Thomas Duddy & Irish Philosophy

Tim Madigan travels through time to seek the essential nature of Irish thought.

- Tim Madigan

“There is of course such a thing as Irish thought, but it cannot be characterized in imperially nationalistic terms, or in any terms that presuppose privileged identities or privileged periods of social and cultural evolution.”

(Thomas Duddy, A History of Irish Thought, Routledge 2002, p.xii).

A few years back I had the pleasure of being the Faculty Director for a Study Abroad Program at the Centre for Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway (now known as the University of Galway).

Part of my duties involved teaching a course to the twenty students who had accompanied me abroad from the US. Since I’m a Professor of Philosophy, I thought it would be appropriate to organize an Irish Philosophy course, but then realized that other than Bishop Berkeley, I knew nothing about any Irish philosophers, so I was in a quandary.

A month or so before the course was to begin I headed over to Galway to get things settled, and I visited the university bookstore. On one of the shelves was a book called