Desmond Fennell

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Desmond Fennell
Born	Desmond Carolan Fennell 29 June 1929 Belfast, Northern Ireland
Died	16 July 2021(2021-07-16) (aged 92)
Occupation	Philosopher, writer, linguist
Nationality	Irish
Education	Belvedere College University College Dublin Trinity College Dublin Bonn University

Desmond Carolan Fennell (29 June 1929 – 16 July 2021)^[1] was an Irish writer, essayist, cultural philosopher, and linguist. Throughout his career, Fennell repeatedly departed from prevailing norms. In the 1950s and early 1960s, with his extensive foreign travel and reporting and his travel book, Mainly in Wonder, he departed from the norm of Irish Catholic writing at the time. From the late 1960s into the 1970s, in developing new approaches to the partition of Ireland and the Irish language revival, he deviated from political and linguistic Irish nationalism, and with the philosophical scope of his Beyond Nationalism: The Struggle against Provinciality in the Modern World, from contemporary Irish culture generally.

Fennell opposed the Western neo-liberal ideologies. In 1991, Fennell wrote a pamphlet challenging the prevalent critical view of Seamus Heaney as a poet of the first rank; in 2003 he wrote a small book where he revised the standard account of European history, and in 2007, his essay Beyond Vasari’s Myth of Origin offered a new version of its early history.