IrishPhilosophy

In the midst of an crowd of Trump supporters, a woman holds up a sign saying "Drain the Swamp"

Friedrich Hayek explains MAGA:
"Much of our occasional impetuous desire to smash the whole entangling machinery of civilisation is due to the inability of man to understand what he is doing."

Grant Spotlight: Archaeology Legacy Grant

Michael Monk’s excavation project, supported by this grant, brought long-standing research to life and provided experience to nearly 100 students.


Apply for 2025 funding until 15 Oct: https://www.ria.ie/grants/archaeology-legacy-grants-scheme/

In politics as in science, Occham's Razor holds true -- even if this excellent article challenges and then refines it:
"To paraphrase Einstein, we should try to make things as simple as possible, but no simpler."

Excellent piece on free speech, particularly in the early United States, where Washington's successor outlawed criticism of POTUS, and an Irish-born Congressman, Spitting Lyons, criticised him for it & was jailed.

#m17ra #mera

While politics of identity doesn't help, Skinner (Liberty as Independence, p. 277) has a point re the limits of liberalism.

He cites Berlin (Two Concepts of Freedom) "there is no necessary connection between individual liberty and democratic rule" in liberalism.

Liberalism has betrayed the working class, but illiberali... If we fail to uphold equality and democracy, where will our society be?

Kenan Malik on the danger of swapping (the best of) liberalism for the leopards of illiberalism

👎"liberals have long sought to deny others the values they prized for themselves."

👍"Out of these struggles emerged the universalist radical tradition"

observer.co.uk/news/columni...

#m17ga #mera

Also - contrast b/w the response when I advocate teaching R instead of SPSS -- "No hurry, let's not rush into it" (still waiting) -- & others re: use of LLMs -- "It's inevitable, we're behind; need it implement it ASAP!" -- is telling. Learning to code is freeing. Overhyped LLMs create dependency.

The speakers at the Royal Irish Academy conference on the Book of Lecan, standing on the stairs at the RIA. I'm at the front on the right.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the excellent @ria.ie conference on the Book of Lecan. It was a fantastic couple of days. The talks were recorded and will appear on SoundCloud soon!
@scs-dias.bsky.social @ceilteachomn.bsky.social 📚

An old manuscript with some decorative feaures, particularly on sentences beginning with D.

Collectio canonum Hibernesis, on loan from St Gallen to the National Museum of Ireland.

A screenshot of a website that says "DISCOVER THE TASTY VERSATILITY OF POTATOES! Europe's favourite since 1536." banner ads say "funded by the european union" and "enjoy - it's from europe."

So there's an EU-funded campaign to get millenials to eat potatoes and - I swear to Jesus I'm not making this up - it's slogan is: "Europe's favourite since 1536."

In the same essay reflecting on stupidity, Arendt distinguished between “preliminary” and “true” understanding. Because it involves applying existing concepts to particular situations, preliminary understanding has a kind of circularity. It can be clever and correct, but it falls short when confronting the genuine novelty of human actions. One can escape the most brute form of stupidity, yet not truly understand the significance of the political and historical moment. Even the cleverest person or system can get trapped in a “preliminary” understanding of events. Arendt argued that there was a second human faculty, in addition to judgment, that allowed understanding to progress to a truer grasp of meaning: imagination. Imagination, for Arendt, is the uniquely human capacity to grasp truth via speculative leaps, drawing on empathy and creativity in the process, as opposed to scientific methods. Politics requires us to navigate situations which are incomparable and immeasurable, because they are genuinely new. This in turn requires something closer to aesthetic judgment than to scientific judgment. “Imagination alone,” Arendt wrote, “enables us to see things in their proper perspective.” The challenge Arendt poses to us is to think of truth and meaning not from the perspective of the economist, financial analyst, data scientist or sociologist, but of the historian, the kind who sees human events as a series of breaks, anomalies and initiations. This is what the “closed world” of platform and market surveillance can’t provide: a kind of understanding that is not reducible to empirical data. Artificial or market “intelligence” has the capacity to learn at ultra-high speed from existing data, but its range of possible outcomes, while extremely large, is nevertheless enumerable and therefore finite. In the gamified space of such “closed worlds”, history is finished, and all that remains is lots and lots of behaviours. Every conceivable event, utterance or idea is already

We believe this future will be easier (if never easy) to navigate with recourse to the skills and temperaments integral to a historical (and humanities) approach to life. The value of history goes further. We live at a time of considerable uncertainty and peril— environmentally, technologically and politically—and many are justifiably concerned about a future shaped without adequate appreciation, and application, of the skills of those trained in the humanities. We believe this future will be easier (if never easy) to navigate with recourse to the skills and temperaments integral to a historical (and humanities) approach to life: contextualisation, scepticism, a seeking after evidence, an acknowledgment and tolerance of complexity, and an appreciation of the value, and precarity, of civic responsibility and democracy. Presently, we are failing to be heard when we make this case—notwithstanding the popularity of history as a pursuit. It is incumbent on organisations like the Royal Historical Society, in collaboration with others, to do better: to make the place, contribution and potential of academic history (much of which takes place far beyond higher education) more legible and intelligible to those who, while ‘liking history’, struggle to see its place in education, its potential as a degree or its value to society.

My day opened with this excellent @theguardian.com piece by a social scientist who respects historians' value: www.theguardian.com/news/2025/oc...
and closed with affirmation of that need for historians' brains by @royalhistsoc.org: blog.royalhistsoc.org/2025/10/02/t...

And that's good bookending.

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

A nice discussion of recent work on political legitimacy -- including my book!

What Is the Point of Legitimacy? - Enzo Rossi, 2025 journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Very sad to hear this, had a lovely chat with him about art and the brain for his Almanac podcast, and he became a real champion for our CúChulainn books. A fascinating, interested and kind soul, RIP a chara

Our colleagues Lynn Kilgallon and @jmarshallmed.bsky.social will be presenting at tomorrow's 26th @fmdmedievaldublin.bsky.social Symposium as part of the Dublin Festival of History.

The author, standing behind a desk at the National Library of Ireland. The desk contains a laptop and a screen

Thanks to all who attended my Dublin Festival of History lecture @nlireland.bsky.social detailing my research on the Catholic Standard newspaper. Great to have an interested audience and a lively Q&A. My research is being undertaken @dublincityuni.bsky.social and funded by @researchireland.ie.

The Need for Reform of Metaphysics in Early Modern Germany and the Impact of the Scientific Societies Abstract. In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Immanuel Kant famously diagnoses the poor condition of metaphysics at the time. While other disciplines, such as l...

Congratulations to our Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Christian Henkel on the publication of his article on ‘The Need for Reform of #Metaphysics in Early Modern Germany and the Impact of Scientific Societies’ in Perspectives on Science. #PhilPublication #EarlyModernPhilosophy direct.mit.edu/posc/article...

😂 #AISlop

This. ⬇️ In my view, teaching critical AI literacy is absolutely central to helping students and others to navigate the current technology landscape. This will enable people to make an informed decision *whether* to use #AI, not only *how* to use it, based on practical, ethical and other factors.

The next Boole Lecture in Philosophy will be delivered by Prof. Rob Wilson (University of Western Australia)

"Norming Human Individuality. The Significance of Eugenification"

Venue and time: CACSSS Seminar Room (O’Rahilly Building G27) | Tuesday, October 7th, 1400-1600

.../

The current anti-immigration hysteria feels like a dress rehearsal for the waves of climate-related mass migration that are coming in the next few decades. It’s not looking good…

Festival of History — public lecture - Irish Manuscripts The Irish Manuscripts Commission are delighted to present, as part of the Dublin Festival of History 2025: Doing business in Ireland 1711-1860 a public lecture Have you ever wondered how enterprises l...

"Doing business in Ireland 1711-1860" a #HistFest25 public lecture

Explore the origins of Irish businesses through the invaluable records of the Registry of Deeds

4 Oct | 11 am | 45 Merrion Sq

No booking required. First come first served.

irishmanuscripts.ie/foh2025/

@tailteeireann.bsky.social

Just upping this again as undergraduate dissertation topics are being picked.

#BiographyoftheWeek from the Dictionary of Irish Biography

'Women shall be admitted on precisely the same terms as men.’ (King's Inns, January 1920)

On 23 December 1919 the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act was passed, allowing women admission to the legal and other professions.

I've learnt a useful new phrase in the Irish
language: "foc é sin agus foc iad uilig"

#Spéirgorm

Take good care of yourselves, seek out community, and know when to leave – some great advice here for PhD students and ECRs

(My full response follows tomorrow!)

Discover how libraries are helping the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland to recover Ireland's history.

Join us for a lecture with Dr Sarah Hendriks and see the RIA Library's physical exhibition. 3pm, Wednesday 8 October. Visit https://www.ria.ie/events/ for booking

@virtualtreasury.bsky.social

Join us at the Royal Irish Academy on 2 and 3 October for a two-day conference exploring all aspects of the Book of Lecan.

Book your tickets now: www.ria.ie/events/libra...

The Manuscript of the Week is RIA MS 23 P 2, Leabhar Mór Leacain/the Great Book of Lecan. Compiled in A.D. 1397-1418, it contains a large amount of genealogical material, as well as historical, biblical and hagiographical material.

Clare Moriarty: Trump’s ‘tough it out’ message to pregnant women is dangerous His claims about a link between paracetamol and autism are not just anti-science, they’re anti-woman

Wrote about the Trump/RFK paracetamol/autism stuff this weekend. Sorry it's paywalled. Some snips of the more philosophical bits below...

www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

An elderly man with white hair and glasses, smiling gently at the camera

We are deeply saddened to learn of the death of our Member, Martin Mansergh. Elected in 2018, he was an active contributor to the Academy, most recently as part of our North-South Standing Committee. Our condolences to his family, friends and colleagues.