Volume 75, 2018
Theories of Knowledge and Epistemology
Monika Walczak
Pages 243-247
Two Notions of Belief
Bernard Lonergan and Analytical Epistemology
This paper is a contribution to the comparison of – on the one hand – the understanding of knowledge and belief by Bernard J.F. Lonergan (1904-1984), whose philosophy is a version of transcendental philosophy (interpreted as a form of transcendental Thomism, intentionality analysis, or phenomenology), with – on the other hand – notions of knowledge and belief held by contemporary analytical philosophers (such as P. K. Moser, W. P. Alston, K. Lehrer, A. Plantinga, among others). A crucial problem of contemporary analytical epistemology (the theory of knowledge) is the question: what is knowledge? Although in epistemology we find different conceptions of knowledge, the basic conception to which discussions (be they positive or polemical) appeal is the classical conception of knowledge. This limits knowledge to propositional knowledge, which is defined as justified true belief. The task of the paper is, first, to reconstruct the notion of belief used by B. Lonergan; second, to show how Lonergan’s notion of belief differs from that of analytical philosophers; and third, to show that the Lonerganian notion of belief is not the basic category involved in understanding propositional knowledge as it is understood by analytical philosophers.