book may not always be considered important enough to warrant a photograph with such a figure, and no doubt some readers were curious about who this author Bernard Lonergan was. But, at the same time, an international conference was being held at the Italian Philosophical Institute in Naples under the auspices of the Pontifical Theology Faculty of Southern Italy to celebrate the same publishing event. The conference was entitled Beyond Essentialism: Bernard Lonergan an Atypical Scholastic, and delegates at this conference came from a variety of European countries as well as Canada, USA, Chile and India. Thus, also in Naples the question was heard: who is this Bernard Lonergan and what does he have to say?

…The epistemological moment of Insight comes when – having completed [an] account of our three cognitional levels: experience, understanding, and judgement – Lonergan invites his readers to an act of “self-appropriation”. Here they affirm that in their own lives their acts of knowing are in fact structured in this three-step manner. This is the epistemological moment: now one is not just observing and understanding a phenomenon of mental acts but one is judging as true that one really can, oneself, attain objective knowledge by passing through these steps. Finally, for Lonergan, metaphysics anticipates the broad lines of what we are capable of knowing by such authentic acts of knowing. He speaks of an “isomorphism” between the structure of knowing and the structure of being. Thus, for example, he speaks of the notions of potency, form and act as being isomorphic to our experiencing data, our understanding, and our judging. But there is more to be explored with respect to this isomorphism; in fact, the move from epistemology to metaphysics begins to reveal to us what powerful intellectual tools philosophy can now make available to us….

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