Metaphysics and the sciences

I am reading ch. 14 of Insight, on the relation of metaphysics to the sciences and to common sense: metaphysics conceived as the integral heuristic structure of proportionate being takes the results of science and common sense, reverses their counterpositions, and integrates them.

A very precise relationship between metaphysics and science / common sense.

Also the - perhaps so far unique to Lonergan - idea that forms are obtained, not by (descriptive) common sense, but by (explanatory) science. That the insights of common sense, far from arriving - automatically, as it were - at the forms of things, are actually linguistic insights, and they give us the ability to deal with the world. But that the true understanding or explanations of things is to be obtained by the respective science. (And here, as far as common sense is concerned, plenty of echoes with postmoderns like Rorty.... My feeling that what Rorty says fits in very well with what Lonergan says about common sense.)

How, I wonder, would Radical Orthodoxy conceive of the relationship between metaphysics and science? Or perhaps there is no relationship? Not likely.

Certainly both Lonergan and RO meditate / take seriously the idea of theology as the queen of the sciences. The question is to pinpoint the differences, for differences there do seem to be. RO is aggressively anti-secular, and perhaps also anti-other-religions.

Heidegger on science and mathematics

I had the impression that Heidegger did not much about / was not much bothered about the fact of science. But see his GA23, 10ff: a whole section 3 with the title: "Entdeckung der Natur und Ausbildung der mathematischen Physik." Subsection a) Wissenschaftliche Entdeckung der Natur und ontologische Besinnung. b) Die neue Bedeutung der Mathematik.

Not, I think, as sophisticated as Lonergan; but not nothing either.

In a sense, if H wants to deal with Modern philosophy, he cannot avoid the fact of science: he has to deal with Descartes, and Spinoza, and Leibniz, and Pascal, and Kant, after all. All of whom are grappling, probably, with the implications of modern empirical mathematical science for philosophy. Descartes and Kant are certainly wanting to remodel philosophy after the example of mathematical science - the same certainty, for example; the same clarity; the same effectiveness and overcoming of confusion.

And of course there is H's master, Husserl, with his "Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft." So Wissenschaft cannot be far from H. But: that does not mean he loves it. He is probably working his way out of its traps. Which is part of his overcoming of modernity, or post-modernism.