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Søren Kierkegaard is a fascinating author. Living shortly after the dawn of modernity in the Enlightenment, he restates classical Christianity in dynamic fashion. His Lutheran heritage is vital here as he places ‘faith’ over ‘reason’. Yet Kierkegaard also holds decidedly pre-modern epistemological presuppositions that are supportive of his endeavour. After an initial chapter on Kierkegaard's intellectual milieu, the book expounds with reference to the philosophical and historical context of seven of his major texts, ranging across theological, ethical, social and political questions. A final chapter, on an autobiographical text, allows for an estimate of Kierkegaard as a person. The book does not however simply depict Kierkegaard. In the ‘Critique’ with which each chapter concludes, the book carries on a lively debate with Kierkegaard. Questions range from his indifference to biblical historical criticism, his lack of a sense for causality and for the regularity of nature, and his early a-political outlook. Whatever one's theological evaluation, Kierkegaard has insights that are abiding; into the nature of the self in relation to God, the manner of according dignity to others, and the need to prioritise rightly in life.

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.

This study engages in a detailed examination of Kierkegaard's works of literary and dramatic criticism, including those works directed at interpreting Kierkegaard's own authorship, with a specific concern for both what Kierkegaard and Kierkegaard's anonyms and pseudonyms write about the nature and practice of authorship, as well as how the Kierkegaardian authors practice authorship themselves. Moving through five chapters, each devoted to one or more works of Kierkegaard's criticism, the study develops a new approach to reading Kierkegaard – a new Kierkegaardian hermeneutic – that begins always with the character of the author. This new approach avoids the challenges of critics of biographical criticism, such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, by positing the author always as a work of fiction him- or herself, the creation of an unknown and ever anonymous \"author of the author\".

In Kierkegaard's Instant, David J. Kangas reads Kierkegaard to reveal his radical thinking about temporality. For Kierkegaard, the instant of becoming, in which everything changes in the blink of an eye, eludes recollection and anticipation. It constitutes a beginning always already at work. As Kangas shows, Kierkegaard's retrieval of the sudden quality of temporality allows him to stage a deep critique of the idealist projects of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. By linking Kierkegaard's thought to the tradition of Meister Eckhart, Kangas formulates the central problem of these early texts and puts them into contemporary light -- can thinking hold itself open to the challenges of temporality?.

Pursuing Jacques Derrida's reflections on the possibility of religion without religion, John Llewelyn makes room for a sense of the religious that does not depend on the religions or traditional notions of God or gods. Beginning with Derrida's statement that it was Kierkegaard to whom he remained most faithful, Llewelyn reads Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Deleuze, Marion, as well as Kierkegaard and Derrida, in original and compelling ways. Llewelyn puts religiousness in vital touch with the struggles of the human condition, finding religious space in the margins between the secular and the religions, transcendence and immanence, faith and knowledge, affirmation and despair, lucidity and madness. This provocative and philosophically rich account shows why and where the religious matters.

An accessible and original exploration of the theological and philosophical significance of Kierkegaard's religious thought.

\"The day will come when not only my writings, but precisely my life--the intriguing secret of all the machinery--will be studied and studied.\" Søren Kierkegaard's remarkable combination of genius and peculiarity made this a fair if arrogant prediction. But Kierkegaard's life has been notoriously hard to study, so complex was the web of fact and fiction in his work. Joakim Garff's biography of Kierkegaard is thus a landmark achievement. A seamless blend of history, philosophy, and psychological insight, all conveyed with novelistic verve, this is the most comprehensive and penetrating account yet written of the life and works of the enigmatic Dane who changed the course of intellectual history. Garff portrays Kierkegaard not as the all-controlling impresario behind some of the most important works of modern philosophy and religious thought--books credited with founding existentialism and prefiguring postmodernism--but rather as a man whose writings came to control him. Kierkegaard saw himself as a vessel for his writings, a tool in the hand of God, and eventually as a martyr singled out to call for the end of \"Christendom.\" Garff explores the events and relationships that formed Kierkegaard, including his guilt-ridden relationship with his father, his rivalry with his brother, and his famously tortured relationship with his fiancée Regine Olsen. He recreates the squalor and splendor of Golden Age Copenhagen and the intellectual milieu in which Kierkegaard found himself increasingly embattled and mercilessly caricatured. Acclaimed as a major cultural event on its publication in Denmark in 2000, this book, here presented in an exceptionally crisp and elegant translation, will be the definitive account of Kierkegaard's life for years to come.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was first and foremost a Christian thinker who is perhaps best known for his devastating attack upon Christendom or the established order of his time. Not since Luther has there been a Protestant thinker who has so uncompromisingly sought to define and present Christianity in its utmost integrity. Characterizing Christianity as an ‘existence-communication’ rather than a doctrine, Kierkegaard sought to portray what it means to be a Christian in the strictest sense in the interest of reintroducing authentic Christianity as an existential possibility for every individual in the modern age. This book explores Kierkegaard's 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 author contrasts his approach with objective ways of doing theology, which in his view falsify Christianity and the believer's relation to it. The study begins with a biographical overview of the personal and intellectual influences, theological upbringing, important events, and phases of authorship in Kierkegaard's life. The author highlights some of his most important contributions to Christian thought concerning the Christian understanding of God, and our human condition in anxiety, sin, and despair.

Few philosophers have devoted more than passing attention to similarities between the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish Christian, and Emmanuel Levinas, a French Jew. Here, one of philosophy of religion's most distinctive voices offers a sustained comparison. Focusing on questions surrounding otherness, transcendence, postmodernity, and the nature of religious thought, Merold Westphal draws readers into a dialogue between the two thinkers. Westphal's masterful command of both philosophies shows that each can learn from the other. Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue is an insightful and accessible contribution to philosophical considerations of ethics and religion.

Ironically, the philosophy of love has long been neglected by philosophers, so-called \"lovers of wisdom,\" who would seemingly need to understand how one best becomes a lover.In Kierkegaard and the Philosophy of Love, Michael Strawser shows that the philosophy of love lies at the heart of Kierkegaard's writings, as he argues that the central issue.