John Sallis, recently retired professor of philosophy at Boston College and very well-known for his work in phenomenology, has died.

Professor Sallis was a prolific author, writing on a wide array of topics, from imagination to Plato to art to various figures in phenomenology, and more. He was the author or editor of around forty books, as well as the founding editor of  the journal, Research in Phenomenology, and the general editor of the Studies in Continental Thought series (Indiana University Press). Some of his more recent books include Heidegger’s Ontological Project: on Being and Time (2024), Nietzsche’s Voices  (2022), On Beauty and Measure: Plato’s Symposium and Statesman (2021), and Chorology: on Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (2020). You can learn more about his writings here.

Prior to joining the faculty at Boston College in 2005, Sallis held positions at Pennsylvania State University, Vanderbilt University, Loyola University of Chicago, Duquesne University, and the University of the South. He earned his PhD from Tulane University.

2022 saw the publication of Philosophy, Art, and the Imagination: Essays on the Work of John Sallis, edited by James Risser (Seattle University). In the foreword to the book, Dennis Schmidt (Penn State) writes:

[T]he sweep of Sallis’ work, his erudition and scholarship, his research and reach, and his uncanny ability to find access to texts, ideas, and questions that open new avenues for thinking never cease to amaze and to captivate while defining the cutting edge of thinking. One quickly realizes that Sallis’ work is marked by a readiness to learn from worlds and experiences beyond the customary horizons of philosophical concerns and that he does not shrink those experiences to fit philosophical concepts or categories, but rather lets those experiences enlarge his sense of the philosophical. This is one feature of Sallis’ radicality: his continual shattering of the expectations we have and his rewriting of the starting points of our understanding. Sallis’ work is distinguished by what seems to be an unerring homing instinct for what is original, for a return to sources, to the birthplace of what needs to be thought. Appropriately, Sallis’ work has itself given birth to so much; it has opened up new ways of understanding and with that previously unimagined futures. 

John Sallis died on February 18th, 2025.