Abstract

Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J. is recognized as a Roman Catholic theologian who asked radical questions about the doing and teaching of theology, and about the philosophical underpinnings of that activity. This thesis traces the development of Lonergan's thought on human knowing from the writing of his doctoral dissertation to the publication of Insight: A Study of Human Understanding while searching for and finding clues to what his thought on knowing contributes to an understanding of teaching. ;The major findings of the thesis are that Lonergan's distinctive style of teaching and scholarship was modelled on his mentor Thomas Aquinas, and was informed by the three-fold "habitus" of rigorous scholarship, questioning, and bringing one's own critical intelligence to the inherited tradition. Though Lonergan did not consider himself an educator in the formal sense, the result of his fifteen year search for an answer to the question: what do we do when we know? which he considered preliminary work to the development of a method of teaching theology, provides teachers of all subjects with a heuristic method of teaching which is based on the dynamic operations of the human mind. Based on the assumption that an understanding of what we do when we know contributes to an understanding of what we do when we teach, in dialogue with Israel Scheffler's thought on teaching, the thesis suggests a heuristic method of teaching which reflects Lonergan's cognitional theory. ;The Conclusion suggests some implications of the thesis and the contribution which the kind of philosophical inquiry represented by Lonergan's work, could make to the work of teacher educators and researchers in teacher education