The Philosophy of Kierkegaard

The Philosophy of Kierkegaard
Author: George Pattison
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2015-01-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317494245

Although the ideas of Soren Kierkegaard played a pivotal role in the shaping of mainstream German philosophy and the history of French existentialism, the question of how philosophers should read Kierkegaard is a difficult one to settle. His intransigent religiosity has led some philosophers to view him as essentially a religious thinker of a singularly anti-philosophical attitude who should be left to the theologians. In this major new survey of Kierkegaard's thought, George Pattison addresses this question head on and shows that although it would be difficult to claim a "philosophy of Kierkegaard" as one could a philosophy of Kant, or of Hegel, there are nevertheless significant points of common interest between Kierkegaard's central thinking and the questions that concern philosophers today. The challenge of self-knowledge in an age of moral and intellectual uncertainty that lies at the heart of Kierkegaard's writings remains as important today as it did in the culture of post-Enlightenment modernity.

Philosopher of the Heart

Philosopher of the Heart
Author: Clare Carlisle
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0374721696

Philosopher of the Heart is the groundbreaking biography of renowned existentialist Søren Kierkegaard’s life and creativity, and a searching exploration of how to be a human being in the world. Søren Kierkegaard is one of the most passionate and challenging of all modern philosophers, and is often regarded as the founder of existentialism. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen pursuing the question of existence—how to be a human being in the world?—while exploring the possibilities of Christianity and confronting the failures of its institutional manifestation around him. Much of his creativity sprang from his relationship with the young woman whom he promised to marry, then left to devote himself to writing, a relationship which remained decisive for the rest of his life. He deliberately lived in the swim of human life in Copenhagen, but alone, and died exhausted in 1855 at the age of 42, bequeathing his remarkable writings to his erstwhile fiancée. Clare Carlisle’s innovative and moving biography writes Kierkegaard’s life as far as possible from his own perspective, to convey what it was like actually being this Socrates of Christendom—as he put it, living life forwards yet only understanding it backwards.

Kierkegaard and Socrates

Kierkegaard and Socrates
Author: Jacob Howland
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2006-04-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1139452746

This volume is a study of the relationship between philosophy and faith in Søren Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments. It is also the first book to examine the role of Socrates in this body of writings, illuminating the significance of Socrates for Kierkegaard's thought. Jacob Howland argues that in the Fragments, philosophy and faith are closely related passions. A careful examination of the role of Socrates demonstrates that Socratic, philosophical eros opens up a path to faith. At the same time, the work of faith - which holds the self together with that which transcends it - is essentially erotic in the Socratic sense of the term. Chapters on Kierkegaard's Johannes Climacus and on Plato's Apology shed light on the Socratic character of the pseudonymous author of the Fragments and the role of 'the god' in Socrates' pursuit of wisdom. Howland also analyzes the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Kierkegaard's reflections on Socrates and Christ.

Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Becoming

Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Becoming
Author: Clare Carlisle
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0791482804

Søren Kierkegaard's proposal of "repetition" as the new category of truth signaled the beginning of existentialist thought, turning philosophical attention from the pursuit of objective knowledge to the movement of becoming that characterizes each individual's life. Focusing on the theme of movement in his 1843 pseudonymous texts Either/Or, Repetition, and Fear and Trembling, Clare Carlisle presents an original and illuminating interpretation of Kierkegaard's religious thought, including newly translated material, that emphasizes equally its philosophical and theological significance. Kierkegaard complained of a lack of movement not only in Hegelian philosophy but also in his own "dreadful still life," and his heroes are those who leap, dance, and make journeys—but what do these movements signify, and how are they accomplished? How can we be true to ourselves, let alone to others if we are continually becoming? Carlisle explores these questions to uncover both the philosophical and the literary coherence of Kierkegaard's notoriously enigmatic authorship.

A Confusion of the Spheres

A Confusion of the Spheres
Author: Genia Sch?nbaumsfeld
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 700
Release: 2010-03-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191614831

Cursory allusions to the relation between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are common in philosophical literature, but there has been little in the way of serious and comprehensive commentary on the relationship of their ideas. Genia Sch?nbaumsfeld closes this gap and offers new readings of Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's conceptions of philosophy and religious belief. Chapter one documents Kierkegaard's influence on Wittgenstein, while chapters two and three provide trenchant criticisms of two prominent attempts to compare the two thinkers, those by D. Z. Phillips and James Conant. In chapter four, Sch?nbaumsfeld develops Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's concerted criticisms of certain standard conceptions of religious belief, and defends their own positive conception against the common charges of 'irrationalism' and 'fideism'. As well as contributing to contemporary debate about how to read Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's work, A Confusion of the Spheres addresses issues which not only concern scholars of Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, but anyone interested in the philosophy of religion, or the ethical aspects of philosophical practice as such.

Kierkegaard's Writings, VII, Volume 7

Kierkegaard's Writings, VII, Volume 7
Author: Søren Kierkegaard
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2013-04-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 140084696X

This volume contains a new translation, with a historical introduction by the translators, of two works written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. Through Climacus, Kierkegaard contrasts the paradoxes of Christianity with Greek and modern philosophical thinking. In Philosophical Fragments he begins with Greek Platonic philosophy, exploring the implications of venturing beyond the Socratic understanding of truth acquired through recollection to the Christian experience of acquiring truth through grace. Published in 1844 and not originally planned to appear under the pseudonym Climacus, the book varies in tone and substance from the other works so attributed, but it is dialectically related to them, as well as to the other pseudonymous writings. The central issue of Johannes Climacus is doubt. Probably written between November 1842 and April 1843 but unfinished and published only posthumously, this book was described by Kierkegaard as an attack on modern speculative philosophy by "means of the melancholy irony, which did not consist in any single utterance on the part of Johannes Climacus but in his whole life. . . . Johannes does what we are told to do--he actually doubts everything--he suffers through all the pain of doing that, becomes cunning, almost acquires a bad conscience. When he has gone as far in that direction as he can go and wants to come back, he cannot do so. . . . Now he despairs, his life is wasted, his youth is spent in these deliberations. Life does not acquire any meaning for him, and all this is the fault of philosophy." A note by Kierkegaard suggests how he might have finished the work: "Doubt is conquered not by the system but by faith, just as it is faith that has brought doubt into the world!."

Subjectivity and Religious Truth in the Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

Subjectivity and Religious Truth in the Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard
Author: Merigala Gabriel
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2010
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0881461709

Merigala Gabriel's main objective is to thoroughly examine subjective truth, which is the core concept in Kierkegaard's philosophy. Here Gabriel contrast subjective truth with objective truth in order to highlight the significance of subjective truth in its religious context and to bring out the inadequacy of objective truth. The principle of absolute paradox connected with the subjective truth is also discussed. The study also aims to present a detailed analysis of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages that represent existential dialectic, to examine their interrelationship and to show how the religious mode of existence is the key to genuineness in real existence. Care is taken to examine the disjunction between reason and faith: to bring out the importance of "faith" in Christianity and to show the limitations of science as far as Christianity is concerned. Gabriel also addresses the relation between God and Man. Finally, the importance of Kierkegaard's thought and his contribution to the development of "subjectivity and religious truth" are outlined.

Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard
Author: C. Stephen Evans
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2009-04-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0521877032

This clear, readable introduction to Kierkegaard presents him as a thinker with powerful answers to the questions which philosophers ask.

Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard
Author: Sylvia Walsh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2009
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199208352

Kierkegaard was a Christian thinker perhaps best known for his devastating attack upon Christendom or the established order of his time. Sylvia Walsh explores his understanding of Christianity and the existential mode of thinking theologically appropriate to it in the context of the intellectual, cultural, and socio-political milieu of his time.

The Religion of Existence

The Religion of Existence
Author: Noreen Khawaja
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2016-12-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 022640451X

What was existentialism? At its heart, Noreen Khawaja argues, existentialism was an effort to translate Protestant piety into a secular philosophy. While there have been many attempts to define existentialism from within as a coherent philosophical program and even as a movement, Khawaja s book is the first study of existentialism from the standpoint of intellectual history and the first to look systematically at the role that Christianity played in the development of existential thought. Focusing on Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Khawaja illuminates the key moments in existentialism s reconstruction of Protestant piety within the confines of secular philosophy. Heidegger once described his work as an exercise in the piety of thinking. Khawaja s book shows the historical and systematic truth behind this metaphor. Notwithstanding Heidegger, thinking has not always been a pious act. But for a certain group of European intellectuals in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became so. "The Religion of Existence "will appeal to scholars of modern Christianity, philosophers, and historians of European philosophy, as well as those engaged with the theoretical and historical problems of secular and post-secular modernity. "