Notes to the Second Gallery of Images
Descriptions of images from left to right, top to bottom:
A. This photo was taken in 1969 after McShane had given a lecture on physics. Others in the photo include his mother, his two sisters, and Éamonn de Valera. De Valera, who was the president of Ireland at the time, was the only member of the 1916 revolution who was not executed.
B. This is a short letter from Bernard Lonergan to McShane encouraging him to “Find out what your man wants, and figure a way to give it to him.” The readers of his Oxford doctoral thesis considered chapter 8 “Foundations of Statistics” to be merely pure mathematics. McShane suppressed the chapter from his thesis but included it in Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence. He mentioned both the letter from Lonergan and the request of his readers on page lv of the Preface to the Second Edition of Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence (2021).
C. This photo was taken at a conference in West Dublin, Nova Scotia in 2003. During the conference McShane introduced the “dramatic instance” of insight implicit in Archimedes’ directive “Weigh the crown in water” that Lonergan writes about on the first pages of the first chapter of Insight (CWL 3, 27–28). On this occasion McShane used a coat hanger from which he dangled two bananas. He wrote about the exercise in Cantower XXVII, “Atoms in Motion,” on pages 17–19.
D. In November of 2009, Daniel Mayer spent four days with Sally and Phil McShane in Halifax. This is a note that Phil left Daniel, with an outline for a “5-month ‘revolutionary’ doctorate” appended. On December 1, 2021, Daniel defended his doctoral thesis. In various essays and articles, McShane wrote about sunflowers. See, for example, Cantower II, “Sunflowers Speak to Us of Growing” and Æcornomics 5, “Structuring the Reach Towards the Future,” an essay written for the 3rd Peaceful Coexistence Colloquium, Helsinki, Finland, June 13–14, 2019.
E. This is the flyer from the West Coast Methods Institute 2011 at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. The conference was held in honor of McShane and his contributions to Lonergan Studies. In his conference presentation “Functional Research,” McShane spoke of the “human spirit as a pattern of chemicals, the loneliness of the primitive burst of chemicals in that first second, 13.7 billion years ago.”
F. McShane was a scholar-in-residence at Saint Ignatius’ College Riverview in Sydney, Australia for five weeks, April–May 2001. Besides giving a series of classes and seminars on Ignatian pedagogy and spirituality for the 21st century, McShane also taught classes to high school boys. Fr. Andrew Bullen SJ wrote this article thanking McShane, who would later write about his experience teaching high school boys in Field Nocturne 13 “Solving the Mind-Body Problem,” on pages 11-12.
G. This photo was taken at a Lonergan Conference in Seoul, South Korea, March 2007. McShane gave ten days of lectures and seminars on philosophy and theology at Sogang University, as well as lectures on economics before the Korean Self-Governance Colloquium. He also led discussions on Ignatian, Franciscan, and Korean spirituality with groups of Korean women religious.
H. From 1978 until 1983, Lonergan taught the course ‘Macroeconomics and the Dialectic of History’ for one semester each academic year at Boston College. During that time, he was reading Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis (HEA). McShane refers to this letter that Lonergan wrote to him in his editor’s introduction to For a New Political Economy (CWL 21, xxviii). On the next page, after quoting a transcript from the spring 1982 course, McShane wrote that Lonergan was “pointing towards the ongoing genesis of a genetic systematics that sublates historical studies.” CWL 21, xxix.
I. This is a photo of a roundtable discussion at the West Coast Methods Institute, April 19-21, 2018, at Loyola Marymount University. Each of the four panelists spoke about a short passage from Method in Theology. In his essay “A Paradigmatic Panel Dynamic for (Advanced) Students (of Religion),” McShane associated the four passages with four probing questions. In what would be his last public presentation, he spoke about the crucial importance of implementing the structure of Dialectic (CWL 14, 234–235), which was also the topic of “On the Stile of a Crucial Experiment,” published in 2020.