Brian Cronin

Brian Cronin was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1942 and joined the Holy Ghost Fathers, AKA Spiritans, after his years of philosophy, social science and theology. He was appointed to mission in Kenya where he did pastoral work for eight years before being sent to teach philosophy in Tanzania in 1980. Since then he has done a doctorate specializing in Bernard Lonergan in Boston College, (1983-86). He returned to Arusha in Tanzania to set up a new course in philosophy in Spiritan Missionary Seminary, where he taught until 2008.

During that time he was awarded five Post-Doctoral Lonergan Fellowships in Boston College to write his books, "Foundations of Philosophy: Lonergan's Cognitional Theory and Epistemology" (1999); and "Value Ethics: A Lonergan Perspective"(2006). Since 2011 he has been Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh. There he wrote his latest book, "Phenomenology of Human Understanding".

Brian is Irish and it shows. He has a low tolerance for nonsense of which much is to be found in philosophy. He is a dedicated teacher, clear thinker, is positive about the role philosophy should play in education, politics and the university. The human mind has been much devalued; some seem to think that Bonobos and computers are more intelligent! His vocation is to restore the spark of the divine, the human intellect in its capacity to create, and make all things.

Brian is now working on a book, A Worldview of Everything: A Contemporary First Philosophy. Each and every one of us has developed a worldview, a big picture of how the world works, what we consider important, a priority, for ourselves and others. These parameters determine what our daily decisions and actions will be; they guide our whole life. Sadly, our worldview might be incomplete, or unbalanced, or simply wrong. We have not thought much about our worldview and may not even know that we have one. First Philosophy is the discipline which explicitly claims to develop a big picture that is comprehensive, correct, explicit, ethical and critical.

It is comprehensive because it embraces everything and includes all common sense, empirical sciences, human sciences, cultures and religious studies, skills and disciplines. It is correct in that it starts with an appreciation of how the human mind actually works, discovers there an invariant structure, realizes that from there you can extrapolate to the structure of the universe, its first principles and causes, its direction and the role of free human persons in its continued development. It is critical in the sense that it is an explicit process on a verifiable basis that enables everybody to do it for themselves; it is repeatable. We can lay claim to a verifiable explicit philosophy, the framework and guiding principle for all our particular specific judgments, decisions and actions. Book expected to be published in 2021.