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While many studies of On the Concept of Irony treat Kierkegaard's "irony" primarily from a literary perspective,The Isolated Self also examines irony with an eye to the fundamental problem in Kierkegaard's authorship, namely, the challenge of becoming a "self." Kierkegaard's "irony" is a cavalier way of life that seeks isolation from the other - an isolation he considers necessary to becoming a self. At the same time, irony is said to be a hindrance to selfhood because the self fails to become a part of the social world in which it resides. The Isolated Self thus puts the existential tension of On the Concept of Irony into relief and suggests how it sets the stage for the rest of Kierkegaard's authorship. The Isolated Self reconstructs the horizon of understanding during Kierkegaard's time, including Hegel's interpretation of both Socratic irony and Friedrich Schlegel's romantic irony. In addition, the work explores material from the little-known Danish discussion of irony in the works of Poul Martin Møller, Johan Ludvig Heiberg and Hans Lassen Martensen.
Søren Kierkegaard’s authorship exhibits two different trajectories concerning the relation of responsible human agency to sovereign divine agency: one trajectory stresses free human striving, while the other trajectory emphasizes the dominance of divine agency. The first theme led to the view of Kierkegaard as the champion of autonomous existential “leaps,” while the second led to the construal of Kierkegaard as a devout Lutheran who trusted absolutely in God’s gracious governance. Lee C. Barrett argues that Kierkegaard, influenced by Kant’s critique of metaphysics, did not attempt to integrate human and divine agencies in any speculative theory. Instead, Kierkegaard deploys them ...
This book is an attempt to write about Kierkegaard’s philosophy in the style of Kierkegaard’s philosophy: energetic, playful, free spirited, surprising, and joyous. It is a deliberately crumby book in the sense that it seeks out the fragments, scraps, and crumbs of philosophical arguments that are generally ignored or swept away, like so much rubbish, but that are actually the most interesting parts of the meal. The Anti-Assistant-Professor Method that this book follows adopts Kierkegaard’s many excellent jokes about assistant professors as a guide to how not to write about Kierkegaard’s philosophy; specifically: • Don’t cease to be human. • Don’t be a parasite, merely feedin...
Ethical Silence: Kierkegaard on Communication, Education, andHumility examines a new area of Kierkegaard scholarship: the ethical value of silence. Through exegesis of Kierkegaard’s later writings, works in what is known as his second authorship, Sergia Hay argues that silence is an essential element of his Christian ethics. Starting with an overview of Kierkegaard’s ideas concerning ethics and communication, Hay builds a case for a Kierkegaardian notion of ethical silence by showing how silence contributes to the fulfillment of ethical imperatives by halting chatter, setting the “fundamental tone” for ethical activity, curbing excessive self-love, and providing another mode for educating and expressing love. Most importantly, silence can be used to humble the self and elevate the neighbor, creating conditions of Christian equality. Ethical silence is not the silence of the ineffable or what cannot be said, this is the silence of what can be said but should not.
The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard brings together an outstanding selection of contemporary specialists and uniquely combines work on the background and context of Kierkegaard's writings, exposition of his key ideas, and a survey of his influence and heritage.
Few philosophers have devoted such sustained, almost obsessive attention to the topic of death as Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard and Death brings together new work on Kierkegaard's multifaceted discussions of death and provides a thorough guide to the development, in various texts and contexts, of Kierkegaard's ideas concerning death. Essays by an international group of scholars take up essential topics such as dying to the world, living death, immortality, suicide, mortality and subjectivity, death and the meaning of life, remembrance of the dead, and the question of the afterlife. While bringing Kierkegaard's philosophy of death into focus, this volume connects Kierkegaard with important debates in contemporary philosophy.
I would like to write a novel in which the main character would be a man who got a pair of glasses, one lens of which reduced images as powerfully as an oxyhydrogen microscope, and the other of which magnified on the same scale, so that he perceived everything relatively. ? A flight of fancy by an aspiring science fiction writer? While it may sound as such, this wistful musing is one of the little-discussed personal reflections of nineteenth-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, whose remarkable journals and notebooks, unpublished during his lifetime, are presented here. The first of an eleven-volume series produced by Copenhagen's Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, this volume is the fir...
Soren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony, and the Crisis of Modernity examines the thought of Soren Kierkegaard, a unique figure, who has inspired, provoked, fascinated, and irritated people ever since he walked the streets of Copenhagen. At the end of his life, Kierkegaard said that the onlymodel he had for his work was the Greek philosopher Socrates. This work takes this statement as its point of departure. Jon Stewart explores what Kierkegaard meant by this and to show how different aspects of his writing and argumentative strategy can be traced back to Socrates. The main focus isThe Concept of Irony, which is a key text at the beginning of Kierkegaard's literary career. Although it was an early work, it nevertheless played a determining role in his later development and writings. Indeed, it can be said that it laid the groundwork for much of what would appear in his laterfamous books such as Either/Or and Fear and Trembling.
Nihilism – the belief that life is meaningless – is frequently associated with twentieth-century movements such as existentialism, postmodernism and Dadaism, and thought to result from the shocking experiences of the two World Wars and the Holocaust. In his rich and expansive new book, Jon Stewart shows that nihilism's beginnings in fact go back much further to the first half of the nineteenth century. He argues that the true origin of modern nihilism was the rapid development of Enlightenment science, which established a secular worldview. This radically diminished the importance of human beings so that, in the vastness of space and time, individuals now seemed completely insignificant within the universe. The author's panoramic exploration of how nihilism developed – not only in philosophy, but also in religion, poetry and literature – shows what an urgent topic it was for thinkers of all kinds, and how it has continued powerfully to shape intellectual debates ever since.
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.