SOME IRISH THINKERS
Johannes Scottus Eriugena, ‘the greatest thinker of his day, and one of the greatest metaphysicians of all time’ wrote Bett (see infra) of this Irishman (as is generally agreed) who appeared at the Court of Charles the Bald in Northern France about A.D. 847. He either brought with him from Ireland or quickly acquired on the Continent a master of Greek quite unusual in his day. With this skill, he translated the works of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Ambigua of Maximus Confessor, and the De hominis opificio of Gregory of Nyssa into Latin . . . . . the five books of his Periphyseon or De diuisione naturae, published about 867, a highly intellectual account of all things that are and are not . . .
For further reference, see I.P. Sheldon-Williams ‘A Bibliography of the Works of Johannes Scottus Eriugena’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. X, No. 2 (1960). . . . The most adequate biography existing in English [1968] is H. Bett, Joahnnes Scottus Eriugena, Russell and Russell, New York, 1964 (first published 1925).
The first important thinker in the modern period was John Toland (1670-1722) who was born in Clonmany, Inishowen, and in his boyhood received a Catholic education. He attended school at Redcastle and the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh (where he received his M.A.), Leyden (remaining there two years) and Oxford where he wrote Christianity not Mysterious, extolling the unmixed light of reason. He was welcomed back to Ireland in 1694 by Molyneux who considered him a candid thinker and a good scholar, and joined with him in the discussions of modern ideas which were then taking place in Dublin coffee-houses. ‘But’, adds Molyneux, ‘there is a violent sort of spirit reigns here which begins already to show itself against him ;’ . . . His book was burnt by the public hangman and he barely escaped to England with his life.
He traveled widely in Europe — Holland, Germany, Bohemia, Austria — and was well received by the Irish in Prague and at the Courts of Hanover and Berlin. The Elector Palatine gave him a gold chain and a hundred ducats, and Sophie Charlotte, Queen of Prussia, frequently invited him to take part in philosophical conversations. It was to her that Letters to Serena (1704) were addressed — the included one on the topic Motion Essential to Matter, They were translated later by Holbach under the title Lettres philosophiques.
Toland was a polymath who knew more than ten languages, including Irish, and wrote on a wide variety of subjects ; . . a critical history of the Celtic religion ; a history of the Druids ; . . an edition of Milton’s prose ; Pantheisticon (a liturgy commemorating ancient philosophers and notable as containing the first use of the word pantheist) ; and Physic without Physicians. A lapse in adherence to the principles of the last seems to have been responsible for his death in 1722. . . .
Toland was perhaps the first Irishman to take an interest in the Orient; he corresponded with Leibniz on the subject, asking him particularly for his opinion on the difficulty of the Chinese language. Leibniz’s replies are preserved. Quant aux chinois, he says, je crois, qu’il faut distinguer entre leur charactères et leur langue and goes on to say that the characters are difficult to learn but not the language, once one has caught the pronunciation. Elsewhere, Toland remarks that Chinese philosophy is very different from that obtaining in our part of the world. It may have been that over a Dublin coffee-table Toland made some mention of a Chinese idealist who lived two centuries before, Wang Yang-Ming (1472-1528). From such a seed may well have sprung the theory associated with the next great thinker, George Berkeley (1685-1753), who attempted to show that matter )material substance) is a mere figment and that ‘to be’ is ‘to be perceived’ (esse est percipi). . . . Berkeley’s works are written in limpid prose ; most important are Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and the Dialogues (1713). He also made some . . . criticism of the calculus and, in Alciphron, he discussed free thought. Like Toland, Berkeley looked beyond the physician ; for him, the perfect panacea was tarwater, which he recommended in Siris. In 1957 was completed at Edinburgh, under the editorship of A. A. Luce and W. Jessop, the publication of the annotated edition in nine volumes of all Berkeley’s works.
The next great philosophical work to be produced in Ireland was An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on which are founded the mathematical theories of Logic and Probabilities (1854) written by George Boole (1815-64), while he held (from 1849) the Chair of Mathematics in Queen’s College, Cork. Like Eriugena’s De Diuisione Naturae, it is based on the principle of dichotomy. . . .
George Boole married Mary Everest, a niece of the famous surveyor of India and herself a pioneer of modern teaching methods. They had five daughters, two of whom were distinguished :—
Alicia Boole Stott (1860-1940) spent her first thirteen years in Cork. She had extraordinary powers of visualization in the geometry of hyperspaces, and collaborated with Schoute in important work on polytopes, for which she received an honorary degree on the occasion of the tercentenary of the University of Groningen (1913).
Of the work of another daughter, Ethel Voynich, who married a Polish revolutionary [Wilfred Wojnicz], there is a full length study by Evgenia Teratata [i.e Taratuta]. Her novel The Gadfly was published in twenty-two languages. She died in New York in 1960.
As in medieval times, so again during and after the second World War, Ireland benefited from an influx of foreign scholars.Like Eruigena, only in the opposite direction, ‘they were storm-tossed voyages, anxiously seeking a quiet haven’. Outstanding amongst these were the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, for a time a Director and later Senior Professor of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Jan Łukasiewicz who was Professor of Logic at the Royal Irish Academy and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), who wrote volume two of this Philosophical Investigations while living here, between 1947 and 1949.
Schrödinger, who was in effect a Vedantist, feared that his views would upset Dubliners (as had those of Toland) but happily they failed to notice them. On identity, Schrödinger wrote ‘we must dismiss the idea that a particle is an individual entity which retains its identity. The question of sameness really, really has no meaning.’ Of lovers he remarked ‘their thoughts and their joys are numerically one’.
Łukasiewicz’s writings, done in Dublin, included Aristotle’s Syllogistic from the standpoint of Modern Formal Logic (Oxford 1951) and many important papers, particularly one on The Intuitionist Theory of Deduction (Amsterdam 1952), in which he showed that ‘the intuitionistic theory of deduction contains as its proper part the classical theory of deduction.’ He concluded that ‘the intuitionistic theory is richer and consequently more powerful than the classical one . . . among the hitherto known many-valued systems of logic the intuitionistic theory is the most intuitive and elegant’. Using the same Polish notation as Łukasiewicz, Carew Meredith developed, for several logical systems, the shortest single axiom that could, in each case, serve as a foundation. These axioms are surprisingly short, varying from 21 down to 6 letters.
To return of Irish-born thinkers, perhaps the most influential today is John Desmond Bernal (b. 1901), the son of a Catholic farmer in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, who was educated at Stonyhurst. As well as scientific work concerned with all aspects of crystallography, the structure of liquids, the drift of the continents, the origin of the solar system and of life, he has written extensively about the place of science in society. [Unfortunately, the work entirely Marxian in character. (WPT)]