Major Book and Journal Publications by Members of Staff


2014-21: Gerald Cipriani:  Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology (London: Routledge) 

The Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology aims to encourage and promote research in aesthetics that draws inspiration from the phenomenological tradition as broadly understood, where “phenomenology” is inclusive of, but goes beyond the limits of, intellectual practices associated with the tradition and its well-known representative thinkers. Unique in the English speaking world, the journal welcomes scholarly articles written in a phenomenological vein as well as analyses of aesthetic phenomena by researchers working on phenomenology within analytic philosophy. 

The field of the Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology is further defined by its close connections with the arts and culture, including the reality of human experience and its environment. Besides philosophical rigor, the journal puts emphasis on both creativity of ideas and precision of language. It provides a platform for new innovative ideas crossing the boundaries of both philosophical traditions and traditionally accepted fields of research in aesthetics.  

General Editor (effective from 01/01/22) Gerald Cipriani NUI Galway Ireland
ISSN: 2053-9320
2014-21: Gerald Cipriani:  Culture and Dialogue (Leiden: Brill)

Culture and Dialogue is an international peer-reviewed journal of cross-cultural philosophy and the arts that is published semi-annually both in print and electronically. The journal seeks to encourage and promote research in the type of philosophy and theory that sees dialogue as a fundamental ingredient of cultural formations, that is to say the ways cultures become apparent and ultimately identifiable. What is meant here by culture is a particular manifestation of human achievement in the arts, languages, forms of expression (whether secular or religious), and customs of all kinds. Dialogue, in this context, means a mode of relationship that lets cultural formations unfold by bringing together human beings and, for example, their natural environment, their historical past, traditions, external cultural influences, contemporary trends, other communities, or simply other persons in conversation.

The Journal provides a forum for researchers from philosophy as well as other disciplines who study cultural formations dialogically, through comparative analysis, or within the tradition of hermeneutics.   Contributions are expected to either reflect on the role played by dialogue in cultural formations from various perspectives such as politics, religion and the arts; or else establish cross-cultural dialogues globally within those fields.   For each issue, the journal seeks to bring manuscripts together with a common denominator. The language of the Journal is English, but submissions in other languages including German, Traditional Chinese, French and Japanese may be considered for Special Issues with guest editors.


Editor-in-Chief (effective from 01/01/22) Gerald Cipriani NUI Galway  Ireland
ISSN: 2222-3282

 Dr. Gerald Cipriani is on leave in 2021/22.



2018:  Tsarina Doyle (ed.),  Nietzsche's Metaphysics of the Will to Power:    The Possiility of Value 



2015: Gerald Cipriani (ed.), Chinese Environmental Aesthetics




2013: Gerald Cipriani (ed.), Art for Social Change and Cultural Awakening

(Rowman & Littlefield)

Artistic residency has become widely adopted in Western countries while only recently having become popular and well-supported within Taiwan. This book explores the challenges that this form of art practice faced in contemporary Taiwan from the revocation of Martial Law in 1987 to the 2000s—arguably one of the most exciting periods in the sociocultural history of the island. Case studies show what is at stake politically, historically, and socially in artists’ endeavours to give shape to a sense of Taiwanese identity.

The precarious geo-political situation of Taiwan has made issues of cultural identity—tackled by artists and successive governments alike—very sensitive. A new genre of artistic residence in Taiwan would mean that artists involved from whatever cultural background operate as ‘engaging interpreters’; their roles would not be confined to mirroring culture and society. These artists-in-residence would contribute to cultural awakening by offering ways of negotiating creatively with otherness, and this for the sake of a better social life and shared identity.

2013:  Felix Ó Murchadha, A Phenomenology of Christian Life: Glory and Night

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press)

How does Christian philosophy address phenomena in the world? Felix Ó Murchadha believes that seeing, hearing, or otherwise sensing the world through faith requires transcendence or thinking through glory and night (being and meaning). By challenging much of Western metaphysics, Ó Murchadha shows how phenomenology opens new ideas about being, and how philosophers of "the theological turn" have addressed questions of creation, incarnation, resurrection, time, love, and faith. He explores the possibility of a phenomenology of Christian life and argues against any simple separation of philosophy and theology or reason and faith.

2013: Paul Crowther, Phenomenologies of Art and Vision: A Post-Analytic Turn

(London: Bloomsbury)

Contemporary discussions of the image emphasize art's societal functions, or the relation between perception and convention in terms of how pictures are 'read'. Few studies come close to answering why pictures and sculptures fascinate and intrigue regardless of any practical functions they might serve. In this book Paul Crowther reveals the intrinsic significance of pictures and sculptures. To address the question of how painting becomes an art, Crowther uses the analytic philosophy of Richard Wollheim as a starting point. But to sufficiently answer the question, he makes an important link to a tradition much more successful in giving voice to the deeper ontology of visual art - existential phenomenology. The result is a work that demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between phenomenology and analytic aesthetics. To expand its ontological scope and solve the problem of expression, analytic aesthetics needs phenomenology; while to develop a sustained, critically balanced, and intellectually available ontology, phenomenology needs the discursive force and lucidity of analytic philosophy.Bringing the two approaches together enables contemporary discussions of the philosophy of art to be significantly advanced

2013: Felix O'Murchadha,     The Time of Revolution

(Link to Kairos and Chronos in Heidegger)
(London: Bloomsbury)

The Time of Revolution presents Heidegger as fundamentally rethinking the temporal character of revolutionary action and radical transformation


Developing this theme through his key writings of the early 1930s, the book shows how Heidegger's analyses of truth and freedom led to an increasingly dialectical account of time and action culminating in his phenomenology of the - artistic and political - 'work'.  A context is thus given for Heidegger's political engagement in 1933.   While diagnosing the moral failure of this engagement, O'Murchadha defends Heidegger's account of the time of human action and shows it to foreshadow his later thought of a 'new beginning'.

2010: Paul Crowther, The Kantian Aesthetic: from Knowledge to the Avant-garde

(Oxford: Oxford University Press)



2009: Paul Crowther, Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame)

(Stanford: Stanford University Press)

Why are the visual arts so important and what is it that makes their forms significant? Countering recent interpretations of meaning that understand visual artworks on the model of literary texts, Crowther formulates a theory of the visual arts based on what their creation achieves both cognitively and aesthetically. He develops a phenomenology that emphasizes how visual art gives unique aesthetic expression to factors that are basic to perception. At the same time, he shows how various artistic media embody these factors in distinctive ways. Attentive to both the creation and reception of all major visual art forms (picturing, sculpture, architecture, and photography), Phenomenology of the Visual Arts also addresses complex idioms, including abstract, conceptual, and digital art.

2009: Tsarina Doyle, Nietzsche on Epistemology and Metaphysics: The World in View

(Edinburgh University Press)

Few philosophers are as widely read or as widely misunderstood as Nietzsche. In this book, Tsarina Doyle sets out to show that a specifically Kantian-informed methodology lies at the heart of Nietzsche's approach to epistemology and metaphysics. The author claims, contentiously, that both Nietzsche’s early and late writings may be understood as responses to Kant’s constitutive-regulative distinction at the level of epistemology and to his treatment of force and efficient causality at the level of metaphysics.

2007: Paul Crowther, Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt.

(Oxford University Press)


2007: Richard Hull, Deprivation & Freedom


Deprivation and Freedom investigates the key issues of social deprivation and human freedom. This comprehensive yet refreshingly simple book is vitally important and philosophically interesting, providing rigorous examination of a number of central themes and distinctions in ethical and political theory.

2006: Felix O' Murchadha (ed.) Violence, Victims, Justifications: Philosophical Approaches

(Peter Lang)


2004: Thomas Duddy (ed.) Dictionary of Irish Philosophers

(Thoemmes Continuum)

This biographical dictionary of Irish philosophers is a by-product of a series of larger biographical dictionaries of British philosophers published in recent years by Thoemmes Press. The first of these larger dictionaries was the Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers (1999), followed in subsequent years by equivalent works on seventeenth and nineteenth-century British philosophers. Each of these dictionaries included Irish-born philosophers who were considered British not only because of the political links that had been forged historically between Britain and Ireland but also because of the dual or hybrid nationality of those who belonged to the Anglo-Irish ascendancy.

It was partly because of the problems that surrounded the inclusion of Irish entries in the existing 'British' dictionaries that the need for a special dictionary dedicated to Irish philosophers was recognized. This dictionary will include many of those who have already appeared in the 'British' dictionaries, but also many who have been left out of the existing dictionaries, either because they were too early to be included in the seventeenth-century dictionary, or too late to be included in the nineteenth-century dictionary, or simply because their obscurity was such that they had not come to the attention of the editors of the other published dictionaries.

2003: Paul Crowther, Philosophy after Postmodernism: Civilized Values and the Scope of Knowledge



2003: Thomas Duddy (ed.), The Irish Response to Darwinism

(Thoemmes Continuum)

2003:Bongard/Kampling/Wörner (eds) Verstehen an der Grenze - Beitraege zur Hermeneutik interreligioeser und interkultureller Kommunikation.

(Muenster: Aschendorff)

2002: Paul Crowther, The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and its History

(Cambridge University Press)

Why are visual artworks experienced as having intrinsic significance or normative depth? Why are some works of art better able to manifest this significance than others? In his latest book Paul Crowther argues that we can answer these questions only if we have a full analytic definition of visual art. Crowther's approach focuses on the pictorial image, broadly construed to include abstract work and recent conceptually-based idioms. The significance of art depends, however, essentially on the transhistorical nature of the pictorial image, the way in which its illuminative power is extended through historical transformation of the relevant artistic medium. Crowther argues against fashionable forms of cultural relativism, while at the same time showing why it is important that an appreciation of the history of art is integral to aesthetic judgment.

2002: Thomas Duddy, A History of Irish Thought





2002: Thomas Duddy (ed.), Irish Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century: Epistemology and Metaphysics

(Thoemmes Continuum)

Irish philosophy is nowadays the subject of increasing attention by scholars and students, and Thomas Duddy, author of A History of Irish Thought (2002), has collaborated with Thoemmes Press to produce a collection of important Irish texts in epistemology and metaphysics from the nineteenth century. (Further sets, on Irish philosophical responses to Darwin and on Irish moral and political philosophy, are in preparation). In this first collection, seven writers address such perennial philosophical issues as the problem of perception and the question of what, if anything, exists beyond the perceived world. The group of writers featured in the set includes Thomas Kingsmill Abbott and W.H.S. Monck, both of whom responded critically to Berkeley's theory of vision. It also includes Thomas Maguire, an idealist in the Platonic tradition, Henry MacCormac who applied empiricist principles to social and political problems, William Graham who attempted a metaphysical critique of science and also argued for pantheism, and George Gabriel Stokes who explored the borderland between science and theology while at the same time attempting to reconcile the religious and scientific world-pictures. These books are extremely uncommon in libraries and virtually unobtainable in the antiquarian book market. Presented here in their earliest editions, with Thomas Duddy's authoritative introduction, many scholars will now have access to them for the first time.

2002: J. Mahon, Simone de Beauvoir and her Catholicism - An essay on her Ethical and Religious Meditations

(Galway: Arlen House)


2000: M. H. Wörner, Glückendes Leben.

(Berlin: Morus Verlag)

1999: Felix O Murchadha, Zeit des Handelns und Moglichkeit der Verwandlung: Kairologie und Chronologie bei Heidegger im Jjahrzehnt nach Sein und Zeit

(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann)

Die als "Kehre" getaufte, entscheidende, wenn auch höchstumstrittene Phase von Heideggers Denken im Jahrzehnt nach der Veröffentlichung von "Sein und Zeit" (1927) ist vom Scheitern des ursprünglichen Denkansatzes und von Heideggers Versuch, einen neuen Ansatz, etwa durch seine philosophische Begegnung mit Kunst und Dichtung zu gewinnen, gekennzeichnet. Die vorliegende Arbeit unternimmt den Versuch, die Wandlungen und Krisen von Heideggers damaligem Denkweg als letztlich doch in den sachlichen Fragen nach der Zeitlichkeit geschichtlichen Handelns begründete darzulegen. In Auseinandersetzung mit Heidegger wird diese Zeitlichkeit als ein Wechselspiel von Kairos (dem plötzlichen Augenblick) und Chronos (der kontinuierlichen Jetztfolge) einerseits, und Praxis (Tun) und Poiesis (Machen) andererseits ausgelegt. Aus diesem Komplex von Phänomenen zeigt der Autor auf, wie gewisse Wandlungen und insbesondere die zunehmende Bedeutung des Poiesisbegriffs, die etwa in der Kunstwerkabhandlung (1935) unverkennbar ist, sich mit Rückblick auf "Sein und Zeit" begreifen lassen, nämlich als ein Resultat Heideggers Reflexion auf die Verflechtungen von Handelns- und Zeitproblematiken in "Sein und Zeit". Daß dem so ist, bleibt bei Heidegger selbst ungesagt. Aus diesem Zusammenhang heraus wird auch Heideggers politisches Engagament in den Jahren 1933/34 neu bewertet.

1997: Paul Crowther, The Language of Twentieth Century Art: A Conceptual History

(Yale University Press)



1997: J. Mahon, Existentialism, Feminism and Simone de Beauvoir.

(London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press)

Simone De Beauvoir made her own distinctive contribution to existentialism in the form of an ethics which diverged sharply from that of Jean-Paul Sartre. In her novels and philosophical essays of the 1940s she produced not just a recognizable existentialist ethics, but also a character ethics and an ethics for violence. This book defends her existentialist feminism against the many reproaches which have been levelled against it over several decades.

1993:  Paul Crowther, Art and Embodiment: from Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness

(Oxford University Press)


1993: Paul Crowther: Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism

(Oxford University Press)

In recent times considerable controversy has raged around the question of postmodern culture and its products. Paul Crowther attempts to overcome some of the antagonistic viewpoints involved by expounding and developing key themes from the work of Kant and Merleau-Ponty in the context of contemporary culture. His work analyzes topics such as the relation between art and politics, the problems of poststructuralist and feminist approaches to art, the re-emergence and relevance of theories of the sublime, and the continuing possibilities of artistic creativity. The central theme of the book is that there are constants in human experience around which art and philosophy turn. At the same time, however, due account must be given of the ways such constants are historically mediated. By articulating various aspects of this relation, Crowther shows that the postmodern sensibility can be more than that of an alienated consumerism. Understood in the proper theoretical context, it is grounded on experience and artifacts which humanize .

1989: Paul Crowther, the Kantian Sublime: from Morality to Art

(Oxford University Press)

With this, the first volume in the Oxford Philosophical Monographs series, Paul Crowther breaks new ground by providing what is probably the first study in any language to be devoted exclusively to Kant's theory of the sublime. It fills a gap in an area of scholarship where Kant makes crucial links between morality and aesthetics and will be particularly useful for Continental philosophers, among whom the Kantian sublime is currently receiving widespread discussion in debates about the nature of postmodernism. Crowther's arguments center on the links which Kant makes between morality and aesthetics, and seek ultimately to modify Kant's approach in order to establish the sublime as a viable aesthetic concept with a broader cultural significance.

1996 (2/2001): M. H. Wörner, Thomas von Aquin, Summa Contra Gentiles IV, lat. annot. Text, dt, Übersetzung u. Nachwort., Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft
1995: F.P. O'Gorman/T. Boylan, Beyond Rhetoric and Realism


1992: F.P. O'Gorman, Rationality and Relativity

(Avebury Press)

1990: M. H. Wörner, Das Ethische in der Rhetorik des Aristoteles

Rhetorik als Medium politisch-praktischer Vernunft besteht für Aristoteles in einer Methode, dasjenige aufzufinden, was zum Gelingen des Lebens in einem Stadtstaat erforderlich ist. Der Autor legt dar, wie dieser aristotelische Grundsatz auf unser heutiges Zusammenleben übertragbar ist.
Freiburg/Br: Alber

1984: J. Mahon, An Introduction to Practical Ethics

(Dublin: Turoe Press 1984)

1978: M. H. Wörner, Performative und Sprachliches Handeln

(Hamburg: Buske 1978)