Soren Kierkegaard's Works of Love, a series of deliberations on the commandment to love one's neighbor, has often been condemned by critics. Here, Ferreira seeks to rehabilitate Works of Love as one of Kierkegaard's most important works. He shows that Kierkegaard's deliberations on love are highly relevant to some important themes in contemporary ethics, including impartiality, duty, equality, mutuality, reciprocity, self-love, sympathy, and sacrifice. Ferreira also argues that Works of Love bears on issues peculiar to a religious ethic, such as (...) the role of God as "middle term," and the possibility of preserving the aesthetic dimensions of love in a religious ethic of relation. (shrink)

Augustine famously claimed that the virtues of pagan Rome were nothing more than splendid vices. This critique reinvented itself as a suspicion of acquired virtue as such, and true Christian virtue has, ever since, been set against a false, hypocritical virtue alleged merely to conceal pride. _Putting On Virtue_ reveals how a distrust of learned and habituated virtue shaped both early modern Christian moral reflection and secular forms of ethical thought. Jennifer Herdt develops her claims through an argument of broad (...) historical sweep, which brings together the Aristotelian tradition as taken up by Thomas Aquinas with the early modern thinkers who shaped modern liberalism. In chapters on Luther, Bunyan, the Jansenists, Mandeville, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant, she argues that efforts to make a radical distinction between true Christian virtue and its tainted imitations actually created an autonomous natural ethics separate from Christianity. This secular value system valorized pride and authenticity, while rendering graced human agency less meaningful. Ultimately, _Putting On Virtue_ traces a path from suspicion of virtue to its secular inversion, from confession of dependence to assertion of independence. (shrink)

Traces the search for evidence that Kierkegaard was familiar with the works of Kant, sparked by the observation that Kierkegaard's treatment of ethics and sin is organized exactly as Kant's treatment of the same topics, and even seems to ...

The first comprehensive introduction to cover the entire span of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Explores how the two strands of his writing—religious discourses and pseudonymous literary creations—influenced each other Accompanies the reader chronologically through all the philosopher’s major works, and integrates his writing into his biography Employs a unique “how to” approach to help the reader discover individual texts on their own and to help them closely examine Kierkegaard’s language Presents the literary strategies employed in Kierkegaard’s work to give the reader insight (...) into subtext. (shrink)