Richard Boyd Barrett

Richard Boyd Barrett (born 1967) is an Irish politician who has been a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dún Laoghaire constituency since 2011.

He is a former member of Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council, and chair of the Irish Anti-War Movement and on multiple occasions has been cited on war issues in the Irish media. He opposed the Iraq War and helped organise protests against it in 2003, amid concerns that the war would lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths. Domestically, he has campaigned to reverse job losses, supported the Rossport Five and voiced opposition to Ireland's bank-bail outs and the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) among other issues.

Boyd Barrett was elected to Dáil Éireann at the 2011 general election. He is known for what The Irish Times described as his "consistently passionate outrage and opposition to the Government's handling of the financial and banking crisis."

Family and education

Richard Boyd Barrett was adopted as a baby. His birth mother is actress Sinéad Cusack, with whom he was later reunited. This was revealed in the last week of his unsuccessful 2007 Dáil election campaign, during which Cusack, a vocal opponent of the Iraq War, canvassed for him. In May 2013, he claimed that theatre director Vincent Dowling was his biological father.

Richard Boyd

Richard Newell Boyd (born 19 May 1942, Washington, D.C., USA; Ph.D. MIT 1970) is an American philosopher who has spent most of his career at Cornell University, though he also taught briefly at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of California, Berkeley. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

His co-edited book The Philosophy of Science (ISBN 0-262-52156-3) is used in undergraduate and graduate philosophy courses. Boyd's doctoral thesis, directed by Hilary Putnam, is called "A recursion-theoretic characterization of the ramified analytical hierarchy".

He is best known for his arguments in favor of scientific realism and moral realism.

See also

References