Desmond Fennell

Desmond Fennell
BornDesmond Carolan Fennell
29 June 1929
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Died16 July 2021(2021-07-16) (aged 92)
OccupationPhilosopher, writer, linguist
NationalityIrish
EducationBelvedere 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.

  1. ^ "Desmond Fennell obituary: An independent thinker and purveyor of ideas". The Irish Times. 24 July 2021. Retrieved 5 July 2024.