Monday, March 08, 2010

Bole, William. "Table Talk: a Celebrated Thinker has Friends to Dinner." BOSTON COLLEGE MAGAZINE (Winter 2010).

Richardson, W. J. Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963. Some years back there circulated an urban legend surrounding a Jesuit philosophy professor named William Richardson. The story went that Richardson, a student at the time, was defending his doctoral dissertation on Martin Heidegger—one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century—and the young Jesuit was being challenged on essential points of his Heideggerian interpretation, when a man stood up in the back of the lecture room and said simply, “I think he’s right.” And that man was Heidegger. . . . Bill Richardson’s philosophical life is as storied as it has been abundant, with legends made and, one Thursday evening in October, remade. That night, he welcomed three philosopher friends to St. Mary’s for a conversation over dinner that was an intimate affair except for the cameras, lights, tripods, and microphones wired to each of the four participants. There to capture the dialogue was a video crew hired by another three philosophers, young academics who studied with Richardson at Boston College and are producing a documentary about the man and the theorist. The three eminent guests who found their way to the small dining room in a corner of the Jesuit residence were Boston College philosophy professors Jeffrey Bloechl and Richard Kearney, together with Thomas Sheehan, who teaches at Stanford University. In an interview later on, Sheehan said of Richardson, “He was the one who established the paradigm that we still follow to this day for understanding Heidegger.” . . . Read the rest here: http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/winter_2010/linden_lane/table-talk.html.

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