George Heffernan
Professor
Philosophy
Ph.D., University of Cologne
Professor George Heffernan has a B.A. and an M.A. from the Catholic University of America and a Ph.D. from the University of Cologne. He also holds the highest degree in the German Language awarded by the Goethe Institute of Munich as well as the diploma of a State-Certified Translator and Interpreter for the German Language granted by the city of Bonn. He specializes in contemporary European philosophy, particularly phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism, concentrating on questions of evidence, meaning, and understanding. He is also competent in various epistemologies from ancient to modern times.
Professor Heffernan has presented papers in a dozen countries on four continents, including at the World Congress of Philosophy, the International Husserl Circle, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, the International Humanities Conference, the American Philosophical Association, the Society of Scholars of Christian Antiquity, and the Society for Eighteenth Century Studies.
Professor Heffernan has also published numerous books, including one in the renowned series Phaenomenologica, as well as numerous articles, including several both in Husserl Studies and in the International Journal of the Humanities. He has received many awards from academic institutions, including the Basselin Foundation, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame, and the German Academic Exchange Service. He has also received a Liberal Arts Faculty Fellowship from Merrimack College and several Thagaste Symposium Awards from the Center for Augustinian Study. He organizes the Annual Cassiciacum Dialogue at Merrimack College. He is completing an edition of Augustine’s Against the Academicians that situates the text within the horizon of the perennial issues raised by Hellenistic skepticism, recast by Cartesian rationalism, and revised by contemporary epistemology.
Professor Heffernan enjoys traveling to world culture sites, for example, the obscure Athenian city-state prison of the Classical period, the most likely location at which Socrates drank the hemlock.