Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Ireland

Clara Fischer is an EU Marie-Sklodowska Fellow at the Centre for Gender, Feminisms, and Sexualities and Co-director of the Dewey Studies Research Centre at University College Dublin. She is the author of Gendered Readings of Change: A Feminist-Pragmatist Approach (2014), and co-editor of Irish Feminisms: Past, Present and Future (2015) and of New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment (2018). She has also recently edited a special issue of Hypatia on ‘Gender and the Politics of Shame’ (2018).Áine Mahon is Assistant Professor in the School of Education at University College Dublin. Her primary research areas are Philosophy of Education and Philosophy of Literature. Áine’s first monograph, The Ironist and the Romantic: Reading Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell, was published in 2014. With Andrew Taylor of the University of Edinburgh, she has also co-edited Stanley Cavell, Literature and Film: The Idea of America (Routledge, 2013).

"The stated intent of this collection of essays is ambitious: addressing the dearth of philosophical contributions to the field of Irish studies, which the editors see as dominated by literary and historical scholarship . . . The editors offer the hope of continual engagement with the experiences of previously ignored groups through the discussion of such contemporary issues as traumatic memory, postcolonial nation building, citizenship, and diasporic dislocation . . . [The chapters] go beyond the application of philosophical concepts to Irish subjects, providing the sort of conceptual tools that allow scholars from all fields to realize the integrative potential of a truly interdisciplinary Irish studies. Summing up: Recommended."ChoiceReviews"This book responds to a pressing need for engaged philosophical discussion of fundamental issues in contemporary Irish society. The contributors to this volume bring a wide range of philosophical approaches and exacting conceptual rigour to bear on issues such as memory and trauma, institutional abuse and the politics of shame, injustice and violence against women, exile and language loss, national aspirations and republican ideals. This is a long overdue and intellectually exciting book."Felix Ó Murchadha, National University of Ireland, Galway

• Introduction1. Crossing Ireland’s Boundaries, Real and Imagined Áine Mahon and Clara FischerPart I: Memory, Trauma, and Recovery2. The Risk of Hospitality: Exchanging Stories Changing HistoryRichard Kearney 3. ‘In the frail way that people assemble themselves’: Feeling Shame about TuamKathleen Lennon Part II: Citizenship, Injustice, and the Law4. ‘Take me to Church’: Sexual Citizenship and Spatial Justice in IrelandAideen Quilty5. State Shame, Sovereignty, and Legal Responses to Historical Institutional AbuseSinéad Ring and Máiréad Enright 6. Ireland After the Celtic Tiger: A Study in Social Injustice Vittorio Bufacchi Part III: Nation-Building and Post/Coloniality: Ireland North and South7. Civil Society and Nonviolent Political Action in Northern IrelandIain Atack and Dong Jim Kim 8. Is Irish Reunification Republican?Adam Fusco 9. Irish Republican Masculinities: The Politics of HumiliationDianna Taylor Part IV: Irish Cultural Imaginaries: Dislocation, Diaspora, and Home10. Coast-Modernism, Wittgenstein, Primitivism, and the West of IrelandLuke Gibbons 11. Exile, Dislocation, and Home Spaces: Irish NarrativesDanielle Petherbridge Part V: Language, Identity, and Erasure 12. Racisms, Identity, and Anti-Racist Learner-CitizenshipKarl Kitching13. Who’s Afraid of the Irish Language? The National-Philosophical Possibilities of a Lost TongueLisa Foran