Each volume of this series of Companions to major philosophers contains specially-commissioned essays by an international team of scholars, together with a substantial bibliography, and will serve as a reference work for students and non-specialists. The contributors to this Companion probe the full depth of Kierkegaard's thought revealing its distinctive subtlety. The topics covered include Kierkegaard's views on art and religion, ethics and psychology, theology and politics, and knowledge and virtue. Much attention is devoted to the pervasive influence of Kierkegaard (...) in twentieth-century philosophy. New readers will find this the a convenient and accessible guide to Kierkegaard. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Kierkegaard. (shrink)

On Harrison Hall's reading, Kierkegaard uses the terms translated ?eternal happiness? and ?salvation? to refer to a quality of this?worldly life. As I understand him, the author denies that Kierkegaard believed in an afterlife. While acknowledging the vein of meanings that ?Love and Death . . .? point to, I argue that Kierkegaard did in fact look forward to an eternal life in the traditional, Biblical, and so?called common sense of the term. In connection with his views on the question (...) of salvation, Hall holds, and I take issue, that for Kierkegaard Christianity has a minimal objective content. (shrink)

This volume on anthropology and authority in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) offers its reader nineteen timely discussions of two fundamental categories pertaining to the literary, philosophical, and theological production of this prominent 19th century Danish thinker, whose vast influence upon 20th century intellectual life continues to grow as the new millennium approaches. The volume's nineteen contributors - from Canada, Denmark, Great Britain, Holland, Hungary, Italy, and the United States - inquire into such complex problematics in Kierkegaard's oeuvre as (...) the interrelationship between the human, the divine, and the spiritual; between the secular and the Christian; between human and Christian love; between state and church institutions and the single individual of faith; and between this individual's concern for quality in civic and religious life and the quantitative forces of modern society's masses and crowds. Special attention is given to the indisputable authority of God, Christ, and the apostles as opposed to the debatable authority, or non-authority, of the author. Of particular interest is the nexus between Kierkegaard's existential and religious concerns, on the one hand, and his intricate textual conceptions, multifarious poetic strategies, and various means of pseudonymous and indirect communication, on the other. Between the covers of Anthropology and Authority some chapters seek to refine received knowledge of Kierkegaard in such disciplines as theology and moral philosophy. Conversely, other chapters submit rather postmodern critiques of the author's stylistic and rhetorical devices. A summary assessment of the nineteen contributions would fail to recognize this considerable methodological and theoretical diversity. Instead, the reader's access to the smorgasbord of insights has been facilitated by an introduction in which one of the American editors briefly outline the individual contributions on a general historical and intellectual background. Altogether, the probing insights of Anthropology and Authority go to the core of Søren Kierkegaard's authorship. Individual chapters either update previous responses to the many challenges presented by this work, or the chapters face new challenges and/or present critical challenges on their own. (shrink)

Taking Kierkegaard Personally: First Person Responses is a one-of-a-kind volume in which scholars from the world over address personal, existential lessons that Kierkegaard has taught them. Papers were selected from the June 2018 International Kierkegaard Conference, sponsored by the Howard V. and Edna H. Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College. The Conference's prompt-The Wisdom of Kierkegaard: What Existential Lessons Have You Learned from Him?-compelled scholars to drop their guards and write primarily in first person narrative instead of standard third (...) person scholarly/professorial narrative. Papers range from a preacher in Texas discussing how this white nineteenth-century Dane's thought speaks to black issues, to a university development director wondering what Kierkegaard can teach Silicon Valley executives, to a Danish scholar struggling with human autonomy versus dependence on God, to a Jewish scholar finding hope in this Danish Protestant's works in which existential alienation from the world is the norm, to a Nigerian scholar introducing Kierkegaard's "single individual" into his Ndi Igbo community (a tribe predicated not on the individual but the collective), to a Slovak scholar surviving a bad divorce, to an Hispanic scholar's passion to teach Kierkegaard along the U.S.-Mexico border to Hispanic students, to an American scholar fielding his father's questions about suicide, to other scholars suffering from and coping with deaths of parents, raising children, working in trauma units, finding the need for self-denial in flourishing countries, preaching valuable sermons, dealing with college campus/department politics, and living perfectly quotidian lives. (shrink)

An anthology representing 2,500 years of thought covers a broad range of topics from justice, morality, and faith to animal rights and gender issues and includes writings from such classic and contemporary thinkers as Plato, Kant, Susan Wolf, and Peter Singer.

On the value of public philosophy, both the present writer and the author of Across Black Spaces concur that when it comes to nontechnical issues, philosophers ought to be able to make themselves clear to educated nonspecialists. In terms of our public philosophy, I am not as fixated as Yancy in forcing readers to ‘unsuture themselves’ so as to acknowledge their racist beliefs and feelings. In The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, Nietzsche contends that the criterion for a (...) good look into our past should be an answer to the question, ‘Does the historical study improve the present health of our culture?’ I argue that in some respects Yancy’s work falls short of achieving this end. Throughout, Yancy demands space for a philosophy based on Blackness. In contrast, I join Ralph Ellison and Martin Luther King Jr. in looking forward to what the late Congressman John Lewis termed ‘the blessed community’, that is, one in which we all see each other as brothers and sisters. I endeavor to defend my views against the inevitable charge that many of my judgements can be dismissed as manifestations of White privilege. (shrink)

There are religious thinkers of Kierkegaard's ilk who concede that their belief in an afterlife is the expression of a wish and an offense to the understanding. Freud could not agree more. The collision that this essay plots comes when a Freud and a Kierkegaard try to decide what the individual is to do with such inherently human, unrealistic desires. Freud urges us to forsake all wish?fulfilling thoughts of everlasting life; however, this requires nothing less than the acceptance of imminent, (...) everlasting death. This is a difficult thought to think I half argue, half insist. The question is raised as to whether or not psychoanalysis can help us come to terms with the reality it compels us to face. A negative conclusion is reached. (shrink)

Anxiety -- Depression -- Death -- Authenticity -- Faith -- Ethics -- Love.

The reader who is acquainted with Niels Thulstrup's introduction and commentary to Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments will know precisely what to expect from Thulstrup's introduction and commentary to the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to those fragments. There is, however, one unsurprising difference--of the two, the Postscript is the grander, more sweeping source text and Thulstrup has mirrored this fact in the length and breadth of his prefatory remarks.

Still edited by Frank Kermode, the Modern Masters series continues with one significant change--the masters are the authors, not the subject matter. In one of the first three works to appear in this series, now called Masterguides, Leszek Kolakowski has penned more than the introduction promised on the dust jacket of his Religion.

Still edited by Frank Kermode, the Modern Masters series continues with one significant change--the masters are the authors, not the subject matter. In one of the first three works to appear in this series, now called Masterguides, Leszek Kolakowski has penned more than the introduction promised on the dust jacket of his Religion.

The penultimate sentence of The Logic of Subjectivity reads, "Kierkegaard is not the sort of thinker who can easily be captured for all time in a series of syllogisms". This may be true, but let it never be said that the author of this book has not tried. In an appendix that really ought to have come first, Louis Pojman treats the how and why of Kierkegaard's method of indirect communication. With these essential pages always ahead and reservations scattered around, (...) he ferrets out arguments implicit in Kierkegaard's pseudonymous texts, primarily the Philosophical Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Contra Mackey, the author asserts that Kierkegaard was something more or at least other than a "kind of poet." His axial point is that Kierkegaard can and should be understood as a philosopher, and here the scholar means a maker and defender of arguments. (shrink)

Thanks in large part to a stimulating article by David Wisdo, Kierkegaard scholars have of late been very much taken up with the question, Was Kierkegaard a volitionalist on matters of faith? That is, did Kierkegaard understand faith to be an act of will or an ineffable gift of grace? In this signal contribution to Kierkegaard scholarship, Ferreira tries to deconstruct this and other dichotomies.