Brian Cronin 
A Worldview of Everything 
A Contemporary First Philosophy

Philosophy has sometimes been described as the discipline in which you can never be wrong, as the reserve of absentminded professors, aloof academics and purveyors of obscure ideas or interesting opinions. Quite the contrary. Philosophy answers the hard questions: Does everything happen by chance? Is there anything more than matter in the universe? Are humans in the same class as animals? Is there a God? Can we know the correct answer to these questions? The answers to these questions matter. We are all philosophers even though we are not aware of the fact. We each have a set of ultimate priorities and principles, answers to these questions, a big picture that determines our everyday thoughts, decisions, and actions. In this book Brian Cronin uses the ideas of Bernard Lonergan’s Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, to argue methodically towards a correct, critical, comprehensive worldview, an answer to those big questions which is the precise task of first philosophy. This book is an accessible and readable presentation of Lonergan’s metaphysics, a somewhat neglected topic. Science and philosophy are complementary. Scientists answer the concrete, detailed questions about everything around us: the parts. Philosophy integrates all these into a correct worldview of the whole: of everything.

关于作者

Brian Cronin is an Irish Spiritan missionary and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh. He has worked as a missionary in Kenya and Tanzania and has been teaching philosophy since 1980. He did his doctorate at Boston College and was later awarded five postdoctoral fellowships there. He is author of two books, Foundations of Philosophy (1999) and Value Ethics (2006).