Irish philosopher Richard Kearney, who holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College, has published a novel titled Salvage (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) that centers on the timeless tension between progress and tradition. A description of the novel from the publisher: “It’s 1939 and young Maeve O’Sullivan and her family are among the last inhabitants of a windswept island off the south coast of Ireland. After her father drowns in a boating accident, Maeve finds herself the last inheritor of the old ways of healing. But the future beckons to Maeve with the arrival of Seamus, a handsome young medical student heading for Dublin. Maeve suddenly finds herself at a crossroads, torn between the pull of the past and the lure of the modern. Must she sacrifice one in order to accommodate the other?”
Kearney’s scholarship on touch, excarnation, embodiment, and hermeneutics is the focus of a recent book of essays with contributions from 13 of his former graduate students. Anacarnation and Returning to the Lived Body with Richard Kearney, edited by Kearney’s former students Brian Treanor and James Taylor, takes up a wide variety of subjects, from nature and non-human animals to the experience of the sacred and the demonic, and from art’s account of touching to the political implications of various types of embodiment. It also includes a new reflection from Kearney, in which he lays out his vision for “anacarnation.”
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