Once describing himself as “a mathematician gone astray, rambling in the worlds of economics and literature, music and physics,” McShane was a prolific scholar and theoretician. He crossed disciplinary boundaries in essays and books focusing on topics ranging from the foundations of mathematics, probability theory, and evolutionary process, to the philosophy of education and omnidisciplinary methodology. He also published introductory texts focusing on critical thinking, linguistics, and economics.
In the area of methodology, he wrote The Shaping of the Foundations (1976), Lack in the Beingstalk (2006), and Futurology Express (2013); in the area of theology The Road to Religious Reality (2012), The Everlasting Joy of Being Human (2013), and The Allure of the Compelling Genius of History (2015); and in the area of economics Pastkeynes Pastmodern Economics: A Fresh Pragmatism (2000), Piketty’s Plight and the Global Future (2014), and Economics for Everyone: Das Jus Kapital (3rd edition, 2017). Among his introductory works are Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations (1975), A Brief History of Tongue (1998), and Music That Is Soundless (2nd edition, 2005).
McShane also edited Bernard Lonergan’s For a New Political Economy (1998) and Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism (2001), and together with Pierrot Lambert he co-authored Bernard Lonergan: His Life and Leading Ideas (2nd printing, 2013). He is considered by many the leading interpreter of Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, a compendious work in which Lonergan lays out both a genetic method for studying organic development and some canons for a methodological hermeneutics.
Twice nominated for the Templeton Prize for his extensive work in methodology, economics, spirituality, and philosophy of science, McShane ran workshops and delivered keynote addresses in Canada, Australia, England, the U.S., Korea, India, Australia, Mexico, Columbia, and Ireland. On various occasions and in various countries—including Mexico, Korea, Australia, Canada, and the U.S.—he presented the key issues underlying the vital transition from Marxist, neo-Marxist, Keynesian, and neo-Keynesian analyses to a democratic economics.
For over sixty years, McShane fermented forward towards a solution to the steady decay of global culture and its abuse of Gaia. In the last years of his life, he wrote time and again about the negative Anthropocene age in which we live and a future positive Anthropocene age of luminous collaboration. In Questing2020, his final series of essays, he wrote of the possibility of human collaboration mirroring the psychic adaptation of starling murmuration.
When McShane died in July of 2020, colleagues and former students around the globe paid tribute to him. A theologian from Africa described him as akin to 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.”