A successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol has been a long time coming. A previous attempt to shape a global agreement fell apart in 2009, at talks in Copenhagen. Now the world is ready to try again, and for the first time, all countries are poised to take action (see page 418). But the history here is sobering: the quest to build a global climate treaty has hit many obstacles over the past 25 years. Its dramatic story is chronicled in a comic starting on page 427.
Although the United Nations aims to limit global warming to 2 °C, a News Feature on page 436 reveals that this will be much harder than many studies have indicated....." End quote
As I see it, MiT's mediated second phase would be a great resource to those ready to assemble in Paris... If only.... For good measure, here is footnote TWO which I just inserted into this sec. of my present MS:
Lonergan’s radical generalization of data to include both those of sense and consciousness can also be called his theory-praxis revolution. One could claim that all of Lonergan's work in method is “praxis” in so far as it is concerned with the question of what we do when we know. Lonergan himself acknowledges a more transformative sense of praxis in which decision and action precede and ground a knowledge of value. This, too, presupposes his original blending of thetransformative nature of the data of sense and of the data of consciousness.[1] Taking our cue from this notion of a transformative praxis, this book deploys two transformative phases (mediating and mediated)[2] as outlined in Lonergan’sMiT. With Jim Kanaris, we stress GEM-FS’s decentering-recentering sides which lie at the core of human realities.[3]
[1] This transformative notion of praxis includes a hermeneutics of suspicion and of recovery as explained by Paul Ricoeur. See Alison Scott-Baumann,Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion (Bloomsbury, 2009).
[2] One may ask whether there is a pivot point for MiT’s kataphatic first mediating phase transitioning into the mediated phase founded on an apophatic. For possible affirmative answers, see Ian Bell, The Relevance of Bernard Lonergan’s Notion of Self-Appropriation to a Mystical-Political Theology Series (American Univ. Studies, 2008) and Ivana Noble, The Apophatic Way in Gregory of Nyssa, http://www.iespraha.cz/node/28 retrieved Nov. 25, 2015.
[3] In Deference to the Other, Lonergan and Contemporary Continental Thought (SUNY, 2004, 28), Kanaris notes “the presence we have of ourselves is a constitutive presence because, not despite, the fact that it is a decentering presence. Our presence to ourselves as subjects is a constitutive presence of human subjectivity . . . in the sense “that it brings us closer to ourselves as engaged in a process which can provide us with access to the intelligible universe.” Kanaris rebuts claims of Continental thinkers that our presence to ourselves is another instance of the metaphysics of presence.” Lonergan helps us “surrender all of ourselves to the radically decentering of ourselves” so as to participate in transcendent meaning and values. Unlike Michel Foucault who questioned the notion of human nature, Noam Chomsky, like Lonergan, held that unless “there is some form of relatively fixed human nature, true scientific understanding is impossible.” As does Chomsky, GEM-FS builds on a human creative-foundational potential. Michel Foucault also sought the operational range of true values, but his presuppositions led him “fish around” in self-defeating circles. See Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (Pantheon, 1984), 3.
JOHN RAYMAKER
DR JOHN RAYMAKER