Richard Wolin (; born 1952) is an American intellectual historian specialising in 20th-century European philosophy, particularly German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the group of thinkers known collectively as the Frankfurt School.
Life
Wolin was born at the United States Navy's Naval Station Great Lakes near North Chicago in Lake County, Illinois as a son of Merle Wolin. In his senior year of high school, he attended the trial of the Chicago Seven, which he later recalled as a formative event.
Wolin earned a bachelor of arts from Reed College in 1974, Wolin's fresh commitment to defending "the valuable potentials for reform, contestation, and critique residing in existing democratic societies" led him to re-examine the link between Martin Heidegger (as a prominent critic of the alienation characteristic of capitalist modernity) and Nazism. Around 1991, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt, with Jürgen Habermas as his host. After the publication of his edited volume The Heidegger Controversy, he was embroiled in a public dispute with Jacques Derrida, who threatened to sue Wolin's publisher Columbia University Press over the inclusion of an interview with himself that he considered mistranslated and abused; the dispute reached a high point with an exchange between Wolin and Derrida in The New York Review of Books. He dedicated his 2001 book Heidegger's Children to Jürgen Habermas, who in turn devoted a lecture at the CUNY Graduate Center in November of the same year to it.