La sfida di dirigere se stessi: soggetto esistenziale e teologia fondazionale in Bernard Lonergan (The Challenge of Directing Oneself: The Existential Subject and Foundational Theology in Bernard Lonergan)

by Giuseppe Guglielmi

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: Bernard Lonergan's Anthropological Picture

I. Scientific and historico-cultural changes
1. Introduction
2. Scientific revolution
3. Historical revolution
4. New notion of culture
5. The anthropological transitions
5.1 From essence to the ideal
5.2 From substance to the subject
5.3 From faculty psychology to the flow of consciousness
6. Conclusion

II. Consciousness
1. Introduction
2. The operations of consciousness
3. Normativeness of the levels
4. Generalized empirical method
5. The subject at the different levels of consciousness
5.1 The experiential subject
5.2 The intelligent subject
5.3 The reasonable subject
6. Conclusion

III. The existential subject: development from "Insight" to "Method in Theology"
1. Introduction
2. "Insight"
3. The summer seminars of 1957-1959
4. The interest in method in theology and the existential turn
5. "Method in Theology"
6. "Variations in Fundamental Theology"

IV. Becoming existential subjects
1. Introduction
2. A critical point: the existential crisis
3. Structure of the existential subject
3.1 Deliberation and existential self-transcendence
3.2 Evaluation as existential discovery
3.3 Existential decision: a "high undertaking"
4. Conclusion

V. The existential subject: between meaning and history
1. Introduction
2. Historicity of the subject
3. The relevance of meaning
3.1 The world of immediacy
3.2 The world mediated by meaning
3.2.1 The appearance of language
3.2.2 The field of common sense
3.2.3 The field of theory
3.2.4 The field of interiority
3.2.5 The field of transcendence
3.2.6 The field of art and of scholarship
3.2.7 Final reflection on the fields
3.3 The world constituted by meaning
4. Theological relevance

Part II: Dialectics and Foundations of the Existential Subject

VI. The dialectic of the existential subject
1. Introduction: an unavoidable "tension"
2. Dialectical method
3. At the root of conflicts
4. The manifestation of conflicts: biases
4.1 Dramatic bias
4.2 Individual bias
4.3 Group bias
4.3.1 Complex and unintelligible social system
4.3.2 Inauthentic tradition and cultural crisis
4.4 General bias
5. Consequences of general bias
5.1 The deformed subject
5.1.1 Rationalistic aberration and the empiricist conception of science
5.1.2 Depersonalizing determinism of technology
5.2 The drifting subject
5.3 The alienated subject

VII. The truth of man: being authentic
1. Introduction
2. Existential subject and the recovery of reason
3. The foundation of objectivity in authentic subjectivity
4. Existential subject and the question of meaning
4.1 The question of meaning in the fundamental theology of H. Verweyen
4.2 Fundamental theology according to Lonergan
4.3 Fundamental theology and the question of meaning 

VIII. The state of authenticity: religious experience
1. Introduction
2. From the existential subject to the religious subject
3. The characteristics of religious experience
4. Redemption
5. Religion and history

IX. Religious experience and fundamental theology
1. Introduction
2. The question of God: the new point of departure
3. The significance of theological doctrines
4. The rejection of God as "disaffection"

Conclusion 

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Giuseppe Guglielmi belongs to the Priests of the Sacred Heart, founded by Leon Dehon. He was born in 1976. He took his licentiate in fundamental theology and his doctorate at the Gregorian University in Rome. At present he is an assistant in theological anthropology at the Theological Faculty of Southern Italy, in Naples. 

The book belongs to a series called "Ai crocevia" ("At the Crossroads") by the Pontifical Theological Faculty of Southern Italy. The publisher is "Il pozzo di Giacobbe" ("Jacob's Well") in Trapani, Sicily. E-mail www.ilpozzodigiacobbe.it . Price 20 Euros. 191 pages.