Gerard of Bologna (d. 1317) was the first Carmelite master at the University of Paris in the Middle Ages. In Quaestio 6, article 1 of his incomplete Summa theologiae, Gerard discusses the issue of teaching and learning. During the course of his discussion he summarises his understanding of the process of cognition in human beings and he considers God, angels and human beings as teachers. Gerard insists on the necessity of the teacher-student relationship in the handing on of human knowledge.

There is general acceptance that those who break the law must be punished; however, not all agree as to why this is necessary. Some argue punishment is necessary to reform criminals, others to deter criminals, and others because you deserve it, whether punishment reforms or deters. Stripped of metaphors, this paper argues that punishment is retribution, but that a distinction must be made between the definition of punishment as retribution and its justification, if a case is to be made for its moral justification. Thus the most important question the paper raises relates to the justification of punishment as retribution.

Stein’s phenomenology is one that is particularly sensitive to intersubjective constitution, and thus her constitutional analysis of the body is one that allows for an analysis of the body as ‘socially constructed’ (in so far as one understands this term to mean the same as ‘inter-subjectively constituted’). The purpose of this paper is to give an account of Stein’s phenomenology of the body as it appears in On the Problem of Empathy, her constitutional analysis being explicitly articulated in this work as including both subjective and intersubjective layers.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s systematic rejection of cognitive analysis undoubtedly leads one to interpret his work as being fundamentally influenced by behaviourism. However, despite his private language argument, his views on ostensive definition, and his investigation into psychological concepts and psychology as an empirical science, this paper will show that Wittgenstein’s behaviourist influences were both relevant and limited and thus his tentative link to methodological behaviourism should not facilitate any distortion or misrepresentation of his philosophy or be confused with his own assertions as a logical behaviourist.

In this article Aquinas’s three accounts of how the elements combine — those of Avicenna, Averroes and Aquinas himself — are considered. An attempt is then made to reinterpret these accounts in the light of our contemporary understanding of the manner in which the modern elements behave in combination. This follows Bobik’s lead in restating Aquinas’s own account of how the Aristotelian elements combine, using present-day insights into the behaviour of the modern elements.

I situate historically, analyze, and examine some of the implications of Kant’s thesis that the analytic unity of apperception — the representation of the identity of the I think — is what transforms any representation to which it is attached into a universal (conceptus communis).

This article is a personal reflection on the question of the importance of human experience regarding suffering and death. It is also a reflection on the paradoxical indifference that many feel with regard to the suffering of others. It concludes, after an examination of some of the major thinkers on the topic, that we may well be forced to concede that to this question we may possibly be unable to give an answer.

In a series of recent articles Stephen Yablo argues the case for mathematical fictionalism on the basis that a Quinean approach to ontology is undermined by an indeterminacy about which objects we should be committed to. Yablo has developed a series of semantic models purporting to show that there is no principled way to separate out genuine from apparent ontological commitments. In this paper I focus on his argument that mathematical discourse is metaphorical. I argue that Yablo’s criticism relies on a misunderstanding of the status of Quine’s naturalised ontology. In particular, the indeterminacy Yablo identifies in ontology is common place in all scientific theories, and just as it is not a sufficient reason for abandoning any other scientific theory so is it not sufficient to abandon ontology. I conclude by arguing that Yablo’s presentation of fictionalism as a return to a Carnap style ‘quizzical’ attitude to ontology is equally problematic.

This article investigates the ethical significance of language in relation to Heidegger and Levinas’s thought. It first examines the prerequisites of the discussion of language based on the concepts of Being (Heidegger) and the Other (Levinas). Then, it deals with the concept of time as an essential element in understanding language. Thirdly, it compares Heidegger’s ontological-language and Levinas’s ethical-language, highlighting Levinas’s critique of Heidegger’s ethical deficiency, especially in Heidegger’s articulation on language. The paper argues that Levinas’s emphasis on the priority and exteriority of the Other in our relation to language both reveals and replaces Heidegger’s mystical significance of language as ‘the House of Being’.

The question of free will is a perennial one. With new insights from modern science much reflection is given again to the problem of determinism, and the possibility of human freedom. Richard Dawkins argues that our genes need to be taken into account when considering the question of whether we are free. Daniel Dennett argues for free will from within the context of an evolutionary framework, thereby giving freedom a naturalistic grounding. Both these thinkers operate from within the neo-Darwinian framework, allowing for the possibility of freedom, against the backdrop of determinism/materialism. One other thinker arising out of the neo-Darwinian framework is the neuroscientist Sam Harris. In his publication Free Will, Harris argues that the concept of free will is incoherent, he appeals to arguments from neuroscience to ‘prove’ that we are not free, outlining that the content of experience is not a free choice, the content is produced out of a complex interaction with the individual, and the environment. For a human being to truly have a free choice, Harris argues we would need to be given access to everything that gives rise to the choice. As Harris draws from findings in neuroscience, discussion will be given to the question of Benjamin Libet’s famous neurological experiment, and the wider discussion of consciousness. The paper argues for the possibility of a compatibilist model of free will in line with Dawkins and Dennett’s approach. Concluding that the naturalist model of explanation has a lot of detail to furnish before it could be proven that free will is an illusion.

The focus of this paper is on Avicenna’s treatment of the nature and possibility of human knowledge, paying particular attention to his theory of imagination and his theory of the intellect. Despite his dualistic approach to the nature of the human being, Avicenna can be interpreted as positing a link, albeit a weak link, between the body and mind. Avicenna develops the Aristotelian conception of imagination by positing five internal senses. An examination of each of the five senses will be helpful in understanding Avicenna’s theory of imagination more clearly and his views on the relationship between body and soul.

The recent widespread transformation in the conjugal rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) people across much of the globe may seem to suggest that, at long last, the history of heterosexism has reached its terminus. In Ireland, the Equal Marriage Referendum in May 2015 offered the opportunity for the citizens of the Republic to extend the same rights, permissions, and privileges to same-sex couples that married heterosexual couples freely enjoy. The passing of that referendum and the extension of these rights to same-sex couples denotes a move beyond societal tolera6tion toward societal acceptance, yet it remains to be seen whether or not the affordance of conjugal rights to LGBT people will necessarily mean that all queer subjects will be given the same acceptance.This article examines equal marriage and its potential engendering of binary divisions between queer subjects who adhere to the logic of cultural heteronormativity and those who transgress its structuring forces. It aims to historicise the discourse that surrounds gay marriage by tracing these debates back to the Enlightenment's production of the companionate marriage. The works of Edmund Burke, his aesthetic writings and political speeches, provide the textual basis for an examination of 'normative desire' in the eighteenth century. The article contends that assessing the eighteenth century's regime of heteronormativity will allow us to see the provisional nature of our own heterosexist cultural formations.

Friedrich Nietzsche's reference to Ernst Chladni in ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’ (1873) could easily be overlooked as a casual analogy. Yet it emerges from a systematic engagement with the nascent field of acoustics. Chladni was among the discipline's founding fathers, having honed the application of rigorous empirical testing to sound and music. His name is most enduringly associated with the discovery of the 'sound figures', which rendered sound visible for the first time. To produce them, Chladni scattered sand onto a metal sheet. A note was then emitted by playing a violin bow against its side. The resulting oscillations prompted the sand to settle in a range of symmetrical patterns. The natural beauty of the shapes made them quite famous. Yet they also represented a mystery. Though the formula for calculating the oscillation of single strings was reliable, it could not easily be reconciled with oscillation in two dimensions. In lieu of an explanation, the sound figures became the object of speculative attention. Their existence posed a difficulty for the quantitative ontology of rationalist metaphysics. The inheritors of Schelling, for example, saw in the sound figures an undeciphered language of nature. But Nietzsche was implacably opposed to this position: for him, nature contains no inherent meaning, no rational order, and no divine teleology. The ‘book of nature’ was at best an anthropomorphic projection, and at worst a theological dogma. Thus reframed, Chladni's sound figures confront us not with the infinite mystery of nature, but our own cognitive impotence. The following essay therefore elaborates the provenance of Nietzsche's sound figure analogy: a rare intersection of scientific experiment and speculative philosophy.

This is a reflection on the gift of beauty and the passion of being in light of the fact that today we often meet an ambiguous attitude to beauty. Beauty seems bland and lacks the more visceral thrill of the ugly, indeed the excremental. We crave what disrupts and provokes us. Bland beauty seems to be the death of originality. How then be open at all to beauty as gift? In fact, we often are disturbed paradoxically by beauty: both taken out of ourselves, hence disquieted, yet awakened to our being at home with beauty. Beauty arouses enigmatic joy in us, and we enjoy an elemental rapport with it as other. Surprised by beauty, our breath is taken away; we are more truly there with the beautiful yet taken outside of ourselves: both at home with ourselves and not at home, in being beyond ourselves. We are first receivers of the gift of surprise and only then perceivers and conceivers. My attention to the passion of being stresses a patience, a receptivity to what is other. What happens is not first our construction. Our being disarmed by the beautiful I hold to be in tune with our being as marked most deeply by what I call a primal ‘porosity’ to being. Beauty sensuously communicates in and through this awakened porosity. We are a patience of being before we are an endeavour to be. In modern aesthetics and culture, originating receptivity tends to be downplayed as a depreciation of our claims to creative power. The predominant stress often falls on human autonomy, such that we love only what we construct ourselves, not what we receive. By contrast, I argue there is something of the godsend in what is truly beautiful. This might not be a fashionable way of talking but the vocation of the philosopher is not to be fashionable but to be true.

The Irish language represents a material link ensuring continuity between the past and present of the Irish experience, but as that link has gradually been obscured, the language has become a form of alterity, indicated in the notion of Gaelic Ireland going ‘underground’. The choice between maintaining the continuity of the Irish literary tradition and abandoning it was characterized by Franciscan theologian and philosopher Froinsias Ó Maolmhuaidh (Francis O’Molloy) as the choice between keeping one’s reason and embracing folly. Thus, his envoi to the first printed Irish grammar in 1677 exhorts the people of Ireland to engage in a revival of literacy in the Irish language so as to transform their future by keeping faith with the past. Yet the desire to revive past knowledge or values is problematic. Is it possible, as the Irish revivalist Douglas Hyde desired, to ‘render the present a rational continuation of the past’? Or is it the case that revivals are attempts at a renewal of tradition, involving a dialectical transition similar to Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung? This inaugural lecture considers this question and the wider implications of revival by situating the Irish tradition of Revivalism within the broader history of ideas.

This paper, which the author delivered as his inaugural lecture as the Chair of Philosophy at Maynooth University, explores the relationship between philosophy, poetry, and religion. Through a line-by-line interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Steer Your Way’, it discovers the poet in a space between postmodern disillusionment and a desire for faith. What opens Cohen to the latter is specifically the experience of pain and brokenness, which lead him to the figure of Jesus. The paper concludes with a reflection on Richard Kearney’s notion of ‘anatheism’, the return to a ‘God after God’.