Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. “Good is a transcendent reality” means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.
Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good” quoted in An Occasion for Unselfing: Iris Murdoch on Imperfection as Integral to Goodness and How the Beauty of Nature and Art Leavens Our Most Unselfish Impulses
women
Mary Delany, the Triumfeminate and other Dublin Women: Swift’s “Female Senate”
This post originally appeared on my personal blog. However at the recent conference on Irish Philosophy in the Age of Berkeley, Christine Gerrard gave a fascinating presentation on “What the Dublin Women of the ‘Triumfeminate’ did with John Locke”. I have therefore moved this post here to serve as an introduction to these women.
In 1752 John Boyle (5th earl of Cork and Orrery), erstwhile friend of Jonathan Swift, wrote in his life of the Dean, “You see the command which Swift had over all his females, and you would have smiled to have found his house a constant seraglio of very virtuous women, who attended him from morning til night”. Boyle blamed Swift’s women for Swift publishing papers he would have been wiser to withhold, since “he communicated every composition as soon as finished, to his female senate.”
Patrick Delany, who had been close friends with Swift since meeting him in 1718, wasted no time in defending the reputation of Swift and his friends in Observations Upon Lord Orrery’s Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift. As well as giving explanations of Swift’s relationships with Esther Johnson (‘Stella’) and Esther Vanhomrigh (‘Vanessa’), he insisted that women almost never visited the Dean’s house, and then only by invitation. Delany had every opportunity of knowing this: “[Delany’s] house at Glasnevin was the scene of the weekly meetings at which Swift and his circle would read poems to each other and submit them for correction” (Andrew Carpenter, 2004). The house, Delville, has since been demolished but stood on the site of the present Bon Secours Hospital, Dublin.
Iris Murdoch on the unity of the virtues
[M]oral advance carries with it intuitions of unity which are increasingly less misleading. Courage, which seemed at first to be something on its own, a sort of specialised daring of spirit, is now seen to be a particular operation of wisdom and love.[…] Freedom, we find out, is not an inconsequential chucking of one’s weight about, it is the disciplined overcoming of self. Humility is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice, it is self-less respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.
Iris Murdoch (1970/2013) The Sovereignty of Good, Routledge, p. 93.
“My accomplished friend”: the life and philosophy of Maria Edgeworth
Maria Edgeworth was born at Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, 250 years ago on 1 January 1768. She was the eldest daughter and third child of the inventor Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his first wife, Anna Maria Elers. Maria Edgeworth’s mother died when she was six and her father remarried the following year.
Richard Lovell Edgeworth had inherited both an estate in Mastrim, Co. Longford and an neglectful attitude to it. He spent little time there until 1782, when the entire family removed there. The move was partially prompted by the views of the English midlands industrialists and philanthropists with whom he associated (he was a Benthamite and a friend of many members of the Lunar society including Erasmus Darwin, James Watt, and Josiah Wedgewood). This was also constitutionally an interesting time: there was an ongoing demand in Ireland for parliamentary reform, and Grattan’s Parliament was established the following year.
In Our Time: Annie Besant
Melvyn Bragg and his guests; Lawrence Goldman (University of Oxford), David Stack (University of Reading) and Yasmin Khan (University of London); discuss the life of the prominent 19th-century social reformer Annie Besant (1 October, 1847 – 20 September 1933).
In 1893 Annie Besant wrote: “it has always been somewhat of a grievance to me that I was born in London, ‘within the sound of Bow Bells”, when three-quarters of my blood and all my heart are Irish”1.
Onora O’Neill on Trust
UCD honored Onora O’Neill by awarding her the UCD Ulysses Medal, on 8th September 2017.
The video above is of a TED talk given by Onora O’Neill in June 2013 entitled “What we don’t understand about trust.” The talk explores misapprehensions about trust and points out that what we really want is more trustworthiness. A link to the talk including transcript is here.
Sophie Bryant advocating Boole’s Symbolic Language
The value of a uniformization of notation was recognized by late-19th and early-20th centuries logicians, who not only remarked the wide variety of definitions and symbolizations for the most basic elements of logic, but complained about the confusing proliferation of notation systems. Venn divided the 33 forms into seven different general types. The authors whose notations are considered range from Leibniz to Boole and Hamilton, and from Charles Pierce and his students to Frege.[…] In 1888 Sophie Willock Bryant (1850-1922), in her article “On the Nature and Functions of a Complete Symbolic Language” – not unnaturally then – complained of the existence of too many competing logical notations and systems, and she advocated a return to Boole’s original system.
I. H. Anellis (2014) “Pierce’s Role in the History of Logic: Lingua Universalis and Calculus Ratiocinator” in Arnold Koslow and Arthur Buchsbaum (eds.) The Road to Universal Logic: Festschrift for the 50th Birthday of Jean-Yves Béziau, Volume 2, pp. 135-170.
Quote from p. 147.
From Ireland to Manchester: Eva Gore-Booth and women’s labour
Some vague Utopia?
In his poem “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz”, Yeats called the work of Eva Gore-Booth a dream “of some vague Utopia”. It was, in fact, part of a wider campaign for the rights of working class people and for women that had been happening in Ireland for twenty years and in England, Wales and Scotland for longer.
In January 1907 James Larkin came to Belfast to act as general organiser for the National Union of Dock Labourers. He had previously been an organiser for the union in Liverpool, Preston and Glasgow and his aim was to unionise the unskilled workers of Belfast. That Summer he led the dockworkers in a strike to campaign for the right to organise and join trades unions, and for the rights of working class people. The strike grew into a movement, with women among the early participants. A thousand women walked out of Gallahers Tobaco in solidarity with seven co-workers sacked for attending a lunchtime meeting organised by Larkin. The strike spread to carters, coal heavers, boilermakers and most surprisingly of all, the Royal Irish Constabulary in Belfast. The Independent Orange Order even collected donations for the strikers on 12 July 19071.
Protection of the Franchise
Eva Gore-Booth (1906) “Women’s wages and the franchise and certain legislative proposals” in Sonja Tiernan (ed) (2015) The Political Writings of Eva Gore-Booth, Manchester University Press. Quote on p. 37.
