Jim Kanaris & Mark J. Doorley 
In Deference to the Other 
Lonergan and Contemporary Continental Thought

In Deference to the Other brings contemporary continental thought into conversation with that of Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984), the Jesuit philosopher and theologian. This is an opportune moment to open such a dialogue: philosophers and theologians indebted to Lonergan have increasingly found themselves challenged by the insights of thinkers typically dubbed ‘postmodern, ‘ while postmodernists, most notably Jacques Derrida, have begun to ask the ‘God question.’ While Lonergan was not a continental philosopher, neither was he an analytic philosopher. Concerned with both epistemology and cognition, his systematic and hermeneutic-like proposals resonate with the concerns of philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, and Kristeva. Contributors to this volume find insight and affiliation between Lonergan’s thought and contemporary continental thought in a wide-ranging work that engages the philosophical problems of authenticity, self-appropriation, ethics, and the human subject.

Table of Content

Foreword
John D. Caputo

Introduction
Jim Kanaris and Mark J. Doorley

1. Decentering Inwardness
Nicholas Plants

2. To Whom Do We Return in the Turn to the Subject? Lonergan, Derrida, and Foucault Revisited
Jim Kanaris

3. Self-Appropriation: Lonergan’s Pearl of Great Price
James L. Marsh

4. Subject for the Other: Lonergan and Levinas on Being Human in Postmodernity
Michele Saracino

5. Kristeva’s Horror and Lonergan’s Insight: The Psychic Structure of the Human Person and the Move to a Higher Viewpoint
Christine E. Jamieson

6. Lonergan’s Postmodern Subject: Neither Neoscholastic Substance nor Cartesian Ego
Frederick Lawrence

7. In Response to the Other: Postmodernity and Critical Realism
Mark J. Doorley

8. Lonergan and the Ambiguity of Postmodern Laughter
Ronald H. Mc Kinney, SJ

Works Cited

Contributors

Index

About the author

Jim Kanaris is Faculty Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at Mc Gill University and author of
Bernard Lonergan’s Philosophy of Religion: From Philosophy of God to Philosophy of Religious Studies, also published by SUNY Press.
Mark J. Doorley is Visiting Assistant Professor of Ethics and Assistant Director of the Ethics Program at Villanova University. He is the author of
The Place of the Heart in Lonergan’s Ethics: The Role of Feelings in the Ethical Intentionality Analysis of Bernard Lonergan.