Autobiography

Born and reared in Dublin, I was educated at Christian Brothers College, Monkstown, Trinity College, Dublin, and the University of Cambridge. By sheer chance in 1992 - I happened to be paying a one-off visit to my alma mater to pick up documentation for an American green card application when I bumped into one of my former professors - an opportunity had arisen in the Political Science Dept. of Trinity College, Dublin and I ended up being appointed as a tutor and later lecturer in political theory. I remained in that post for the next six years.

Then one unfine day in 1998 I found myself reading a collection of essays by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. In the introduction to his book, Nagel remarks:

Bernard Williams once posed the awkward question, What is the point of doing philosophy if you are not extraordinarily good at it? The problem is that you cannot, by sheer hard work, like a historian of modest gifts, make solid discoveries that others can then rely on in building up larger results. If you are not extraordinary, what you do in philosophy will be either unoriginal (and therefore unnecessary) or inadequately supported (and therefore useless). More likely, it will be both unoriginal and wrong.

Reading these lines convinced me, rightly or wrongly, to abandon my struggling PhD and my ‘career’ as an academic. After five months trying to make ends meet, I managed to get a job, reinventing myself as a normal, well-adjusted member of the commercial world. An MBA followed which helped make up for lost time and I eventually fell into corporate communications and change management. Since 1999, I’ve worked in a number of large, multi-national companies including, Irish Life & Permanent, Diageo, Pfizer, Aviva, and AIB. 

While I enjoy the social interaction as well as the cut and thrust of the business arena, I have retained my interest in the life of the mind and especially in philosophy. To paraphrase Chekhov, the day job is my lawful wedded wife and philosophy my mistress. When I’ve had enough of one, I can go and spend the night with the other.

Up until September 2016, spending the night with philosophy was limited to reading rather than committing any of my thoughts to type. Then everything changed during a magical weekend in Cornwall with members of an inspiring writing group called Dark Angels. There I found my hitherto lip-sealed voice as a writer. Afterwards I began putting pen to paper for the sheer delight of it and it felt good. For some reason poems flowed first and then philosophy arrived a little over a year later leading eventually to my first book, The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin, published in January, 2020.

As a result of producing my study of Berlin’s ideas, I came into contact with Dr. Henry Hardy, Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and Isaiah Berlin’s principal editor. I had originally sent him the draft of the preface of my book out of the blue and as a total stranger. He responded, quite unbelievably, within a few hours and asked that I send him the rest of my draft. His comments proved enormously encouraging and instructive.

As a way of repaying what I regarded as a debt to Hardy, I decided to try my hand at writing a review of his 2018 book In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure. I submitted my review on spec to the Dublin Review of Books and they agreed to publish it. Since then I have published a number of essays and reviews on various topics in the Dublin Review of Books as well as the Times Literary Supplement and Aeon an in more academic publications such as the European Journal of Philosophy and Society

My second book, Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021. I am now looking forward to making a start on a number of new and quite different projects, including writing a concise, philosophical introduction to philosophy: most introductions to philosophy are unconcise and unphilosophical.

In 2021 I became Managing Editor and Book Review Editor of the journal Society. Begun in 1962, Society publishes scholarly papers and book reviews that fall within the broad fields of the social sciences and humanities.

When I’m not busy with my day job or with philosophy, I’m usually spending time with my family and friends or walking the dog.

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader”
Robert Frost