Ireland punches above its weight in many fields: cinema, literature, poetry. But what of philosophy? Ireland’s success in creative arts over centuries has led to an impression that we don’t do analytic thinking – at least not in the same way that the English, the Germans or the French do.

In his book The Irish Mind, Richard Kearney describes how “positive discrimination” against Irish thinking emerged in the colonial era. It was best summed up by the English writer Matthew Arnold in patronising commentary about the “Celtic soul”, Irish mysticism and our supposed rejection of “the despotism of fact”.

This prejudice is explored further in Thomas Duddy’s A History of Irish Thought. Through his research, he said, he frequently encountered a perception that Ireland lacks “a national, ethnically distinctive intellectual history”.

Unthinkable today revisits the matter. And, with the Fifa World Cup upon us, it’s timely to do so in the context of that memorable measure of intellectual talent: Monty Python’s Philosophers Football Match.

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