The Method of Metaphysics

Abstract

The central principle of Lonergan’s epistemology is that knowledge is what is to be had by the threefold process of experiencing, understanding, and judging, and that reality is simply what is to be known by this process. There is presupposed in this account not only the mere flux of experience, as in the radical empiricism derived from Hume which has been thoroughly worked out by twentieth-century logical positivism, but also the inquiring intelligence which puts questions and expects answers. ‘The Humean world of mere impressions comes to me as a puzzle to be pieced together.’¹ To follow through this viewpoint consistently is to obtain a theory not only of the knower and his knowing, but of the nature of the world which he is in process of coming to know; an adequate cognitional theory thus gives rise to an ontology or theory of reality.²