UCD School of Philosophy

Since 1989, I have been Professor of Philosophy, holding the statutory Chair of Philosophy (Metaphysics and Logic) at University College Dublin. In 2003, I was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. I have held visiting Professorships at various universities in the USA, including at Yale University (1986-1987), Connecticut College (1992-1993), Rice University (Fall 2003 and Spring 2006), and Northwestern University (2007). I have also been a Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Summer 2010) and Adjunct Professor in Murdoch University, Perth, Australia.

Personal Details and Academic Training

I was born in Stillorgan, County Dublin, Ireland, and educated at Oatlands College Primary and Secondary Schools, Mount Merrion, County Dublin. I completed my Leaving Certificate Examination in June 1970, and was awarded the Easter Week 1916 Commemorative Scholarship by the Department of Education for university study. I also received the Institute of Chemists of Ireland Gold Medal for Chemistry. I entered University College Dublin on a UCD Entrance Scholarship in Autumn 1970 to read English, French and Philosophy (1970-1973), graduating with a Double First Class Honours BA Degree in English and Philosophy in 1973.

I then received the Yale University Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis Graduate Scholarship, which enabled me to pursue graduate studies in Philosophy at Yale University. I entered Yale University Graduate School in Fall 1973 and graduated with MA (1974) in Philosophy, followed by MPhil in Philosophy (1976) and, finally, the PhD (1986) degree in Philosophy. My dissertation supervisor was Professor Karsten Harries and my thesis was entitled 'Nature and Mind in the Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena' (a substantially revised version was subsequently published as a monograph by Cambridge University Press as The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages, in 1989, reprinted 2004).

While at Yale as a graduate student (from 1974-1978) I regularly served as a Teaching Assistant in Philosophy and also taught a College Seminar on James Joyce at Ezra Stiles College (Fall 1976). I was Teaching Assistant for Professor George Schrader ('Persons, Roles and Social Structures', 1974 and 'Political Philosophy', 1977); Karsten Harries ('Philosophy of Existence', 1975); Edward S. Casey ('Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis', 1976); Harry Frankfurt ('Introduction to Modern Philosophy', 1976) and Robert S. Brumbaugh ('Ethics of Classical Greece', 'Philosophy of Space and Time', 1978). As Instructor, I also taught at College Seminar on James Joyce in 1976 at Ezra Stiles College.

Professional Career
In 1979 I returned to Ireland and was appointed to a full-time Lectureship in the Department of Scholastic Philosophy at Queen's University Belfast (1979-82) working under the late Professor James J. McEvoy MRIA in medieval philosophy and also teaching Contemporary European philosophy. I then moved in 1982 to a tenured lecturership in Philosophy at St Patrick's College, Maynooth, then a Recognized College of the National University of Ireland (1982-1989), now NUIM. Since 1989, I have been Professor of Philosophy (holding the NUI Statutory Professorship of Philosophy, Chair of Philosophy (Metaphysics and Logic) at University College Dublin.

I have served as Head of the Department of Philosophy at UCD for three terms (between 1989 to 2001). I am currently an elected member (elected by the Professoriate) of the UCD Governing Authority (2009-2014) and a member of the UCD Academic Council, the UCD Research Ethics Committee, the University Committee on Honorary Degrees, and the Committee of Professors Involved in Mentoring. I also serve on the National University of Ireland Committee on Degrees on Published Work. I am Chairperson of the REC Working Group on Regenerative Medicine examining the ethical and legal issues surrounding the use of human embryonic stem cells in research.

Contribution to the Profession
I have been a member of the Irish Philosophical Society (IPS) since 1979, and I have served as a member of the Executive, as well as Treasurer (1983-6) and Secretary (1986-9, 1999 - 2001). I have also served as Chairperson of the Royal Irish Academy National Committee for Philosophy (1992-1995), President of the Mind Association (1996-1997), Vice-President of the Mind Assocation (1997-1998). I am a Member of the American Philosophical Association, the British Society for Phenomenology, the Hegel Society of Great Britain, the Association of Philosophy Journal Editors, the Society for the Promotion of Eriugena Studies (SPES). I am a founder Member of the Kant Society, UK, and Patron and Founding Member of the Eckhart Society (UK). I was elected a Member of the Husserl Circle in 2000. I have been a Fellow of Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology (CARP) and am now, since 2008, a member of the Board of Directors of CARP. In 2003 I was elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

I have a long standing involvement with the International Federation of Philosophy Societies (Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie --FISP). I have been an elected Member of the Steering Committee (Comité Directeur--CD), Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie (FISP) since 2003 (for the period 2003-2008; re-elected for the period 2008-2013). In April 2009, I was elected President of the Programme Committee for the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy scheduled for Athens in 2013. I am, since 1993, Founding Editor of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies and Co-editor of the Contributions to Phenomenology book series, Springer publishers (2007 - ).

Academic Research

My research is primarily situated in three main areas: Contemporary European Philosophy, specifically phenomenology (see my Introduction to Phenomenology, Routledge 2000, and Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology, Polity 2005); the History of Philosophy, especially the interrelations between analytic and Continental approaches in twentieth-century philosophy (see my Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy, Routledge 2008); and Medieval Philosophy (see my The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena 1989, and Eriugena, Berkeley, and the Idealist Tradition, University of Notre Press, 2006). I am particularly interested in the Neoplatonic tradition as well as in the evolution of the idealist tradition.

My current research focuses on specific philosophical problems from a phenomenological perspective, including the understanding of conscious experience, intentionality, perception, lived embodiment, and the understanding of other persons (through empathy or mind-reading).

Funded Research Projects
In 2008 I was awarded an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Development Initiative (RDI) award for a project on The Phenomenology of Consciousness and Subjectivity (2008-2010). This project aims to construct a considered, robust and reasoned defence of the phenomenological approach against theoretical challenges and criticisms that emerge from contemporary more naturalistic approaches of the mind, consciousness and subjectivity, criticisms that often dismiss phenomenological findings as 'merely' subjective, introspective (hence unreliable) and not amenable to objective assessment or lawful generalisation. An informed theoretical clarification of phenomenology will potentially have a significant impact in the human sciences where theoretical concepts clustered around subjectivity, consciousness, and embodied selfhood are regularly deployed. As part of that research project, I have organised a number of workshops and international conferences at the Royal Irish Academy on issues concerning embodiment, subjectivity, intentionality and empathy. I am also interested in exploring the relationships between philosophy and other disciplines, including literature, psychology and the health sciences (e.g. I am currently participating in an interdisciplinary research project seeking to understand the meaning of human well being).

I am currently one of the co-investigators in the ARC funded project on Judgement, Responsibility and the Life-world: The Phenomenological Critique of Formalism (2010-2012) focusing primarily on Husserl, Heidegger and Patocka, together with co-investigators, Dr Lubica Učník (Murdoch, Australia) and Professor Ivan Chvatík (Prague). This international collaborative project investigates the role of responsibility and judgment in knowledge formation. Building on the work of the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Jan Patočka, the project will investigate the limits of formalist approaches to knowledge, arguing that such formalism depends on a problematic separation of knowledge-production from the life-world in which it is necessarily placed. The project will provide new insight into the work of Husserl and Patočka, while also bringing their concepts to bear on a range of contemporary questions concerning knowledge and its wider cultural and socio-political context.
This project aims to contribute to building Australia's capacity in the area of phenomenology & connecting Australian researchers into the international network of phenomenology research. More generally the project will contribute to the broader community debate that is currently emerging around issues of the role & limits of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, but also knowledge as it arises and is applied in organisational and social contexts, & the importance of responsibility and judgment even in areas of technical problem-solving & decision-making. In this latter respect, the project is likely to have an impact in more directly applied areas such as policy formation & decision-making across many different areas.

I am currently involed in developing a large-scale research project on the nature of the person. The issue of personhood is central not only to the moral and legal sciences, but to philosophy of mind, ethics and metaphysics. What kind of entity is a person? Who count as persons? Can personhood be diminished or lost (e.g. in advanced dementia or neurological dysfunction)? In law, persons are deserving of dignity, respect and protection. Personhood is fundamental to the health and human sciences. Persons matter. Persons are highly complex entities. Yet no agreed cross-disciplinary theoretical account of personhood exists. Defining personhood is a field-defining challenge with enormous potential impact. Objectivist scientific approaches have typically avoided persons; the social and cognitive neurosciences, psychology and philosophy concentrate on modular, compartmentalised components of cognition (e.g. perception, memory, emotion) and consciousness not personhood. Psychology has much to say about personality rather than persons. Indeed, some influential theories explicitly deny the existence of persons altogether or reduce their status, e.g. to something like a function or role, an honorific title attributed to certain (not all) human beings and some animals (like membership of a club). A recent ontological theory characterizes persons as vaguely bounded collections ("swarms") of temporal parts, downplaying their first-personhood. A comprehensive, integrative account of persons is urgently required that accurately characterizes their ontological status and significance and provides a robust basis for defending their dignity and integrity. Standard accounts of personhood accord dignity and respect to persons based on traits such as self-consciousness, rationality, capacity to represent reasons or capacity for autonomous agency. Some accounts focus on what constitutes personal identity over time (e.g. psychological continuity through memory). More promising approaches understand persons as possessors of second-order representations (e.g. desiring to curb a desire); or describe persons as narrators unifying their experiences as if in a story. Each account harbours particular problems and is at best partial.

I am currently planning a research project that hypothesises that persons are irreducible, complex, multi-layered, developmental, yet fragile meaning-makers whose lives that are significant for them. This radical approach opens new horizons by drawing on phenomenological insights--the description of lived experiences as experienced--to articulate a far-reaching and novel conception of persons as embodied meaning-makers with first-person and second-person perspectives, who developmentally constitute a shared world of intentional significance. To be a person is minimally to be embodied self, for whom things matter, with a deep affective emotional core; with a specific evolving sense of a personal past and future, living a life that is meaningful for that person. Optimally, persons are fully conscious, self-reflective 'meta-representational' rational agents recognizing each other and acting autonomously but those with diminished capacity (and, controversially, some animals) are also persons in virtue of living lives of sentient intentional meaning-making. Reason-representing conscious agency is the ideal--but not the only--form of personhood. This project proposes a radically new theory of personhood, one that fundamentally challenges contemporary orthodoxies and that has ground-breaking implications for the recognition, estimation and treatment of persons in society.