Professor Paul O'Grady

Biography

My initial work in philosophy was on the philosophy of logic of Wittgenstein"s Tractatus (MA UCD 1990) and the debate about analyticity between Carnap and Quine (PhD TCD 1996). From this I became interested in the issue of cognitive relativism, how it emerged from this classic tradition of analytic philosophy and developed in later figures such as Davidson, Putnam and Rorty. I published Relativism (Routledge 2002) and a number of papers in this area. I worked at St Catherine"s college Oxford, coming back to TCD in 1997 and being made Fellow in 2003. Paralleling this I also had an interest in Philosophy of Religion, especially in the work of Thomas Aquinas, read in an analytic idiom. I published Philosophical Theology (Priory Institute 2008), Aquinas"s Philosophy of Religion (Palgrave 2014) and various papers on this. Training in and being accredited as a psychotherapist (MIACP 2009) led me to think about the factors that influence one"s choice of topic and style of doing philosophy. In recent years I have been writing about this, using ideas from virtue epistemology (specifically about the virtue of wisdom) and thinking about the connection between biography and philosophy. I edited Consolations of Philosophy: Reflections in an Economic Downturn (Dublin 2011). I was Head of Dept of Philosophy 2015-2020, becoming a member of College Council and also Head of School of Social Sciences and Philosophy in 2022.