Philip McShane (18 February 1932 – 1 July 2020) was an Irish mathematician and philosopher-theologian. Originally trained in mathematics, mathematical physics, and chemistry in the 1950s, he went on to study philosophy from 1956 to 1959. In 1960, after teaching mathematical physics, engineering, and commerce to undergraduates and special relativity and differential equations to graduate students, McShane began studying theology. He did his fourth year of theology in 1963 and in 1968 began reading economics.
In a period that spanned over sixty years, McShane published numerous articles and twenty-five books. His publications range from technical works on the foundations of mathematics, probability theory, evolutionary process, and omnidisciplinary methodology, to introductory texts focusing on critical thinking, linguistics, and economics. He also wrote essays on the philosophy of education. Beginning in 1970, he participated in and helped organize a number of international workshops and conferences addressing topics such as "ongoing collaboration,"This was the slogan of the International Lonergan Congress in Florida (1970). McShane edited two volumes of papers from this conference. reforms in education, and communicating the basic insights of two-flow economics.
Two Festschrift volumes were published to honor McShane, one in 2003"Special Issue: Festschrift for Philip Mcshane," Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis, vol. 3 (2003). and the second in 2022. In the first, eighteen individuals contributed essays, and, at the request of the editor, McShane submitted an essay as well."Implementation: The Ongoing Crisis of Method," Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis, vol. 3 (2003), pp. 11–32. He also replied to the eighteen contributors in the essay "Our Journaling Lonelinesses: A Response.”“Our Journaling Lonelinesses: A Response,” Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis, vol. 3 (2003), pp. 324–42. In the second Festschrift, twenty-four individuals wrote essays remembering and honoring McShane,“In Memoriam: Philip McShane (1932–2020),” originally published in print form in Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy & Education, vol. 33, no. (2022), was republished in the Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis vol. 15 (2022). who was nominated for the Templeton Prize in 2011 and 2015.
Life and education McShane was born in Baileboro, County Cavan.Philip McShane The First Forty Years by Conn O'Donovan, Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis 3 (2003): 33-54. When the McShane family moved to Dublin, Philip went to O'Connell School. He continued his education while training as a Jesuit at University College Dublin (BSc and MSc in relativity theory and quantum mechanics), St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg (Lic. Phil), Heythrop College (STL) and Campion Hall, Oxford (D.Phil.).Philip McShane Atlas of Irish Mathematicians. He lectured in mathematics at University College Dublin (1959-1960) and in Philosophy at the Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy (1968-1973).
McShane entered the Jesuits in September 1950 and spent two years in spiritual formation. In 1952, in spite of having "acquired a 'broken head,' which meant he was unable to study, or even to do any serious reading, he was also allowed to risk a very challenging programme of mathematics, mathematical physics, physics and chemistry."Conn O'Donovan, "Philip McShane: The First Forty Years," p. 34. Eleven years later, after completing a B.Sc., an M.Sc. in relativity theory and quantum mechanics, and a Licentiate of Philosophy, he was ordained a Jesuit priest.
In 1956, McShane "shifted from graduate studies of mathematics and physics that included such works as the classic Space-Time Structure by Erwin Schrödinger,"See Interpretation from A to Z (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2020), p. 9. and embarked on what would be a lifelong venture of reading and appropriating the works of Bernard Lonergan, initially through a careful study of Lonergan's Verbum articles,"The Concept of Verbum in the Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas" was originally published in Theological Studies 10 (1946) 349-92; 8 (1947)35-79, 404-44; 10 (1949) 3-40, 359-93. These articles were published as Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, ed. David B. Burrell (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967; London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1968), later as Volume 2 of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, eds. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (University of Toronto Press, 1997). followed by a startling study Insight."Schrödinger's great book, sweated over in details of tensor scribbles during the year 1955–56, left me quite inadequately prepared for Insight 's fifth chapter on Space and Time." Interpretation from A to Z, p. 9. In the years that followed, he co-authored (with Garret Barden) Towards: Self-Meaning and wrote Music That Is Soundless. In the mid-1960s, he studied at Oxford University, where in August 1969 he successfully defended his doctoral thesis "The Concrete Logic of Discovery of Statistical Science," which soon after was published as Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence.Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence, the original manuscript of McShane's D.Phil. thesis, was first published in 1970 by Macmillan and University of Notre Dame Presses. McShane elaborated on the challenges of defending his thesis in the Preface to the Second Edition of Randomness, Statistics, and Emergence (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2021), pp. lii-lxi. After the First International Lonergan Conference in Florida 1970, McShane took on the task of editing two volumes of the papers presented at that event. and In 1972, he decided to leave the Jesuits.In an essay written some thirty years after making this decision, McShane reflected on his years as a Jesuit by first recalling a question posed by Bernard Lonergan in the essay "Healing and Creating in History" (CWL 16, 94-103): "Which is worse: being disoriented by the clever and wicked or by the righteous and stupid? The topic is massive, and at present I am merely skimming over one aspect: the Christian righteousness that goes with the retreat of the Church from progress in understanding. It is a retreat that Lonergan summed up in conversation with me in Easter 1961 with his remark about 'big frogs in little ponds.' It was manifest to him during his years of training as it was to me in my 9 own Jesuit years." Field Nocturne 41, "What are we up to?" at page 3.
In 1975, along with Conn O'Donovan, McShane founded the Dublin Lonergan Centre, in Milltown Park, Dublin.The Lonergan Centre Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy. In 1979, he served as visiting fellow in religious studies at Lonergan College, Concordia University, Montreal. In his course, McShane encouraged students to work through the exercises in his introductory book Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations.Terrance Quinn recounts this request of McShane in "Beginnings with Philip McShane: A Progress-Oriented Tribute, Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis, vol. 15 (2022), p. 141. From 1974 until 1994, McShane taught philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. When he retired from teaching in 1995, he began writing prolifically.There are just under two million words in McShane's twenty-eight essay series written between 2001 and 2020. Some of these series were working notes for his published articles and books. He regularly referred to these "website essays" in published works. After retiring, McShane also accepted invitations to speak at international conferences and workshops. He gave keynote addresses at gatherings in Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America.
In the last years of his life, McShane wrote about the negative Anthropocene age in which we live and a future positive Anthropocene age of luminous collaboration. See also pages 3-5, 25-27, 71-72, and 104-105. In Questing2020, his final series of essays, he wrote of the possibility of human collaboration mirroring the psychic adaptation of starling murmuration.These essays are available at: Questing2020. When McShane died in July 2020, colleagues and former students around the globe paid tribute to him. A theologian from Africa described him as akin to an "African elder,"Cyril Orji, University of Dayton, Ohio, In Memoriam another as someone who "gave counsel to think long-term, in terms of centuries rather than years or even decades,"Ken Melchin, Saint Paul University, In Memoriam 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."Mila Ghorayeb, Vancouver, Canada In Memoriam 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."Brendan Purcell, University of Notre Dame, Australia In Memoriam.
Influences By his own account, McShane was humbled as a young man by the works of Chopin and fortunate to have discovered Descartes' achievement in geometry.See at page 2. He wrote about "the luck of working with Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh in graduate studies of mathematical physics in the mid-fifties."The Allure of the Compelling Genius of History (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2015), p. 253. He also studied and had a keen appreciation for Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics, especially the third lecture."I have spent more time and energy in my life on Feynman's volumes on Quantum Theory [vol. 3 of those mentioned in note 23, p. 175 of Bernard Lonergan: His Life and Leading Ideas] than on any other book except Insight." FuSe 16, Contexts of Functional Dialectic, n. 3, p. 3. McShane was fond of and often quoted the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Patrick Kavanaugh. "Having music in his genes,"Conn O'Donovan, Conn O’Donovan: “Philip McShane: The First Forty Years,” Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis vol. 3 (2003), p. 46. O'Donovan wrote that "his father was a very competent fiddler and he also played an instrument or instruments in the police band. He [McShane] had formal music lessons for several years, but he says that he only began to learn music when he gave up the lessons." he often referred to particular pieces of music. For example, the quiet emergence of five notes that grow to dominate Bruckner's 8th symphony was symbolic for him of the slow emergence of effective global collaborartion. "Bruckner's 8th has been symbolic for me of the climb to effective functional scientific collaboration: a five note echo trickling in at the beginning of the second movement and finally taking over the symphony: so, we trickle in at, we hope, the beginning of the second movement of the Anthropocene.""Crecycling Sustainability," Seeding the Positive Anthropocene, n. 12, p. 96. This essay is also available as the first part of "Sixes and Sevens: The Need for Cyclic Thinking," a two-part essay McShane wrote in December 2018. In the first part, he focused on the need for creative recycling ("crecycling") of the book Sustainability and Peaceful Coexistence for the Anthropocene, while the second part is a ten-step crecycling of Insight chapters 6 and 7.