Richard Kearney

Richard Kearney (/ˈkɑːrni/; born 1954, Cork, Ireland) is the Charles Seelig professor of philosophy at Boston College and has taught at many universities including University College Dublin, the Sorbonne, and the University of Nice.

He studied at Glenstal Abbey under the Benedictines until 1972, and was a 1st Class Honours graduate in Philosophy in the Bachelor of Arts graduate class of 1975 in UCD. He was also known on campus as a brilliant intellectual who launched the "Crane Bag" journal with fellow students including Andy Sleeman (now Fr. Simon Sleeman, OSB in Glenstal), Christina Nulty, Ronan Sheehan, and Aidan Matthews. He completed an M.A. at McGill University with Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, and a PhD with Paul Ricœur at University of Paris X: Nanterre. He corresponded with Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida and other French philosophers of the era. He was also active in the Irish, British, and French media as a host for various television and radio programs on literary and philosophical themes. His work focuses on the philosophy of the narrative imagination, hermeneutics and phenomenology.

Among his best known written works are The Wake of the Imagination, On Stories, Poetics of Imagining, and Debates in Continental Philosophy.

Richard Kearney has recently established an ongoing artistic and multimedia project called "Hosting the Stranger". The project's core themes are host and guest; violence and reconciliation; embodied imagination and the sacred.

He is the author of over 20 books on European philosophy and literature (including two novels and a volume of poetry) and has edited or co-edited many others. He was formerly a member of the Arts Council of Ireland, the Higher Education Authority of Ireland and chairman of the Irish School of Film at University College Dublin. As a public figure in Ireland, he was involved in drafting a number of proposals for a Northern Irish peace agreement (1983, 1993, 1995). He has presented several series on culture and philosophy for Irish television and broadcast extensively on the European media. His most recent work is Anatheism, published by Columbia University Press in 2009.

He attempted to steer "a middle path between Romantic hermeneutics (Schleiermacher) which retrieve and reappropriate God as presence and radical hermeneutics (Derrida, Caputo) which elevates alterity to the status of undecidable sublimity." He calls his approach "diacritical hermeneutics."