Philip McShane

Philip McShane (18 February 1932 – 1 July 2020) was an Irish mathematician and philosopher-theologian. Originally trained in mathematics, mathematical physics, and chemistry in the 1950s, he went on to study philosophy from 1956 to 1959,[1] followed by four years of theology,[2] and later a number of years studying economics.[3]

Philip McShane
University of British Columbia, July 2014
Born
Philip Joseph McShane

(1932-02-18)18 February 1932
Baileboro, Co. Cavan, Ireland
Died1 July 2020(2020-07-01) (aged 88)
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Alma mater
Scientific career
Fieldsmathematical physics, evolutionary theory, economics, methodology
ThesisThe Concrete Logic of Discovery of Statistical Science
Websitehttps://philipmcshane.org/

In a period that spanned over sixty years, McShane published numerous articles and twenty-five books.[4] His published works range from technical works on the foundations of mathematics, probability theory, evolutionary process, and "sloping," omnidiciplinary methodology,[5] to introductory texts focusing on critical thinking, linguistics, and economics. He also wrote essays focusing on the philosophy of education pivoting on the "Childout Principle."[6] Beginning in 1970, he participated in and helped organize a number of international workshops and conferences focusing on topics such as "ongoing collaboration,"[7] reforming education,[8] communicating the basic insights of sane economics,[9] and jump-starting "functional collaboration."[10]

Life and Education

McShane was born in Baileboro, Co. Cavan.[11] When the McShane family moved to Dublin, Philip went to O'Connell School. He continued his education while training as a Jesuit at University College Dublin (BSc and MSc in relativity theory and quantum mechanics), St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg (Lic. Phil), Heythrop College (STL) and Campion Hall, Oxford (D.Phil).[12] He lectured in Mathematics at UCD (1959-1960) and in Philosophy at the Milltown Institute (1968-1973).

McShane entered the Jesuits in September of 1950 and spent two years in spiritual formation.[13] Thirteen years later, after completing a B.Sc., an M.Sc. in relativity theory and quantum mechanics, and a Licentiate of Philosophy, he was ordained a Jesuit priest. In the years that followed, he co-authored (with Garret Barden) Towards: Self-Meaning and wrote Music That Is Soundless. In the mid-1960s, he studied at Oxford University, where he successfully defended his doctoral thesis "The Concrete Logic of Discovery of Statistical Science" in August of 1969. The following year the thesis was published as Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence.[14] After the First International Lonergan Conference in Florida 1970, McShane took on the task of editing two volumes of the papers presented at that event.[15] In 1972 McShane decided to leave the Jesuits.[16]

In 1975, along with Conn O'Donovan, McShane founded The Dublin Lonergan Centre, in Milltown Park, Dublin.[17] In 1979, he served as visiting fellow in religious studies at Lonergan College, Concordia University, Montreal. In his course, McShane encouraged students to work through the exercises in his introductory book Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations.[18]

From 1974 until 1994, McShane taught philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. When he retired from teaching in 1995, he began writing prolifically.[19] In most if not all of his published works, one finds him exploring different facets of what he called "a triple paradigm shift in economic thinking."[20] One shift is to a theory of economic dynamics to replace one-flow static analysis.[21] A second shift is to a structure of glocal collaboration that subsumes all disciplines, all fields of study.[22] The third shift is "towards a deep and precise plumbing of the depths and heights of human desire and imagination."[23]

"Towards a New Economic Order," Nashik, India, September 2010

After retiring from teaching, McShane also accept international invitations to speak. He gave keynote addresses at conferences in Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. On various occasions and in various countries—including Australia, Canada, India,[24] Korea, Mexico, and the U.S.—he has presented the key issues underlying the significant transition from the descriptive muddles of Marxist, neo-Marxist, Keynesian, and neo-Keynesian analyses to an empirically verifiable analysis.[25]

In his keynote address "Arriving in Cosmopolis,"[26] which he delivered at the First Latin-American Lonergan Workshop in Puebla, Mexico, in June 2011, McShane estimated the numbers of functional specialists —identified by Bernard Lonergan as Researchers, Interpreters, Historians, Dialecticians, Foundational (persons), Doctrines or Policy (makers), Systematizers, and Communicators[27]—collaborating around the globe when the earth's total population reaches 10 billion. In the same essay, McShane placed what is called the Standard Model in physics within a larger standard model of global collaboration, one that situates the dynamics of physics within a dynamics of human progress.[28]

"Educating for Cosmopolis," First Latin-American Lonergan Workshop, Puebla, Mexico, June 2011

In the last years of his life, McShane wrote repeatedly about the negative Anthropocene age in which we live and a future positive Anthropocene age of luminous collaboration.[29] In Questing2020, his final series of essays, he wrote of the possibility of human collaboration mirroring the psychic adaptation of starling murmuration. In "Anthropocene or anthropocene?", an essay published posthumously, McShane proposed that physics and chemistry be considered preliminary parts of engineering. In the same essay, he identified the positive Anthropocene as a period that began "when humanity's stratification of the Earth System became tinged with flickers of human concern" and that "will rise to some maturity when such flickers have blossomed into a statistically effective science, a science, of course, of fulsome engineering."[30]

When McShane died in July of 2020, colleagues and former students around the globe paid tribute to him. One person described him as an "African elder," another as someone who "gave counsel to think long-term, in terms of centuries rather than years or even decades," and a third as "someone I could always be myself around, even when I was angsty, anxious, or depressed … a friend, mentor, professor, and family member all at once." A former student described "being amazed, when I asked him some questions, at his generosity—he tore out a chapter of something he was working on and gave it to me there and then."[31]

Influences
Port Meadow, Oxford, the site of the statistical investigations of the distribution of Ranunculus bulbosus (buttercup) discussed in Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence.

By his own account, McShane was humbled as a young man by the works of Chopin and fortunate to have discovered Descartes' achievement in geometry.[32] He had an appreciation for beauty, intelligence, and creativity as slowly emerging in world process,[33] and his viewpoint transcended disciplinary boundaries. For example, in an essay written for a conference on peaceful coexistence,[34] he cited Elizabeth Barrett Browning and William Shakespeare, and referred to Archimedes' invention of a screw for raising water level. Similarly, there are references to the teachings of the Buddha, the music of Beethoven, and the works of James Clerk Maxwell in Bernard Lonergan: His Life and Leading Ideas.[35]

In a lecture introducing the economic analysis of Lonergan at Fordham University in January 2000,[36] McShane quoted Stephen McKenna. When McKenna discovered the writings of Plotinus in his late 30s, he pondered the possibility of translating The Enneads from Greek into English and decided "this is worth a life."

McShane and Lonergan at the Milltown Institute, Dublin, in 1971.

It could be said that McShane made a similar decision when he discovered the works of Lonergan in 1958. He is the premier interpreter of Lonergan’s novel and highly relevant paradigm shift towards economic science,[37] a shift which took McShane years to absorb.[38] In addition to editing Lonergan’s economic manuscript For a New Political Economy[39] for publication, he published five books and numerous articles introducing the basic insights of two-flow analysis.[40] McShane also edited Lonergan’s Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism,[41] and regularly referred to the final two chapters as a resource for trying to come to grips with the problem of the "existential gap."[42]

McShane is considered by many the leading interpreter of Insight: A Study of Human Understanding,[43] a compendious work in which Lonergan lays out both a genetic method for studying organic development and some canons for a methodological hermeneutics. McShane treated both of these topics in Interpretation from A to Z, a book he wrote to provide "a straightforward help to begin to read properly the two main treatments of Lonergan of the topic of interpretation: section 3 of chapter 17 of Insight and chapter 7 of Method in Theology."[44]

Research interests

The Possibility of Glocal Collaboration


References
  1. McShane began reading Bernard Lonergan's Verbum articles, now Volume 2 in the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, in 1958.
  2. In 1960, after teaching mathematical physics, engineering, and commerce to undergraduates, and special relativity and differential equations to graduate students at University College Dublin, McShane began studying theology at Milltown Park. He did his fourth year of theology at Heythrop College in 1963.
  3. In 1968 he began reading Lonergan's 1944 manuscript "Essay in Circulation Analysis" and made his first attempt to present the material in the summer of 1977. By his own account, McShane "estimated that [he] had spent twenty hours on each page of the manuscript over a period of about five years." {add source}
  4. For a complete list of published articles and books, please see McShane's CV.].
  5. In the essay "Slopes: An Encounter," McShane wrote that "as the disciplines move up from research through interpretation to history and to dialectic, there is a convergence of data and interest." Cantower VIII, at page 13. In the essay he went on to give both a priori and a posteriori reasons for his optimistic perspective on omnidisciplinary foundations.
  6. "When teaching children geometry, one is teaching children children." Benton, John; Drage, Alessandra; McShane, Philip (2005). Introducing Critical Thinking. Vancouver, B.C.: Axial Publishing. p. i. The authors add that "the word geometry can be replaced with any topic, and children can be replaced with teenagers, adults, teachers, and so on."
  7. The slogan of the International Lonergan Congress in Florida (1970). McShane edited two volumes of papers from this conference.
  8. For five weeks in the spring of 2001, McShane was a scholar-in-residence at Saint Ignatius’ College Riverview in Sydney, Australia. In addition to giving a series of classes and seminars on Ignatian pedagogy for the 21st century, McShane taught classes to high school boys. See further "How Might I Become a Better Teacher?" Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy and Education, vol. 16, no. 3, (2005), 359–82.
  9. In 2020 McShane was invited to give the keynote address and lead discussions at a three-day conference on economic theory in Nashik, India.
  10. McShane was part of the organizing committee for The 6th International Lonergan Conference, "Functional Collaboration in the Academy: Advancing Bernard Lonergan's Central Achievement," University of British Columbia, July 2014. He preferred to speak about "functional collaboration" rather than "functional specialization" because the need for collaboration emerged towards the end of Bernard Lonergan's Insight, where the term collaboration occurs more than thirty times. See further "Ways to get into Functional Collaboration."
  11. Philip McShane The First Forty Years by Conn O'Donovan, Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis 3 (2003): 33-54.
  12. Philip McShane Atlas of Irish Mathematicians.
  13. O'Donovan, Conn (2003). "Philip McShane: The First Forty Years". Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis. 3: 37.
  14. Macmillan and University of Notre Dame Presses, 1970. McShane elaborates on the challenges of defending his thesis in the Preface to the Second Edition of Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence, 2nd ed. (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2021), pp. lii-lxi.
  15. McShane, Philip, ed. (1972). Foundations of Theology: Papers from the International Lonergan Congress 1970. University of Notre Dame. and McShane, Philip, ed. (1972). Language, Truth, and Meaning: Papers from the International Lonergan Congress 1970. University of Notre Dame.
  16. In an essay written some thirty years after making this decision, McShane reflected on his years as a Jesuit by first recalling a question posed by Bernard Lonergan in the essay "Healing and Creating in History" (CWL 16, 94-103): "Which is worse: being disoriented by the clever and wicked or by the righteous and stupid? The topic is massive, and at present I am merely skimming over one aspect: the Christian righteousness that goes with the retreat of the Church from progress in understanding. It is a retreat that Lonergan summed up in conversation with me in Easter 1961 with his remark about 'big frogs in little ponds.' It was manifest to him during his years of training as it was to me in my 9 own Jesuit years." Field Nocturne 41, "What are we up to?" at page 3.
  17. The Lonergan Centre Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy.
  18. Terrance Quinn recounts this request of McShane in "Beginnings with Philip McShane: A Progress-Oriented Tribute, Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis, vol. 15 (2022), p. 141.
  19. There are just under two million words in the twenty-eight essay series written between 2001 and 2020. Some of these series were working notes for McShane's published articles and books. He regularly referred to these "website essays" in published works.
  20. Economics for Everyone: Das Jus Kapital (3rd ed., 2017), p. 120.
  21. The first edition of Economics for Everyone: Das Jus Kapital was published by Commonwealth Press (Edmonton, Canada) in 1996. See also McShane, Philip (2002). Pastkeynes Pastmodern Economics: A Fresh Pragmatism. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Axial Press. and Anderson, Bruce; McShane, Philip (2002). Beyond Establishment Economics: No Thank You, Mankiw. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Axial Press.
  22. McShane writes about the structure in "A Rolling Stone Gathers Nomos," which is chapter 3 of A Brief History of Tongue: From Big Bang to Coloured Wholes (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Axial Press, 1998), 80-110, and chapter 5 of Economics for Everyone. See also "Putting Our Global Minding in Order," chapter 32 of Introducing Critical Thinking (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2005), pp. 124-27.
  23. Economics for Everyone: Das Jus Kapital (3rd ed., 2017), p. 120. In Music That Is Soundless (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia: Axial Publishing, 2005), McShane describes the conversational dimension of the third shift by raising the question "When did I last have a real conversation?" and by making a threefold specification of that basic question: "When was I last understanding, understood? When did I last speak? When did I last listen?" (p. 7)
  24. Ivo Coelho described McShane's intervention in India in his blog "Philosophical Musings"
  25. McShane, Philip, ed. (2010). "Do You Want a Sane Global Economy?". Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy and Education. 21 (2).
  26. McShane, Philip. "Arriving in Cosmopolis" (PDF). Philip McShane.
  27. Lonergan, Bernard J. F. (2017). Method in Theology, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 14. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
  28. "Arriving in Cosmopolis," at pp. 2-3.
  29. McShane, Philip; Duffy, James; Henman, Robert; Quinn, Terrance (2022). Seeding the Positive Anthropocene. Vancouver: Axial Publishing. pp. 115–137. See also pages 3-5, 25-27, 71-72, and 104-105.
  30. McShane, Philip; Duffy, James; Henman, Robert; Quinn, Terrance (2022). Seeding the Positive Anthropocene (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2022), p. 4.
  31. The tributes are available at In Memoriam.
  32. McShane, Philip. "The Redress of Poise: The End of Lonergan's Work". Philip McShane. p. 2.
  33. "The emergence of humanity is the evolutionary achievement of sowing what among the cosmic molecules." Philip, McShane (2015). The Allure of the Compelling Genius of History: Teaching Young Human Humanity and Hope. Axial Publishing. p. 3.
  34. The essay "Structuring the Reach Towards the Future," written for the 3rd Peaceful Coexistence Colloquium, Helsinki, Finland, June 2019, was published as chapter 7 of McShane, Philip; Duffy, James; Henman, Robert; Quinn, Terrance (2022). Seeding the Positive Anthropocene. Vancouver: Axial Publishing. pp. 115–137.
  35. Lambert, Pierrot; McShane, Philip (2013). Bernard Lonergan: His Life and Leading Ideas. Vancouver, B.C.: Axial Publishing. There are references to the teachings of Buddha on pages 3, 7–9, and 117; references to Beethoven on pages 23, 38, 101, 115, 117, 128, 192, and 222; references to Maxwell on pages 168, 175-178, and 186.
  36. McShane, Philip. "Fordham Lectures on Economics". Philip McShane.
  37. Shute, Michael (2010). Lonergan's Discovery of the Science of Economics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
  38. On page 5 of "Lonergan's 'Circulation Analysis': A Discussion," McShane commented: "I estimated today that I had spent twenty hours on each page of the manuscript, over a period of about five years."
  39. Lonergan, Bernard J. F. (1998). For a new political economy. Toronto [Ont.]: Published by University of Toronto Press for Lonergan Research Institute of Regis College.
  40. See further the Preface to the 2017 edition of Economics for Everyone (Vancouver: Axial Publishing), i-xii.
  41. Lonergan, Bernard J. F. (2001). Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism. Toronto [Ont.]: Published by University of Toronto Press for Lonergan Research Institute of Regis College.
  42. Lonergan, Bernard. Phenomenology and Logic. pp. 281–84, 298, 306.
  43. Lonergan, Bernard J. F. (1992). Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (5th, rev. and augmented ed.). Toronto: Published for Lonergan Research Institute of Regis College, Toronto, by University of Toronto Press.
  44. From the back cover of McShane, Philip (2020). Interpretation from A to Z. Vancouver: Axial Publishing.


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