Early Forms of Apprehension and Moral Evaluation

William Zanardi

The following essay is an exercise in doing the second functional specialty, Interpretation, in relation to research materials from my essay, “Lonergan’s Puzzling Comment about the Vis Cogitativa.”1 Section I briefly reviews the puzzle and suggests how Lonergan’s theoretical meaning of ‘development’ offers clues for resolving it. In Section II the significance of his comment expands in relation to a much larger puzzle as old as Aristotle’s sensus communis and as current as contemporary neuroscientific reports on the binding problem. Given this much larger puzzle, Section III pauses to ask methodological questions about how to proceed. There the question is what heuristic framework might be adequate in interpreting texts from several disciplines ranging from the neuroscience of attention to psychology and intentionality theory. I identify four features of such a framework and then apply them in the last two sections of this essay.

Methodology, Functional Research, Philosophical Psychology Lonergan, moral development, genealogy of morals, vis cogitativa, binding problem