William A Hart

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William verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• MA, PhD
• Retired at University of Ulster

The pieces included in this collection were written over a period of five decades and deal with the place of language in philosophy, with literature as thought, and the significance of both for education. The majority appeared in publications which were concerned broadly with the humanities, rather than with philosophy as narrowly conceived, althou...

It deals with the difficulties in having research on Ireland's black past published in Irish history journals.

Rachael Baptist, a black woman, was a celebrated singer in the pleasure gardens of Dublin in the 1750s. Subsequently, between 1757 and 1767, she claimed to have ‘performed in London, Bath, and the other principal parts of England, with universal applause’. Some of these English concerts can be documented from contemporary newspapers; but there is n...

Through his books, The Sherbro and its Hinterland (1901) and Sierra Leone: A transformed colony (1911), and his collections of ethnographic material from southern Sierra Leone, Thomas Joshua Alldridge (1847–1916) has probably had a greater influence in shaping the wider world’s perception of Sierra Leone’s traditional culture than any other single...

We know very little about the lives of native-born people of African descent in nineteenth-century Ireland. They barely show up in official records, and references to particular individuals in contemporary local newspapers are rare and for the most part uninformative. Joseph Wilson (1836-1887), son of a black father and a white mother, rose from hu...

The difficulties of estimating the numbers of people of African descent in nineteenth-century Ireland are considerable. Church records are generally unhelpful. Irish newspapers of the period are more useful for documenting the activities of prominent American visitors ‘of colour’ (anti-slavery campaigners, clergymen and missionaries, and entertaine...

In recent scholarly literature the question of where the Afro-Portuguese ivories were made has generally been regarded as settled. Whereas earlier writers on the ivories like Wilhelm Foy and William Fagg had argued that they were most likely made in Portugal, the current consensus of opinion is that they were made by African carvers in West Africa....

Critical review of book on the ancient stone sculptures of upper Guinea

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, artists in West Africa made sophisticated ivory carvings specifically for the early Portuguese navigators and their patrons. In researching the history of the ivories, the records of eighteenth-century English antiquarians are a neglected yet important source of information. Such sources help to...

In recent scholarly literature the question of where the Afro-Portuguese ivories were made has generally been regarded as settled. Whereas earlier writers on the ivories like Wilhelm Foy and William Fagg had argued that they were most likely made in Portugal, the current consensus of opinion is that they were made by African carvers in West Africa....

George Bridgtower was a virtuoso violinist of African descent whose skills astonished his contemporaries and inspired Beethoven to compose for him the work later known as the Kreutzer Sonata. But much of the discussion of his career has recycled information, and often misinformation, about him that is decades—in some cases, a century—out of date. R...

Among the earliest artefacts to be brought back to Europe from sub-Saharan Africa were a group of ivory sculptures carved for the early Portuguese mariners by carvers in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and the Congo in the late 15th and 16th centuries. These Afro-Portuguese ivories—elaborately sculpted hunting horns, saltcellars, pyxes, spoons and forks—were...

Given to a meeting at Collins Barracks, National Museum of Ireland.

It has become commonplace to ask, whenever anything has gone wrong, what lessons can be learned from the experience. But the appearance of open‐endedness in that question is misleading: not every answer that we could give to it is acceptable. There are, in the context of such a question, tacit constraints in what counts as a valid lesson to be lear...

Analysant huit cornes de chefs d'Afrique occidentale, issues de differentes collections museographiques en Grande-Bretagne ou aux Etats-Unis, l'A. tente de demontrer qu'elles sont toutes originaires des zones cotieres de l'actuelle Republique du Liberia. Ces olifants en ivoire partiellement sculptes sont parmi les premiers artefacts en provenance d...

Martha Nussbaum has claimed that it is possible for a moral agent to be confronted, through no fault of his own, with an irresolvable conflict between his moral duties; and cites Kant as someone who takes the opposing view. Kant did indeed take the view that conflict between duties was inconceivable, but Nussbaum has failed to grasp his main reason...

A lot of the talk about education nowadays invokes the notion of ‘quality’ and it has been suggested that education in schools and universities would benefit from exposure to the kind of quality assurance procedures originally developed by industry to monitor and raise performance. The paper is critical of this suggestion, arguing that the notion o...

Traces references to black men in Ireland from the earliest mentions of (in Irish) 'blue men' brought to Ireland in the 10th century by the Vikings to Dr Raphael Armattoe in the mid-20th century.

Bien que possedant une riche collection d'objets africains remontant au 18 eme siecle, le Musee National d'Irlande ne les expose pas. Plusieurs personnes, parmi lesquelles B. O'Beirn, W. Davidson-Houston, R. Casement, H. L. Norton Traill, ont fait don de leurs possessions qui venaient du Nigeria, de la Sierra Leone, du Congo, des Yoruba, d'Afrique...

Two musical instruments, about which little is known, have been in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow since the nineteenth century. This article relates them to a number of similar instruments in museum collections in Europe and the United States, and identifies the West African coast around Sierra Leone as the most likely place of origin. It also sug...

Une corne en ivoire d'origine afro-portugaise se trouve au British Museum. Presentant un melange de style africain et europeen, ayant ete apparemment retravaillee et ayant eu plusieurs utilites, elle daterait du XVI e siecle.

Les Njayei, tribu Mende du sud de la Sierra Leone, sont connus pour leur aptitude a guerir des maladies mentales dues a la transgression de lois, mais aussi pour leurs rites de fertilite, la maison sociale tachetee de points colores gardant les medicaments, l'esprit masque Njokoi dont le masque et les apparitions varient selon les regions, et les p...

The project of studying children in order to understand them, which lies at the heart of contemporary thinking about children and their education, is misconceived. It rests, first of all, upon a false belief that we can only come to know something properly by deliberately and systematically pursuing knowledge of it. Secondly, it offers a paradigm o...

The Upper Guinea Coast—the modern Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia—is one of the few parts of Africa where people have carved stone sculptures. The stone figures sculpted there, usually in soft steatite, or soap-stone, are generally called nomoli or pomta , depending on whether they have the standard features of figures found in southeastern Sierr...

The Philosopher’s Interest in African Thought The development of ethnographical studies in recent years has aroused interest in the traditional thought of African peoples and has prompted the suggestion that here is something which the philosopher could study with profit. But the philosopher’s interest in thought is something quite specific and it...

The Philosopher’s Interest in African Thought The development of ethnographical studies in recent years has aroused interest in the traditional thought of African peoples and has prompted the suggestion that here is something which the philosopher could study with profit. But the philosopher’s interest in thought is something quite specific and it...