Lonergan’s General Empirical Method and the European Higher Education Area

This is a participant-observer report concerning curriculum deployment of Bernard J.F. Lonergan’s insight-based critical realism and general empirical method for interdisciplinary research methods and allied courses in Copenhagen Business School (CBS, Denmark), from 2001 to the present. I also report similar instruction in interdisciplinary methods for management and organization studies at the International School for Social and Business Studies (ISSB, Slovenia) in 2012.1 The overall time period has been entirely under the aegis of the Bologna Process, begun in 1999, and the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), launched in March, 2010. Both the originating Bologna Process and subsequent EHEA envision curriculum development appropriate to “ensure that the European higher education system acquires a world-wide degree of attraction” (European Commission, 2013). In addition, the Bologna Process calls for specification of the “necessary European dimensions of higher education” (Ibid.). The point of this working paper is to report teaching success and indicate potential merits of Lonergan’s general empirical method, grounded in insight-based critical realism, as a robust epistemological basis for EHEA university curriculum and instruction. The design approach to Lonergan’s method offers grounds to think it uniquely adapted for interdisciplinary social science in the complex trans-cultural, multi-lingual, and religiously pluralist EHEA, thus providing curriculum content adequate and appropriate for the “necessary European dimensions of higher education.