ABSTRACT
This dissociation of inquiry has also taken its toll on the Irish intellectual scene. The creative dialogue between philosophical and scientific questioning which prevailed between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries-from Toland and Berkeley to Hamilton and Tyndall-has virtually disappeared. The dynamic debates of the Dublin Philosophical Society, where issues of natural and moral knowledge were passionately discussed, are no longer to be heard. And it is almost unthinkable that any contemporary Irish scientist could provoke the sort of public controversy, at national or international level, which resulted from Tyndall’s famous Belfast Address in 1874. It is regrettably true that few Irish citizens today have ever heard of Tyndall’s achievements, not to mention those of other distinguished Irish scientists, for example: Rowan Hamilton’s discovery of the ‘Hamiltonian function’ which plays a central role in quantum mechanics; Fitzgerald’s contribution to special relativity; William Parsons’s reflecting telescope; Richard Griffith’s innovations in geological mapping; the decisive discoveries of Boyle, Boole or Molyneux in natural philosophy; Ernan McMullan’s contributions to the philosophy of science, and so on. Ireland has a most impressive scientific tradition, especially in the nineteenth century which Gordon Herries Davies has nominated the ‘golden age of Irish science’, comprising the achievements of more than fifty scientists of world renown.1
