A walk on the Wild side

Roger Duncan

in: Jung (ed), Remembering John Wild, Continental Philosophy Review 44 (3), 2011.

Abstract

I first met John Wild, and I have only the vaguest recall of this event, when, accompanying a student who was looking into graduate school, we visited Wild in his office at Northwestern in Evanston, Ill. He had been brought there to head its heavily phenomenological and existentialist philosophy department. The visit was a matter of more or less glancing into his office and getting my first image of him sitting behind a desk, a way I was to see him often, with variations, never it seemed sitting quite up straight but squirming like some mischievous but welcoming, chain-smoking, walleyed monster who didn’t quite belong there. Not that you could see him doing something else, like construction work or skiing; Wild belonged in academia, was bred to it, wore the tweedy emblems of it, yet he would be always shaking his head at it, making excuses for it or chiding it, in one way or another at odds with it. He growled and rasped when he talked, and he growled then, not a malicious growl but...

Cited authors

Wild John