Online research in philosophy

This paper is a review essay of Daniel Berthold’s The Ethics of Authorship. Therein, Berthold depicts Hegel and Kierkegaard as endorsing two postmodern principles. The first is an ethical ideal. Authors should abdicate their traditional privileged position as arbiters of their texts’ meaning. They ought to allow readers to determine this meaning for themselves. In so doing, they will help readers attain genuine selfhood. The second principle is a claim about language. To wit, language cannot express an author’s thoughts or feelings. I argue that if the claim about language is true, it renders the ethical ideal superfluous. In addition, I argue that if Berthold has identified Hegel and Kierkegaard’s actual ethics of authorship, i.e. if he has discovered the views they actually believed, then either they have failed to execute their ethical project or their views about language are false.

This note is in part a response to Alastair Hannay's review discussion, ?A Kind of Philosopher: Comments in Connection with Some Recent Books on Kierkegaard? (Inquiry, Vol. 18 [1975], No. 3). In his review, Hannay states that Kierkegaard and philosophy appear to be on the road to a reconciliation, and asks What is behind this get?together if it is one??. I suggest that in some remarks touching on Kierkegaard's theory of Truth, Hannay has touched on the ground for that ?get?together?, a Pyrrhonian scepticism.

In this paper I argue that Kierkegaard endorses Hegel's theory of mediation, the view that relative opposites are mediated. However, I show that Kierkegaard denies Hegel's thesis that there are all and only relative opposites. I develop two of his arguments against this thesis. The first is existential. This argument comes from the dramatic interplay between A, the often disagreeable aesthete of Either/Or I, and Judge William, the dutiful ethicist of Either/Or II. Judge William convincingly argues that the possibility of future aiming human projects is rendered obsolete if aesthetic and ethical forms of existence are mediated opposites. The second is philosophical. This second argument is offered by Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. I show that Climacus issues a reductio argument that I call "the argument from insufficient difference.".

Despite his persistent polemics against the Hegelian 'speculative' philosophy, Kierkegaard recognized his own 'enigmatic respect for Hegel', and one of his pseudonyms (Johannes Climacus) even acknowledged that his 'own energies are for the most part consecrated to the service' of speculation. Nowhere are Kierkegaard's energies more productively devoted to this service than in the work of his last pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, "The Sickness Unto Death." In this essay, I argue that not only are there structural parallels between the anatomy of despair in "The Sickness Unto Death" and the analysis of the 'unhappy consciousness' in Hegel's "Phenomenology," but that there are striking parallels in terms of the actual content of the respective accounts. I develop these parallels in order, finally, to reconsider the terrain of difference between Kierkegaard's Christian therapeutics of despair and Hegel's phenomenological therapeutics.

Introduction : Rorschach tests -- A question of style -- Live or tell -- Kierkegaard's seductions -- Hegel's seductions -- Talking cures -- A penchant for disguise : the death (and rebirth) of the author in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche -- Passing over : the death of the author in Hegel -- Conclusion : the melancholy of having finished -- Aftersong : from low down.

Philosophically, Søren Kierkegaard was the “bridge” that led from Hegel to Existentialism. Kierkegaard abhorred Hegel’s abstract, know-it-all idealism that tried to capture reality in a few words. Kierkegaard’s attack on social and religious complacency and his single-handed assault on traditional Western philosophy generated a crisis that produced a radically new way of philosophizing and made him the founder of the school that would later be called Existentialism. To Kierkegaard, reality was personal, subjective–it began and ended with the individual–and philosophy was not something one merely talked about, it was the way you lived. Kierkegaard For Beginners explains, plainly and simply, the great Danish thinker’s obsession with the particularity of human existence as well as his demonstration of how the creation of an authentic new kind of individual is possible.

Hegel and the myth of reason -- Hegel's phenomenology as a systematic fragment -- The architectonic of Hegel's Phenomenology of spirit -- Points of contact in the philosophy of religion of Hegel and Schopenhauer -- Kierkegaard's criticism of the absence of ethics in Hegel's system -- Kierkegaard's criticism of abstraction and his proposed solution : appropriation -- Kierkegaard's recurring criticism of Hegel's The good and conscience-- Hegel and Nietzsche on the death of tragedy and Greek ethical life -- Existentialist ethics -- Merleau-Ponty's criticisms of Sartre's theory of freedom -- Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on consciousness and bad faith.

This essay considers the critical response to Hegel's view of Socrates we find in Kierkegaard's dissertation, The Concept of Irony. I argue that this dispute turns on the question whether or not the examination of particular thinkers enters into Socrates’ most basic aims and interests. I go on to show how Kierkegaard's account, which relies on an affirmative answer to this question, enables him to provide a cogent defence of Socrates' philosophical practice against Hegel's criticisms.

Jon Stewart's groundbreaking study is a major re-evaluation of the complex relations between the philosophies of Kierkegaard and Hegel. The standard view on the subject is that Kierkegaard defined himself as explicitly anti-Hegelian, indeed that he viewed Hegel's philosophy with disdain. Jon Stewart shows convincingly that Kierkegaard's criticism was not of Hegel but of a number of contemporary Danish Hegelians. Kierkegaard's own view of Hegel was in fact much more positive to the point where he was directly influenced by some of Hegel's work. Any scholar working in the tradition of Continental philosophy will find this an insightful and provocative book with implications for the subsequent history of philosophy in the twentieth century. The book will also appeal to scholars in religious studies and the history of ideas.

Hegel, Marx, and the concept of immanent critique -- Hegel, Adorno, and the concept of transcendent critique -- Law, culture, and constitutionalism: remarks on Hegel and Habermas -- Political pluralism in Hegel and Rawls -- Hegel and the doctrine of expressivism -- Hegel, Hobbes, and Kant on the scienticization of practical philosophy -- Hegel's concept of virtue -- Political theology and modern republicanism: Hegel's conception of the state as an "earthly divinity" -- Hegel's conception of an "international" "we" -- Hegel, global justice, and the logic of recognition -- Is Hegel's philosophy of history Eurocentric?