The oddest reference in the title for this address to the Metafizz is the term “Dubliner”.  And yet it is probably the key word through which to launch a talk that is meant to review 60 years of my life from an angle that I hope may be both interesting and entertaining for anyone with an interest in philosophy.

I was born in Dublin on 5 May, 1939, the first of two sons parented by a solicitor and his younger wife, both members of the Church of Ireland.  My father had come south from an Orange family in Co. Antrim to qualify as a solicitor through the apprenticeship scheme under the authority of the Incorporated Law Society.  He was very active as a member of a Masonic Lodge in Dublin  My mother had a good secondary education and was respected as a first class secretary and clerk.  At the time of her marriage she was a clerk in the Register Office of Guinness.  It seems to have been assumed that both myself and my brother, four years my junior, would go to university at TCD.  My father died in 1946 when I was seven.

The point of this initial family picture is to give some key elements of context.  First, the city and state into which I was born was deeply sectarian.  Most schools were rooted in a particular religious denomination and relations between Catholics and Protestants were strained by an awareness of difference, illustrated, for example, by the practical consequences of instructions forbidding Catholics to enter Protestant churches or to become students at TCD.  An even stronger Vatican decree called “Ne  Temere” demanded that any “mixed marriage” couple, say of a Church of Ireland male to a Roman Catholic female, could only be acceptable to the Roman Catholic Church  if the couple had declared beforehand that any children of the marriage would be baptised and brought up as Roman Catholics.

The reality of this sectarianism may seem particularly ridiculous to an audience of largely young people, many of whom may have campaigned actively in last year’s historic marriage equality referendum. The practical implications of Ne Temere were still obstacles to be dealt with when I married a Roman Catholic in 1967.

By all accounts I won early recognition as a bright boy, particularly as a good reader and clear speaker from my early kindergarten days to my years as a scholarship holder at St. Andrew’s College, Dublin, a Presbyterian foundation, I believe I probably never heard, and certainly never understood, the word philosophy until becoming  a fifth-former in 1956.

Of course I had acquired some awareness of the conceptual basis of Christianity and its social and political importance over centuries from classes in scripture and European history at school and my preparation for confirmation into membership of the Church of Ireland.  There were some hiccups along the way. I was thrown out of scripture class for a term for insisting that  a course on the 39 Articles would be more likely to help towards an understanding of faith and doctrine than looking at the liturgy for Morning Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer. Later I had to wrestle with the acceptance of a belief in God  prior to my confirmation.  Needless to say I was very interested to note at a meeting of the Metafizz a couple of years back that, when Professor Berman began by asking for a show of hands as to whether anyone present believed in God, I didn’t see a single hand raised..

In my time in the Irish secondary education system, then, as now, there was no philosophy course available.  Happily today it looks as if a specification for a junior cycle short course in philosophy may be about to be published.  The person who brought philosophy into my fifth-form classroom at St. Andrews was an extraordinary character known to the boys as “Buster” O’Neill.

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Buster had arrived to teach Latin, a subject of little interest to my class.  He was a poor teacher, probably an ex-seminarian, and looked and sounded rather exotic.  He lived in Howth, where he had a motor boat, and arrived in Ballsbridge every day on a small motor scooter.  His odd garb was dominated by big leather seaman’s boots extending from the trousers of a double-breasted pin-stripe suit, several sizes too large, but probably necessary because of the knitted navy roll-neck sweater he wore under the jacket.

On most days Buster seemed even less interested in Latin than we were and he was easily distracted.  We quickly discovered that the best way to distract him was to ask “What are you reading , Sir?”  This was a reference to the large tomes he always carried in his suit pockets.  These had titles like “Cosmology” and “Epistemology” and my guess is that they belonged to a basic course in Thomist philosophy.  I cannot really speak for any other member of that fifth form , but I found Buster’s excursions into questions emerging from the contents of his pockets quite enthralling.  I particularly remember the morning he looked at us and asked in his unusually querulous accent: “Has a dog got a soul?”

Less than half the class was headed for university and the school’s guidance as to how to get into Trinity seemed a muddle.  Hardly anyone seemed to have a clear route towards what was called Matriculation.  Most of us had a mixture of Inter and Leaving Cert subjects and UK O and A-level certificates.  Gaps on the way to matriculation could be taken through Trinity Entrance exams and I think my admission was achieved in the end by my taking Trinity entrance in both of my worst subjects, Irish and Latin.  Biology was not taught at St. Andrews but outside grinds from a well-known tutor called Michael Kenny added that subject to my Trinity list.  Years later, when reviewing Michael Kenny’s book on Evolution in the Teach Yourself series for a small  Dublin magazine with a Protestant ethos called Focus, I learned  that he had been a Trinity Scholar in Mental and Moral Science.

Preparing to start in Trinity in October 1957, the big question was what to take as an Honor Degree course.  When I acquired for myself a list of the courses available my first decision was to avoid Legal Science because the practice of law was said to have killed my father.  History and Political Science seemed too boring for words, and my knowledge of Science, Classics and Languages seemed to me to fall short of what I felt would be required of a first-year student.  Then I saw there was a course called Mental and Moral Science, that sounded every bit as interesting as Buster’s questions, but how was I to find out more about it?

Happily one of the boys in my class, still a close friend, who desperately wanted to become an airline pilot and achieved his goal, realised he had a friend who was in his first year at Trinity doing Mental and Moral Science.  Having coffee in town was then all the rage for fifth and sixth formers with a sense of sophistication so my friend Bob Tweedy arranged that we would have coffee with his Freshman pal, Peter Thomas, in what was then Switzer’s downstairs restaurant on Grafton Street.

Peter told me that most of his class – as he was – were destined for ordination into the Church of Ireland.  Like me he knew little of philosophy in advance of the first Freshman lecture.  He said Mental and Moral Science was an old course title in the Oxbridge tradition.  He immediately found the course quite interesting and was particularly pleased to find that it seemed easy to pass the early exams.  Thanks to this reassuring assessment my decision to study philosophy was quickly made.  I could tell from my mother’s reaction that she felt rather disappointed and wondered what sort of career the course might prepare me for – apart from becoming a clergyman.

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My study of TCD courses at that time had revealed that there was a two-year part-time evening course leading to a Diploma in Public Administration.  I decided to undertake that course in parallel with my Freshman Years as a gesture towards reassuring my mother that I had career prospects as I joined the evening ranks of ambitious young civil servants and lawyers.

How did things go on my first day as a Junior Freshman? The main philosophy lecture room and general HQ of the department was a first floor room in No. 4 Front Square.  That was where the Metaphysical Society met, usually on Tuesday afternoons during term, and the Metaphysical Society Library was housed in a locked cupboard-like room to the right of the redundant fireplace.  I seem to remember a blackboard and rows of wooden benches with a reading desk in front.  I had decided to make and keep my notes in the basic style exercise books I had used at school, and which remains one of my favourite notebook formats.  Perhaps I should stress that in preparing this address I have relied entirely on recollection and make no claim that names or dates have been checked.  Contrary to what should be proper philosophy practice, this talk may be full of errors because I have made no attempt to verify what may certainly be verifiable facts.

I now propose introducing you to my dramatis personae in the context of the Mental and Moral degree course 1957-1961.

I think there were ten men and three women in the class.  In that 13 were six likely candidates for ordination in the Church of Ireland.  On the basis of the first term and examinations, where I was delighted to find myself top of the class, a friendly rivalry developed on almost all fronts between five males, including another Dubliner like myself.  Hugh Glanville, who appeared to have some previous understanding of philosophy,  and also appeared to be on special terms with Professor E. J. Furlong, Head of the Philosophy School.  Hallam Johnston and T. H. (Jack) Daniels had come from rural Protestant schools, Bandon Grammar School and Kilkenny College, and both,  like myself, turned out to be prizewinning debaters.  They had joined  the Phil and I had joined the Hist.  The fifth competitor was Mike Leahy, although elfin in appearance, he was older and more worldly-wise as he had come to Trinity on completion of his National Service, which had included service in Kenya.  He came complete with a very plummy accent and one of those stylishly silent Ariel motor bikes, complete with hand and leg protectors and saddle bags.  I believe now deceased, I think he was the only member of the class to make it into a career as a professional philosopher, eventually on the staff of the University of Kent at Canterbury. 

Another potential cleric, John Nicholson, was also English, and we had another very exotic male from South Africa, called Archie Ablett..  He appeared to take no interest in the course and rarely attended lectures.  He led us to understand that he had women friends in Dublin and I believe played the clarinet in a jazz band at the Green Lounge on St. Stephen’s Green, an establishment with a rather seedy reputation.  I remember particularly his advice that the highest attainable sexual experience was to ride a motorcycle in the nude across the veldt.

Two of the three women in the class were also older than the rest of us who had just emerged from Irish secondary schools and had rather distinctive experiences.  Eliza, an American, whose family name I forget, shared an exciting apartment on the canal at Percy Place, where lively parties were held.  She was a heavy smoker and I remember her as the first woman I had ever come across with the heady perfume of tobacco.  Frances-Jane ffrench had inherited from her parents a Leeson Street terrace house and was looked after by a housekeeper.

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She was already an established political/literary figure in Trinity, and indeed in Dublin.  She was said to have already failed two degrees but had become the Chairman and Trustee of Trinity News and was something of a pamphleteer with influential friends and contacts, including Sean MacBride.

Who were the dramatis personae confronting us as teachers?

The Professor and head of Department was E. J. Furlong.  He and his family lived in Dalkey, as I did, and were regulars in the congregation of St. Patrick’s Church of Ireland.  He had a reputation for eccentricity and used his car as his study.  He was often spotted parked at nearby Bulloch Harbour poring over books in the back seat.  In his university role he was clearly very conscientious and hard-working.  He had published monographs on Dreams and on Memory and over the years was editor of Hermathena and of the College Calendar.  When I was an undergraduate the university was relatively small with a population of between 1,000 and 2,000.  At that time most senior staff took on administrative tasks that would now be the responsibility of professional administrators.  Professor Furlong’s main commitment seemed to be to uphold the historic reputation of George Berkeley and his philosophy as a most notable part of the College’s heritage.

The Reverend Dr. A. A. Luce held a personal Chair as Professor of Metaphysics and was also an exponent of Berkeley’s immaterialism.  He was a tall elderly figure without a hair on his head and had his own lecture room.  He had a somewhat spiky reputation and it was often noted that the qualifications noted on his publications always began with MC, the Military Cross he had won in the 1914-18 war.  There have been suggestions this year that it was he who ensured Trinity’s gates were locked at the first signs of the 1916 rising.  His scholarly reputation rested on his role as an editor of the collected edition of Berkeley’s work.  In a separate facsimile edition of Berkeley’s Commonplace Book he appeared to have cracked the code Berkeley used to categorise his thoughts on an ongoing daily basis.  A. A. Luce was also an enthusiastic angler and the author of a book, Thinking and Fishing.

Another cathedral canon attached to the Philosophy Department was Dr. R. R Hartford, who taught traditional logic, and was said to harbour the ambition to become a bishop.  Mr. C. A. Meredith from the Mathematics Department gave a course in symbolic logic.

J. V. Luce, a son of A. A’s, who was a Lecturer in the Classics Department, taught Plato and Aristotle to Mental and Moral students.  He also had a long career as the College Orator, preparing the Latin orations delivered at  ceremonies to mark the conferring of Honorary Degrees.

Another Senior Fellow of the A. A. Luce vintage, also with his own lecture room and holding the College Post of Senior Lecturer, was Frank La Touche Godfrey.  A permanently waist-coated rotund figure, he taught the History of Philosophy.  He obviously was a survivor from the time when the Philosophy Department had been Hegelian in orientation under a Professor McCrann.  His presentation  of history stuck strictly to that approach.

The main work-horse of the department under Furlong, was Mr. R.V. Denard, who was also my Tutor.  His special responsibility was the teaching of Psychology.  I believe both he and E. J. Furlong had taken Mental and Moral science in Trinity as their primary degrees.  R. V. Denard is now over 90 and I meet him at College and other events from time to time.  We had a chat recently at a performance of one of William Lyons’s plays in UCD and his critical faculties remain acute.

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The Philosophy Department received a new Junior Lecturer in the middle of our degree course.  Gershon Weiler was a bearded Eastern European and his arrival felt like an exciting breath of fresh air, not least because he was accompanied by his beautiful Pakistani wife.  Oxford had just introduced a new B.Phil course in Philosophy and apparently Gershon Weiler was one of its first graduates.

Now that you have met all the people, I hope to give a summary account of my developing encounter with philosophy through my interrelationships with these characters over the four-year degree course.  A feature of all degree courses in Trinity at that time was that every undergraduate had to pass a test called Littlego.  This was in effect a three-subject examination said to be at the level of the Senior Freshman pass arts courses.  Most of us reckoned the thing to do was to take the examinations as quickly as possible in the hope that we could get through on the strength of what we had learnt at school.  Apparently Littlego could be taken any number of times and I was delighted to get through first time, taking, I believe, English, French and Geography.

The first teaching day of the degree course was led by Professor Furlong.  He suggested that the best way to approach philosophy was through the study of philosophers and what they had to say historically, stressing the importance of journal articles where contemporary philosophers were concerned.  Although, of course, most of us would be dependent on translation in many cases, he said one should always start from available original texts and not rely on books purporting to summarise or explain the work of different philosophers.  He introduced Bertrand Russell’s Problems of Philosophy as an accessible example of thinking philosophically and said one could take different approaches to philosophy from the biographical to the critical.  

Explaining  the structure of the four-year course, Furlong presented the first year emphasis on psychology and logic as providing us with essential background tools.  The history of philosophy would give us context for the focus on groups of thinkers in the terms ahead:  Plato and Aristotle; Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza; Locke, Berkeley and Hume; Kant and Hegel.  Contemporary critical philosophy would be focused through terms on topics like ethics, perception, and the theory of knowledge.  He encouraged us to use the Metaphysical Society Library as well as the College Library and to remember that the reading list we were given ranged more widely than the ground to be covered in lectures.  Going to meetings of the Metaphysical Society and the occasional guest lecture would help to widen our horizons and give us opportunities to meet the philosophy students from the Senior Freshman, Junior Sophister and Senior Sophister years.  I can’t remember whether it was at that introductory session or later he told us we would have a special course from a visiting Professor from Penn State University who would lecture on American philosophers like James, Peirce and Royce.

And so we were launched and began to engage with the varied styles and approaches of our lecturers.  Canon Hartford and Vincent Denard simply followed the text of set books.  H. W. Joseph’s Introduction to Logic and an Introduction to Psychology by Woodworth and Marquis.  Godfrey’s history of philosophy had no set text but I became a fan of Copleston’s History of Philosophy, a multi-volume work on the way to completion.  From time to time bodies like UCD and the Royal College of Surgeons offered public lectures of clear interest to our studies and among prominent voices I would hear were Copleston, Maritain, and Sir Richard Braine.  I guessed that the best route towards achieving high marks in courses that seemed tied to set books would be to become very familiar with those texts.

The course in symbolic logic offered a completely different approach and seemed chaotic and radical.  This was entirely due to the personality and enthusiasms of H. C. Meredith the visiting lecturer from the Mathematics Department.

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Imagine that first-year class of innocents who had never heard of mathematical or symbolic logic but somehow guessed that it must be new and important territory.  Suddenly our world was invaded by an eccentric totally dedicated to chalk and the blackboard, covering it every day with masses of lines looking like algebraic equations and talking about names and problems reaching beyond the frontiers established by names that were completely new to us like Boole, Russell and Whitehead, Hilbert, Carnap, Tarski, Lukaseivwic and others.  He handed out occasional photocopied articles from publications with titles like the American Journal of Business Machines.

A memorable early experience was when he arrived early to scribble five propositions on the board in some complex notation.  “Hilbert has five axioms,” he told us, “I believe I can reduce them to three.”  He looked at the board quizzically with a chalky finger on his nose oblivious to the fact that all that must be completely incomprehensible to a Junior Freshman Philosophy class.  His course was very stimulating nevertheless as thanks to a small book by Basson and O’Connor called An Introduction to Symbolic Logic I began to grasp what it was all about and its importance.  Boole, from Cork, had found a way of expressing logical propositions through concepts like Yes and No, Either and Or.  This facilitated the treatment of data by the business machines that were the precursors of today’s computers.  In Principia Mathematica Russell and Whitehead had developed a new notation to bring together the extraordinary powers of logic and mathematics.  Meredith was a personal friend of Lukaseivwic, a Polish refugee at Dublin’s Institute of Advanced Studies, who was revisiting Aristotle’s Syllogistic to re-state it in terms of the latest logic and mathematics.  As Lukasievwic had no access to a typewriter with the necessary symbols he was forced to devise yet another notation.  Despite all these difficulties and obscurities I felt I learnt just enough to cope first with the ideas of Leibniz and later to grasp some of the early Wittgenstein.  In wider terms, it gave me an early insight into the coming importance of new information technology.

In the exams at the end of the first term I was very happy to be top of the list and I think got a prize in the form of a cheque for book purchasing of which I had been completely unaware.  Thanks to my mother’s backing I had already embarked on a policy of buying as many course-related books as I possibly could.  The collection I amassed during the four degree years followed me into my adult life of career and marriage and eventually became the core of my donation to what is now the Metafizz Library.  The story of that gift and my life-long purchasing of philosophy texts comes later.

Two incidents from our class’s contact with A. A. Luce and J. V. Luce seem worth recording.  Hugh Glanville suddenly interrupted an A. A. Luce to observe, “But that’s a circular argument, Professor”.  Luce looked startled for a moment, then stretched back to draw a large circle with his hand.  “But, Glanville, “ he replied, “If the circle is big enough you can fit in everything.”  I was the victim when in another class J. V. Luce was presenting a logical dilemma presented by Socrates in one of Plato’s dialogues.  Believing it to be a problem about the treatment of empty classes recently resolved by Bertrand Russell through his Theory of Individuals, I spoke up to point this out.  “Keery, how can you mention Bertrand Russell and Plato in the same breath?” I was asked.

To become a Scholar of the College was to win great undergraduate prestige and came with a salary, the right to free rooms and commons and the further opportunity to earn something more by becoming a waiter on commons, the traditional terminology for being called on to say College’s Latin grace before and after commons.  I began to prepare very seriously for the Scholarship examinations, which in Mental and Moral Science meant taking the spring Senior Freshman examinations and additional papers on three designated works.

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For the 1959 exam, which would of course include an extern-examiner  among the markers, that meant Stuart Hampshire’s Thought and Action, A. D. Woozley, Theory of Knowledge: An Introduction, and Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous.  I hoped my approach to mastering these texts in the way I had worked on the earlier psychology and logic texts would be the best I could do.  Given the Luce-type incidents, and a sense that I should do everything possible to keep on the right side of Furlong,  I resolved to say nothing in any reply to a scholarship question that might be read as scepticism about the wisdom of Bishop Berkeley.  Writing about the Three Dialogues tested this resolve to the limit as I saw that the Bishop’s answer to the problem unseen objects raised for his principle of Esse est Percipi was that happily God is always there to keep an eye on things – very handy, but unlikely to win universal acceptance.

Come Trinity Monday, when I joined the nervous crowd of candidates, I was of course over the moon to hear that I had been elected a Scholar in Mental and Moral Science.  Almost everyone in the crowd was stunned to hear that two further Mental and Moral Scholars had been elected – a very rare achievement.  I had no idea whether it had happened before or has happened since.  Apparently I had come top in the exams and Hugh Glanville and Hallam Johnston had tied ex-aequo for second place.  I still wonder if Hallam and I have to thank our lucky stars for the way the exams had transpired for Hugh.

There followed a summer of great promise.  I had my Scholar’s gown to wear in Hist debates, I had a great set of rooms in the Rubrics and on our occasional gatherings I really enjoyed meeting all the Scholars of the House who were still undergraduates   I knew three of the women scholars particularly well  and still value their long-standing friendships.  Life would have been perfect if entering the third year could also have been the final year. For all sorts of reasons, and today I will only mention those that were directly philosophy related, I believe a four-year course was too long for me at that time.  My focus had begun to drift, I seemed to lose energy, and the reality of life’s big questions loomed larger and larger as I prepared for my crucial final year of philosophy studies.

The contrast between the staff approach to Kant and Hegel could not have been more extreme.  Gershon Weiler engaged us in trying to understand what Kant was saying.  He deployed his knowledge of German and other languages in seeking to show how much Kant’s ethics and aesthetics were not adequately explained by the translations at our disposal.  Looking back, I feel I only came to fully understand his exposition of Kant’s Critique of Judgement the year after graduation.  Weiler’s explanation of the role of accident and of what he called “purposiveness without purpose” gave me insights that have been invaluable to me as an amateur painter and art critic.  Frank Godfrey on Hegel had a completely different dogmatic approach.  Hegel’s understanding of the Absolute through the thought process of Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis was presented as a brilliant insight that could be counted on to explain everything.  We were told that Hegel’s thought had been faithfully captured in Stace’s book on his philosophy and that the schematic three fold-out pages at the back of the book could be relied on to answer whatever questions we might have.  The route to high marks on Hegel was thus clearly signposted. Unfortunately I found Hegel of little interest and Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy had shown me clearly that Hegel’s decision to treat as philosophical dark ages the period between classical Greek thought and Descartes was indefensible.  It meant overlooking the contributions of Jewish and Islamic thinkers and, as I have learnt over the years since, there is much of great interest and value in the writings of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Acquinas, for example.  Funnily enough, there will be other references to Russell ahead.  The impact of his history was a major factor in his being awarded a Nobel Prize for literature.

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As the course advanced, apart from the focus on individual historic thinkers, we began to be offered series of lectures on broad themes like ethics, perception and the theory of knowledge.  Professor Furlong led many of these thematic reflections himself and I became more and more uncomfortable in some of these lectures as I began to develop views of my own which questioned some of his positions.  After my election as a Scholar I had also accepted election as Auditor of the Metaphysical Society without realising the time that that would involve – particularly because of the expectation that I would present a paper to the Society during my year of office.

It often seemed very difficult to separate reflection on perception from theory of knowledge.  Obviously a Berkeleyian approach was sympathetic to what was said to be the common sense position of G. E. Moore.  The latest major study we had to deal with was Perception by H. H. Price.  A debate seemed to rage as to whether or not sense data had a reality of their own. I found myself becoming interested in seeing how popular notions of perception related to increasing scientific knowledge about the brain and the physical working of the sensory process.  A book by Thouless on the psychology module for the Diploma in Public Administration suggested that perception told us about the end-organ stimulated and Bertrand Russell was looking at ideas like this in his Analysis of Mind.  To Professor Furlong such thinking was “representationalism”, the insertion of an unnecessary image between each individual and the reality in front of us.  I was quite shocked when one day in class one of my questions was dismissed with some vehemence.  “Keery, you are only a representationalist”, I was told, as if this was a fate worse than death.

In theory of knowledge, Gilbert Ryle’s, The Concept of Mind was very fashionable at the time.  It seemed to represent Oxford philosophy when the really powerful new voices were Cambridge based.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, the strongest philosophical voice of the 20^th Century had come to teach there and his lectures were building up a strong school of followers, again I will have more to say later.

I enjoyed our classes in ethics although I had a distinct impression that it was oriented towards the needs of those in the class who might some day have to deliver sermons on right and wrong and the place of evil in the world.  C. D. Broad’s summary work on Five Types of Ethical Theory greatly impressed me.  I still consider Aristotle’s Nichomathean Ethics as good a guide to life and behaviour as there is.  Moore’s Principia Ethica was treated as important – and I will have more to say about it in a postgraduate context – and focused on the meaning of good, in competition with writers stressing the importance of the concepts of duty, rights and responsibilities.  Reading more widely I found Stephen Toulmin’s Ethics in Relation to Conduct particularly valuable as it seemed to offer useful material for current political debates.

These courses took their place in the Junior and Senior Sophister years leading up to graduation.  Facing a personal challenge as to try to become Auditor of the Hist or to work towards a First Class Honours degree I decided to take the latter option.  For a large part of final degree marking there was a choice between writing a dissertation or covering all the ground through examinations.  Given my views of some of the department staff and dislike of the dissertation topics, I decided to go the exam route.  It was too late to change tack when I realised I was still doing too much debating and found that my preparation for the final exams was being totally shaped  by the influence of a book by David Pole called The Later Philosophy of Wittgenstein.  In essay after essay and in every exam question I found I was seeking the answer in the meaning of words.  In the end, exhausted and bored to death, I felt fortunate to get a 2.2 Degree and to be headed for a job I had at last secured through what were called the milk round visits of UK firms to the Careers and Appointments Office. 

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There had been other ups and downs in my final two years.  It was extraordinary to find myself the only Irish finalist in the then Observer Mace university debating competition.  And I had managed to deliver my auditorial paper to the Metaphysical Society even if it did not turn out as I had hoped.  I had written a paper on Wittgenstein with a view to conveying to an audience beyond philosophy students that here was a thinker of stature to be aware of. Even with a certain amount of promotion and a distinguished guest speaker that turned out to be a vain hope.  I had found J. G. Von Wright’s Memoir of Wittgenstein an enchanting book and had made with John Nicholson a pilgrimage to the cottage described there where Wittgenstein had worked for some time – it had become a youth hostel – at the side of Killary harbour in Connemara.  The owners of the cottage had been the Drury family and R.

O’C. Drury had become a friend of Wittgenstein’s when attending his lectures in Cambridge.  I found out that he had then taken Wittgenstein’s advice not to teach philosophy and had become a psychiatrist, who was then doing some lecturing in TCD’s Medical School.  While struggling to complete my paper I managed to contact him and fix a date when he would be free to attend the Metaphysical Society presentation of the paper.  I never quite understood why nothing really seemed to work on the day, with Dr. Drury having very little to say.

At this stage it seems ridiculous that I have only covered four of the five years of my sixty year encounter with philosophy.  Happily, I found the Mental and Moral course turned out to be a great general education and still sustains my interest in philosophy and is a constant source of stimulation and pleasure.  My idea now is to give as quickly as I can some examples of how much of my life turns around this interest, concluding with a reading of a couple of poems relating to philosophical ideas which should appear later this year in my third verse collection.

From my first job with Westminster Press Provincial Newspapers as a journalist in the North of England, to my return to Ireland to administrative posts and a term in the Senate, next in a career of more than 20 years with the European Commission in Dublin and Brussels, and most recently in retirement as a writer and activist, I have found a determination to distinguish between fact and opinion and to remember that everything has a big picture context absolutely invaluable.

My training as a journalist began as a reporter on the Blyth News in Northumberland.  Blyth is quite near Newcastle and I was able to go to meetings of the branch of the Royal Institute of Philosophy in the university there.  The branch was run by Geoff Midgley and I warmly recommend Mary Midgley’s Memoir, the Owl of Minerva, published in 2005.  Wherever I have lived I have always been a great fan of local libraries and the library in Blyth purchased for me anything new by Iris Murdoch and J. D. Salinger.  Iris Murdoch had come to my attention as an undergraduate, not just for her papers on ethics, but as author of the first major study in English of Jean Paul Sartre.  Our course never mentioned Sartre’s Existentialism but Jack Daniels came to see himself as something of an Existentialist and in a university debate in Belfast, a student from UCG, later a Secretary-General of the Department of Foreign Affairs, proclaimed himself an Existentialist too.  My Salinger interest was that I might try to write something trying to develop his concept “phoney” as a moral category for our time.

Whenever I take a book from my shelves I often find it is accompanied by newspaper cuttings.  One of my personal treasures is Steve Pyke’s photographs, Philosophers,  published in 1993.  Since acquiring it in Edinburgh I have systematically stuffed it with cuttings on the philosophers covered and others I think worth recording.  Most of these cuttings are of obituaries and book reviews and include people like Bernard Williams, of whom I have read a lot over the years.

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Particularly while working for the European Commission in Brussels I would come across leading French and other international thinkers who seemed  to have big-picture ideas that could be useful for speechwriting.  Big names are certainly Michel Maus, Frantz Fannon and Ivan Illich.  Very recently, as an activist involved in thinking about European values and the possible introduction of a Basic Universal Income, I have enjoyed Slavoj Zizek and am beginning to read something of Giorgio Agamben.

Given my commitment to original texts, I find it very frustrating when I come across people  who spoof about figures like Freud and Foucault and yet seem to have never read anything by Freud or Foucault for themselves.  Particularly when, following my retirement in 2001, I took the UCD MA course in Film Studies, it seemed to me that many of the critics and lecturers talking about intellectual influences on cinema knew very little directly of the big names they were citing.

My most recent purchase of a philosophy book is a second-hand copy of A. J. Ayer’s study of Wittgenstein I bought from a market stall in Ranelagh.  It brought back memories of the impact of  Ayer and the Vienna circle, particularly his book Language Truth and Logic.  Freddy Ayer became a TV personality and a celebrity associated with a number of very attractive women.  I had a brief non-noteworthy conversation with him at a London reception on one occasion, and was very disappointed by a visit he made to Trinity to deliver a prestigious lecture sponsored by some Guinness Foundation.  He told his audience the lecture was an adaptation of a recent talk he had given to a Foyle’s Literary Lunch.

I have always found lectures and talks on philosophy and philosophers great value and would like to congratulate what is now the Metafizz on its busy programmes which have come to my attention in the last couple of years.  Both Sorcha Ni Buaidgh and Colm Finlay have obviously put in much more work and imagination than I did when Auditor of the Metaphysical Society.  The fact that this year the Metafizz has a librarian who is available to readers at set times has led directly to this talk.  As someone who had made a substantial donation of books to the library I was glad to have an opportunity to come to see how the collection was organised.  By the time I completed my degree, I reckoned I had a collection of books that would see anyone through the mental and Moral course and offer other books peripheral to the course by authors who had attracted my attention like Sidgwick and Nietsche.  That collection got as far as a family house in a Brussels suburb.

By 1991 that house had become too big for my late wife and myself as both our children had left home for university.  When we decided to downsize to a smaller apartment we had to think what we could do about my archive of political and other papers and my substantial collections of philosophy and poetry books and other publications, much of which was stored in our basement.  We had a visit at that time from my friend the historian, Joe Lee, and to my amazement he said he would take the whole of my political archive for the Boole Library in University College Cork.  That triggered thoughts of who might be interested in my poetry and philosophy collections.  The Philosophy Department agreed to take for the Metaphysical Society Library all the books I brought over to them and the Poetry Ireland Library, then based in the former Austin Clarke Library on Lower Mount Street, was happy to take my poetry collection – now part of the special collections in UCD.  When your Librarian and Auditor suggested I might like to tell my story I agreed and there you have it.

I will now conclude by reading All Greek, Off Limits, and The Big Picture. 

Thank you.

11

(Read to a meeting of the Dublin University Metaphysical Society in TCD, followed by my election as a Vice-President of the Society,)  

Neville Keery    Tuesday 15 March 2016 

The three poems mentioned above have now been published  in my third collection, Memoir: Poems 2007-2016 (Hinds Publishing Ltd, 2017, ISBN-13 978-1-909442-04-7) Available at Books Upstairs, D’Olier Street.

NK    1 February 2018