We are concerned here with two towers. One is a Norman keep in the Galway barony of Kiltartan, some twenty miles from the western seacoast. The second, one of a chain constructed by the British to withstand a Napoleonic invasion, stands facing eastwards towards the Irish sea at the village of Sandycove, a few miles south of Dublin. Yeats's tower at Ballylee—Ballylee Castle as it was grandly termed—and the Martello tower in which Joyce lived in for a few weeks (...) in 1904, the setting upon which Ulysses opens, take on central and symbolic roles in the art of each man and enter also those shorthands of symbols by which we, in our turn, hold the two writers in our imagination. I propose to consider the very different manner in which each man came to accept his identity as an Irish writer. And this in its turn involves some consideration of what for convenience we may term the "matter of Ireland," the body of oral and written Irish literature, and the accumulated symbolic powers of the word "Ireland" itself. If I place their two towers, Ballylee and Martello, as twin emblems at our entrance way, it will at last appear, I trust, that I do so for substantial rather than decorative purposes. Thomas Flanagan, chairman of the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of The Irish Novelists, 1800-1850 and many studies of contemporary literature. (shrink)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1865 edition. Excerpt:... PART II. BERKELEY'S PHILOSOPHY: SECTION XIV. Bishop Berkeley is best known by the system of idealism developed by him. This theory is unfolded in two works, called "The Principles of Human Knowledge/' and "Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous."t If it were not for this system, the (...) name and works of Berkeley, like many more good and great men, would have fallen into a state of entire obscurity. But so long as the various systems of mental science will be studied, the name of Berkeley will be mentioned and his works studied. As yet his theory of idealism, and works in general, have not been so generally read and digested, as they have been The book called, The Principles of Human Knowledge, was published in 1710, by Aaron Rhonies, for Jeremy Pepyat, bookseller in Skinner Row, Dublin; and was the only edition published in Dr. Berkeley's life. t His Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonout was published in London in 1713. It shows much acuteness, great precision and elegance of expression, bat considerable repetition, and often appears as one turning in a circle. D ignorantly referred to and flippantly treated with a smile. The demonstration of the great lexicographer, Dr. Johnson, against the idealism of Berkeley, kicking a stone, is as faithfully and generally copied as it is familiarly known His system of idealism is considered, generally, so absurd, and contrary to common sense and universal experience, that the best answer it is worthy of is to treat it lightly and indifferently, as the production of one whose brain was not sound at the time in all its organs and powers.t On this ground the philosopher has just reason to complain, and appeal against his critics and judges. We think that the views and sincere convictions of... (shrink)

Changing Generations, a study of intergenerational relations in Ireland undertaken between 2011 and 2013 by the Social Policy and Ageing Research Centre, Trinity College, Dublin, and the Irish Centre for Social Gerontology, NUI Galway, used the Constructivist Grounded Theory method to interrogate support and care provision between generations. This article draws on interviews with 52 women ages 18 to 102, allowing for simultaneous analysis of older and younger women’s perspectives. The intersectionality of gender and class emerged as central to (...) the analysis. Socioeconomic positions shape contrasting forms of interdependency among family generations, ranging from “enmeshed” lives among lower socioeconomic groups to “freed” lives among higher socioeconomic groups. Women are initiating changes in how care and support flow across generations. Older women in higher socioeconomic groups are attuned to how emotional capital women expend across family generations can constrain women’s lives. In an expression of solidarity, older women are renegotiating the place of care labor in their own lives and in the lives of younger women. A new reciprocity emerges that amounts to women “undoing gender.” This process is, however, deeply classed as it is women in higher socioeconomic groups whose resources best place them to renegotiate care. (shrink)

SINCE the work of Gottlob Frege the question of sense and meaning has been regarded by logicians as perhaps the most important problem of philosophy. We may gain some idea of how important this question is to the modern logician from the words of one of the leading analytical philosophers, Gilbert Ryle.

This essay is an informal examination of the efforts made by mathematical logicians from Russell on, to evade the paradoxes revealed by uncritical methods of definition and predication. Where systems are described it is with a minimum of formal apparatus, so that the climate is one of rather vague statement and imprecise question. Russell’s drastic banning of type–offending formulas gives the starting–point for queries about the connection of sense and formalism, and the conclusion may be summed up as the detection (...) of a contrast between mechanisation and sensefulness which is seen as constituting a line of tension, as it were a geological weakness in formal structures, which permits the insertion of a philosophic wedge. Interesting as such an idea is, it is not clear between what regions this line has been drawn. On the one hand the undecidability results of Gödel show that formal methods can be extended indefinitely beyond the scope of what is mechanisable; on the other the author methodically refrains from defining what he means by ‘sense’. In so far as he explicitly leaves his meaning on this point to be gathered form his treatment of non–sense, and the paradoxes are here taken as representative of the latter, we might suppose that he is equating sense with consistency. For expressions leading to paradox were only ruled senseless by Russell because they lead to inconsistency. But it is fairly clear that something more epistemologically interesting is intended, since the author dismisses from consideration ‘la déductivité structurale, sens immédiat d’une vaste architecture symbolique d’abord vide, et intégralement traduisible en syntaxe’. Such translatability has, incidentally, its limits, as Gödel’s results again show, and it is our belief that the discussion might have been put in a more exact and workmanlike frame if the list of works consulted had contained more than one, and that a relatively minor, publication of Gödel. (shrink)

“Hegel for Anglo–Saxons” would have been an appropriate subtitle to Professor Findlay’s philosophically very interesting work. By an ingenious confrontation with the ideas of Wittgenstein and modern neo–positivism, the salient theses of Hegel’s philosophic doctrine are subjected to a “testing for consistency”. The result, although it must remain only one of the possible interpretations of Hegelianism, is a Hegel freed from much of the terminological baggage and poetic romanticism which render the reading of his works so exacerbating for students of (...) the 20th century. Thus, this work recommends itself to the student of philosophy as much by the insights it can give him into the monumental work of G. W. F. Hegel as by the object–lesson it provides on methodological procedure in philosophical interpretation. (shrink)

To discern the contours of a Berkeleian moral philosophy the article has been divided into four sections: the first introduces the moral importance of Berkeley’s new principle; in the second section the inter-dependence of morality and sociality is discussed; the third section identifies perennial moral problems and Berkeley’s success or failure in dealing with them; the fourth occupies itself with a notion of the common good that is socio-historical. Berkeley’s moral pragmatism is placed in relief in this way.

The author’s thesis is that the Platonism which has had most influence on religious thought represents a Plato dimidiatus. “There are important aspects of Plato’s philosophy which have not been and yet could be applied in an important way to religion…”. In philosophy Plato is not only the objective idealist for whom the ideas alone have true existence. He is also the metaphysical realist for whom the sensible is no less objectively real than the intelligible. In religion he is not (...) only the heir of Orphic and Dionysiac enthusiasm, with its transcendental emphasis and its infinite intent. He is also the inheritor of the traditional Greek Olympic and Chthonic gods, with their regard for the natural and the significance of the finite. Aristotle alone preserved this second strand in Plato’s thought. Philo, the founder of Neoplatonism, and his successor Plotinus successively depressed his naturalism in favour of an exaggerated emphasis on the supernatural. It is the second alone which has since passed as Platonism. Even the 13th century discovery of Aristotle was the discovery of a Neoplatonically interpreted Aristotle. (shrink)

There are words the study of which maps out whole tracts of spiritual history. This is particularly true of the early Christian centuries. Single terms often fuse in a new unity material accumulated separately in the preceding Hebrew and Greek traditions. ‘Conversion’ is one such term—or epistrophe, to use the vulgate which the Jews took from the Greeks for the LXX, and the Christians took from both. Besides, it covers a phenomenon of some actuality, when belief is understood as more (...) than the result of abstract demonstration. C’est... un bouleversement total... le moment décisif d’une existence.... (shrink)

This excellent volume is in the Cambridge pattern of a composite history by several contributors. Despite the title the first two chapters are on Plato and Aristotle, and so there is some chronological overlapping with W K C Guthrie’s History of Greek Philosophy, in connection with which this volume was originally planned although, as it has developed, it is an ‘independent survey’. Chronological overlapping only. For classical Greek philosophy is dealt with only in so far as it is necessary to (...) explain the genesis of the period with which the book is concerned, from Philo to St Anselm—a period within which the Neo-platonism of Plotinus is the dominant form of Greek philosophy. Within this period its purpose is to show in what form Greek philosophy was known to Jews, Christians and Moslems, and how they used it. (shrink)

At first sight it might seem that John Locke had about as much to do with the romantic agony as his Whig patricians with working-class radicalism, yet the dialectic of history plays with the logic of ideas, in epistemology and social philosophy alike, to elicit conclusions unexpected by those who enuntiated the premisses. Mr. Tuveson’s careful argument traces the cult, and in some cases the fine frenzy, of communing with the ‘natural sublime’ through the special faculties of moral sense and (...) imagination back to its roots in an empiricism which held that the reason reaches to our impressions of reality rather than to reality itself: as has happened before and since the defects of a dominantly subjective cognition were supplemented from elsewhere. He could have gone back earlier, yet as Aristotle had been ‘the Philosopher’ for the medieval schoolmen so was Locke for the literary men of the eighteenth-century. (shrink)

This dossier article contains four short and varied contributions from activists and other service and healthcare providers who have been agitating and working on the frontlines of HIV/AIDS in Ireland since the early 1980s. The dossier contains: (1) a history, by Bill Foley, of the early collective efforts of a group of gay men to provoke government action and healthcare under the umbrella of Gay Health Action (GHA) (2) a speech delivered by Dr. Erin Nugent to government officials on the (...) re-branding of HIV Ireland in 2015; (3) a brief history, recounted by Noel Donnellan, of ACT UP Dublin since it was revitalized in 2016 by a small cohort of dedicated activists from a dormant group into a vibrant collective that has achieved great legislative change with regards to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP); and (4) a polemic, written by Thomas Strong, on living with HIV as a queer man in Ireland that demonstrates the ways in which HIV stigma not only thrives in but molds and shapes twenty-first-century gay men’s communities, both in real life and online. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:WAS ST. THOMAS AQUINAS A PLATONIST? FORTY YEARS AGO, few students would have called St. Thomas Aquinas a Platonist. At that time he was almost universally recognized as a brilliant exponent of medieval Aristotelianism. In fact, St. Thomas was considered by many to be a " pure " Aristotelian. This position was aptly expl'essed by Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy : Aquinas, unlike (...) his predecessors, had a really competent knowledge of Aristotle. His friend William of Moerheke provided him with translations from Greek, and he himself wrote commentaries. Until his time, men's notions of Aristotle had been obscured by Neoplatonic accretions. He, however, followed the genuine Aristotle, and disliked Platonism, even as it appears in Saint Augustine. He succeeded in persuading the Church that Aristotle's system was to be preferred to Plato's as the basis of Christian philosophy, and that Mohammedans and Christian Averroists had misinterpreted Aristotle.1 Russell, however, although correct in saying that St. Thomas "had a really competent knowledge of Aristotle," neither knew how his philosophy was different from that which had come before nor had any idea of the extent to which the overpowering influence of Neoplatonism had been elt by almost all medieval thinkers, including St. Thomas. Concerning St. Thomas's Aristotelianism, Wayne Hankey has observed the following: Indeed one might say that his Aristotelianism should be seen within the context of his Neoplatonism. Certainly he generally reads Aristotle through Neoplatonic spectacles, but more significant is that the movement toward a more positive view of Aristotle is a feature of the later Neoplatonism and especially of its Christian 1 Bertrand Russell, A. History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), p. 453. 209 210 LUIS CORTEST adherents. Nor is it exclusively a feature of the Iamblichan tradition ; for Porphyry's view of the first principle is closer to Aristotle's than are the positions of either Plotinus or Iamblichus and his followers, and he is responsible for the assimilation of Aristotle's logic into Neoplatonism after Plotinus's critique. It is perhaps enough to mention that Porphyry, Boethius, and the Arabs provide the main western medieval sources for the knowledge of Aristotle until the time of St. Thomas.2 On the surface, it would seem that Russell, never an admirer of Thomistic philosophy, was neither accurate nor objective in his evalu::tion of St. Thomas's Platonism. This judgment of Russell's position, however, might perhaps be too severe. It must be remembered that modern Neoplatonic studies were only in their infancy when Russell's text was first published in 1945. Actually, this scholarship dates, for the most part, from the time of Dodd's edition of Proclus's Elements of Theology in 1933.3 In fact, only in recent years have these studies been cultivated by an impressive number of scholars. Even in the early years of Neoplatonic scholarship, however, there were a few works devoted to St. Thomas Aquinas and Platonism. In 1939, Cornelio Fab:m published his important study, La nozione metafisica di partecipazione secondo S. Tommaso d'Aquino in Milan. This work not only stressed the importance of the Platonic doctrine of participation in the works of St. Thomas, but also considered the Thomistic corpus in terms of medieval Neoplatonism. Along with Fabro's works, many others soon appeared focusing on the Platonic side of St. Thomas, including those of L. B. Geiger,4 Joseph Santeler,5 and Arthur Little.6 Some concluding remarks f:mm Little's 2 Wayne Hankey, ".Aquinas' First Principle: Being or Unity?" Dionysius, IV (1980), 147-148. a Eric Robertson Dodds, Proclus. The Elements of Theology (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1933). 4 L. B. Geiger, La Participation dans la Philosophie de S. Thomas d'Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 1942). 5 Joseph Santeler, Der Platonismus in der l!Jrkenntnislehre des Heiligen Thomas von Aquin (Innsbruck: F. Rauch, 1939). s.Arthur Little, The Platonic Heritage of Thomism (Dublin: Golden Eagles Books, 1950). WAS ST. THOMAS AQUINAS A PLATONIST( 211 book, The Platonic Heritage of Thomism, are indicative of the scholarship from this period in Thomistic studies: Whether wittingly or unwittingly he [St. Thomas] taught a Platonic doctrine rejected by Aristotle when he taught... (shrink)

When leading spectroscopists in Europe and America were engaged, during 1897, in exploring the recently-discovered Zeeman Effect, they were overtaken by a relatively obscure phsicist working in Dublin. Thomas Preston had previously been known only for his excellent textbooks. His achievement in discovering the Anomalous Zeeman Effect was immediately recognized, but his untimely death has deprived posterity until now of a full account of his life and qualities.

The contemporary secular student approaching the traditional summit of philosophy, like a candidate approaching an exalted political office, is troubled by the question: ‘Is its future now behind it?’ Seven centuries ago an over-loyal witness to the virtue of St. Thomas anticipated the question with a hyperbolic flourish: “in fine conclusit, quod idem Fr. Thomas in scripturis suis imposuit finem omnibus laborantibus usque ad finem saeculi, et quod omnes deinceps frustra laborarent”. He was promptly contradicted by lively divisions (...) within Scholasticism itself and later by the unexpected and rich development of secular philosophies, whose wars have ended by generating a general suspicion of the validity and position of metaphysics itself. The problem now is to restore a respected significance to that surviving science, as is bluntly stated by Dr. Owens: “the difficulty to-day for metaphysics is to take even the first step toward a proper place in the advanced and complicated culture which is ours”. (shrink)

These superbly reproduced annotated pages form a profoundly moving human document which certainly ought to appeal to a wider public than those specially interested in St Thomas More’s life and writings. The ‘Prayer Book’ referred to in the title consists of two books, bound together. The first is a Book of Hours, namely the Little Hours of Our Lady, together with a number of occasional prayers, the Seven Penitential Psalms, the Fifteen Gradual Psalms, the Litany of the Saints and (...) the Office of the Dead. The second book is the Psalter, really a one-volume Breviary without the lessons and collects, for as well as the psalms the Psalter contains the dominical and ferial antiphons and hymns. The binding dates from 1530-1540, though it is not possible to determine whether the two books were bound together while in St Thomas More’s possession. The fact that each now lacks a number of pages seems to indicate a later binding. Inside the front cover, on a pasted down leaf which may have been originally a fly-leaf, is written: Liber quondam Thomae Mori militis in multis locis manu sua propria inscriptus. (shrink)

From his authority as the co-author of established text-books, notably The Foundations of Physics, Dr. Margenau compares current scientific methodology with some relevant principles of St. Thomas’s epistemology, particularly in the perennial problem of the valid functions of reason and of sense in scientific experience. Since Quantum Theory has removed the possibility of absolute prediction and verification, reason can no longer be considered to offer a mere image of the sense world. Hence “the sensory domain is forever richer than (...) theory since individual sensory events have no direct counterpart in theory, and on the other hand, it is clear that the concepts of reason cannot be directly sensed … in the realm of the atom”. This change, he submits, confirms the reality of an ‘active’ or ‘factive’ intellect in the Aristotelian-Thomist sense. In illustration he cites Eddington’s distinction between the macroscopic desk of ordinary sense experience and the microscopic desk of mathematico-physical science, which produces the dilemma: “The second desk … has ultimate elements which cannot be perceived. He who identifies the two desks is guilty of saying that an object wholly given in sensation can be decomposed by the magic of science into constituents not given in sensation”. Further, he claims that this difference “appears in every careful analysis of all scientific quantities or objects” and ambiguously explains it thus: “the second desk is the product, very largely, of Aquinas’s factive intellect; the first involves mere abstraction, collation of sensory material, performed by what Thomas called the passive [?] intellect “. (shrink)

This is a newly-revised edition of a French work, which originally appeared in 1930 as “a kind of Thomist manifesto, especially directed to the French Catholic public”. Apart from those who do not share M. Maritain’s religious faith, some may reject the confessedly “youthful emphasis and rhetoric” with which this very personal introduction to the basic verities of his intellectual life is warmly presented. Yet M. Maritain can claim truly to be a pioneer in the “great historic novelty” of making (...) the rediscovered basic insights of Thomas Aquinas “emerge, from a school tradition restricted to the intellectual preparation of clerics, into the open and global compass of contemporary thought”. (shrink)

Aristotle is one of the greatest philosophers who have written on the nature of man. And when he chose to write on man and his pursuit of happiness, he did it by describing carefully the virtues which together constitute the good life. He tells us that moral virtue in general is a habit of choice, essentially consisting in the preservation of the mean, relatively to the persons concerned, as determined by rule, i.e., by the rule by which the prudent man (...) would determine it. In the pursuit of true happiness, then, we must be guided by the prudent man. Hence the importance of prudence in the moral life. For Aristotle, as for St. Thomas, prudence is the auriga virtutum. It deserves careful study, and indeed, it has been studied profoundly by both Philosopher and Theologian. They are in agreement for the most part, but on one point at least they differ greatly. For a better understanding of a virtue Aristotle very often describes the corresponding vice. The contrast of virtue and vice is looked upon as an Aristotelian technique. But there is one vice to which Aristotle devotes no attention: the vice of imprudence. St. Thomas, on the other hand, has no hesitation in treating specifically of the vice of imprudence, its special place and its various parts. (shrink)

It is quite clear that sin like any other evil involves the privation of a requisite perfection, that it has what is called a negative malice. But is that all? Even a superficial examination of a sin of transgression shows that there is another element, an act, which is something positive: peccatum non est pura privatio, sed est actus debito ordine privatus; peccatum est actus inordinatus. Is this positive element the formal constituent of sin, so that sin may be said (...) not only to have a negative malice, but also a positive one? Or, in other words, is a sin bad not only on account of what it lacks, of what it is not, but also—and principally—on account of what it is? (shrink)

This admirable presentation to the contemporary, critically secular mind of the life and general mentality of a medieval genius recalls and deepens the instant success of Chesterton’s journalistic essay of thirty years ago. Prepared by an early study of St Thomas, which was praised by Grabmann as an ‘expression of his interior life’, this book was first published in Munich in 1958 and was based upon a series of twelve lectures. Fluently translated into English, the original spoken vivacity accentuates (...) their purpose. (shrink)

To reconstruct the philosophy of St Thomas must we include, as an integral part of the system, his teaching concerning the heavenly bodies? One would hardly think so were we to judge by the attention devoted to this theme in classic expositions of Thomism such as those of Gilson and Sertillanges. However, in this study, Dr Litt argues that an historical examination of the writings of St Thomas clearly establishes that his references to the heavenly bodies are not (...) merely incidental and by way of example. In many important respects they are proposed by St Thomas as genuinely metaphysical assertions fulfilling an important and positive role in the elaboration of his philosophy. (shrink)