- Lived:
- 1904–1984 · Quebec, Montreal, London, Rome, Toronto, Boston
- Tradition:
- Canadian Jesuit philosophy and theology; critical realism; the twentieth-century recovery of Aquinas
- The Big Idea:
- Knowing is not looking. It is a three-step performance — experiencing, understanding, judging — that you can catch yourself doing, and once you have caught it, you hold the key to objectivity, science, ethics, and the rise and fall of civilizations.
- In their words:
- "Be attentive. Be intelligent. Be reasonable. Be responsible."
- If you remember one thing:
- He spent forty years watching himself understand so that the rest of us could catch ourselves doing it — and a 1970 profile in Time reported that many intellectuals considered him the finest philosophic thinker of the century, which may be the least famous sentence ever printed about a living philosopher.