William Desmond, PhD

Distinguished Research Fellow

Publications

He is the author of many books, including the ground-breaking trilogy Being and the Between (1995), Ethics and the Between (2001), and God and the Between (2008). Being and the Between was winner of both the prestigious Prix Cardinal Mercier and the J.N. Findlay Award for best book in metaphysics in 1997. Other books include Art and the Absolute (1986); Desire Dialectic and Otherness: An Essay on Origins (1987); Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of Being and Mind (1990); Beyond Hegel and Dialectic (1992); Perplexity and Ultimacy (1995); Hegel’s God (2003); Art, Origins, Otherness: Between Art and Philosophy also in (2003); as well as Is There a Sabbath for Thought?: Between Religion and Philosophy (2005).  He has also edited five books and published more than 100 articles and book chapters. His book The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic appeared in 2012, the same year in which the William Desmond Reader also appeared. His recent book, The Intimate Universal: The Hidden Porosity among Religion, Art, Philosophy and Politics appeared with Columbia University Press 2016, and has been awarded the J.N. Findlay Award for best book in metaphysics in 2018, the second time he has been recipient of this award. His most recent books are The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being: On the Threshold between the Aesthetic and the Religious (2018); and The Voiding of Being: The Doing and Undoing of Metaphysics in Modernity (2020); Godsends: From Default Atheism to the Surprise of Revelation (2021). Among the Visiting Chairs he has held are the J.N. Findlay Chair at Boston University, the Gadamer Chair at Boston College, and the O’Malley Chair at Loyola Marymount University. He is Past President of the Hegel Society of America, the Metaphysical Society of America, and the American Catholic Philosophical Association. He is the recipient of Doctor of Literature (DLitt), honoris causa from Maynooth University.