Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Ireland Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy Series

This is the first book to bring a philosophical lens to issues of socio-political and cultural importance in twenty-first century Ireland. While the social, political, and economic landscape of contemporary Ireland has inspired extensive scholarly debate both within and well beyond the field of Irish Studies, there is a distinct lack of philosophical voices in these discussions. The aim of this volume is to enrich the fields of Philosophy and Irish Studies by encouraging a manifestly philosophical exploration of contemporary issues and concerns.

The essays in this volume collectively address diverse philosophical questions on contemporary Ireland by exploring a variety of themes, including: diaspora, exile, return; women?s bodies and autonomy; historic injustices and national healing; remembering and commemoration; institutionalization and containment; colonialism and Ireland as "home"; conflict and violence; Northern Ireland and the peace process; nationalism, patriotism, and masculinities; ethnicity, immigration, and identity; and translation, art and culture.

Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Ireland marks a significant contribution to contemporary theorizations of Ireland by incorporating both Irish and transatlantic perspectives. It will appeal to a broad audience of scholars and advanced students working in philosophy, Irish Studies, feminist theory, history, legal studies, and literary theory. Beyond academia, it will also engage those interested in contemporary Ireland from policy and civil society perspectives.

Introduction

1. Crossing Ireland’s Boundaries, Real and Imagined

Áine Mahon and Clara Fischer

Part I: Memory, Trauma, and Recovery

2. The Risk of Hospitality: Exchanging Stories Changing History

Richard Kearney

3. ‘In the frail way that people assemble themselves’: Feeling Shame about Tuam

Kathleen Lennon

Part II: Citizenship, Injustice, and the Law

4. ‘Take me to Church’: Sexual Citizenship and Spatial Justice in Ireland

Aideen Quilty

5. State Shame, Sovereignty, and Legal Responses to Historical Institutional Abuse

Sinéad 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 South

7. Civil Society and Nonviolent Political Action in Northern Ireland

Iain Atack and Dong Jim Kim

8. Is Irish Reunification Republican?

Adam Fusco

9. Irish Republican Masculinities: The Politics of Humiliation

Dianna Taylor

Part IV: Irish Cultural Imaginaries: Dislocation, Diaspora, and Home

10. Coast-Modernism, Wittgenstein, Primitivism, and the West of Ireland

Luke Gibbons

11. Exile, Dislocation, and Home Spaces: Irish Narratives

Danielle Petherbridge

Part V: Language, Identity, and Erasure

12. Racisms, Identity, and Anti-Racist Learner-Citizenship

Karl Kitching

13. Who’s Afraid of the Irish Language? The National-Philosophical Possibilities of a Lost Tongue

Lisa Foran

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).