For the first time in English the world community of scholars is systematically assembling and presenting the results of recent research in the vast literature of Soren Kierkegaard. Based on the definitive English edition of Kierkegaard's works by Princeton University Press, this series of commentaries addresses all the published texts of the influential Danish philosopher and theologian.

Stewart’s book reminds one of Voltaire’s remark to the effect that history is the trick that the living play on the dead. In that spirit, careful readers must critically consider Stewart’s reconsiderations to discover his tricks. This review is only a beginning, for this important book will be debated for years to come.

Hegel’s philosophy is a response to the bifurcations and antinomies that developed in Western philosophy particularly in the modern period. Although one is tempted to think that the mistakes in modern philosophy emanate from the false start of Descartes, the real trouble began much earlier. In Hegel’s perspective at least, Descartes is more a symptom than the cause of the limitations of modern philosophy. Besides, even though Descartes made his mistakes, there is a fundamental respect for Descartes in Hegel’s philosophy. (...) In this essay I shall begin with a comment on the perplexities and false starts in modern epistemology, centering on the concept of perspectivity and its opposite, objectivity. This approach is unusual, but it will throw fresh light on Hegel’s epistemology as a critical reflection upon this dichotomy. Second, I shall offer some comments on Descartes’ epistemology as a struggle against perspectivism. Finally, I shall evaluate Hegel’s effort to succeed where Descartes failed. This paper views Hegel in the context of a limited problem rather than as an innovator of revolutionary proportions, though he may indeed be such. In a very real sense modern epistemology grows out of a dispute over perspectivity and objectivity, the latter being understood, rather simply, as a mode of understanding which lacks perspective, interest, and “subjectivity.” That negative approach to subjectivity is now reflected in everyday speech and in a lot of chatter one hears around the campus. It is much easier to say what objectivity is not than to say what it is. Historically, objectivity is related to some fundamental theological notions. From a theological standpoint, objectivity is considered to be the mode of understanding that shares or is equivalent to divine knowledge, i.e., God’s knowledge of the world, a knowledge which is sub specie aeternitatis. Objectivity permits us to grasp the world as it really is, not from this or that perspective. Objectivity is a knowledge that is so certain, so clear, so distinct, so universal, so necessary, finally so coherent and so complete that it grasps totality without any qualification. That is a high and mixed expectation for human knowledge. That this exalted claim for human knowledge should be contested should cause no surprise whatsoever. (shrink)

This work admirably continues Thulstrup’s effort to set forth the philosophical, historical, and literary contexts of the works of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous Johannes Climacus. Howard Hong admirably translated Thulstrup’s introduction and commentary to the Philosophical Fragments and Robert J. Widenmann has succeeded as well here.

Prof. Robinson has presented a compactly written and tightly organized work on a major section of the Phenomenology. In fact one suspects that if it were not all too compact it would be easier going. Still it has its own way of being clear and it is much easier going than Hegel’s own text. We are all indebted to Prof. Robinson.

Kierkegaard’s views of knowledge and moral psychology provide insights into certain issues that Habermas treats at length: multiculturalism and the Historikerstreit. Kierkegaard’s concept of subjective truth sustains the universality necessary to oppose racism,sexism, nationalism, fundamentalism, and the economic imperialism characteristic of some postnational states. Habermas expands Kierkegaard’s ethical concept of “choosing oneself” to politics and historiography in the debate over the Holocaust. To be a self, onemust accept responsibility for one’s “good and evil.” Likewise a nation creates its national identity (...) through the choice and enforcement of public policies, especially educational content, which subtly and pervasively create a sense of the nation. Thus a nation must acknowledge its wrongs and crimes. This robust choice enables persons to loyally witness against their nation’s history, free themselves from an inherited guilt-consciousness, and develop a freer and more cohesive politics. (shrink)

This volume contains the first English translation of three of Martensen’s earliest publications. They are The Autonomy of Human Self-Consciousness in Modern Dogmatic Theology, Meister Eckhart: A Study in Speculative Theology, and Outline of a System of Moral Philosophy. The first and third of these essays were translated by Thompson, who also wrote the introduction to the volume. The essay on Eckhart was translated by Kangas.

Kierkegaard recognized that the changes ushered in by the revolutions of 1848 would profoundly affect human existence in both its political and personal dimensions. At the political level he was concerned that the new forms of government would not be able to govern any more effectively than the previous forms. Loquacity would be substituted for policy. Then, too, the new forms of government encouraged confusion about the actual locus of power; the appearances and the reality of power did not conform. (...) Also, the actual state represents ?interests?, and as a result, justice is jeopardized. To be sure, compromise will be evident in such an actual state, but is governing possible in and through such conflictual arrangements? What is the relation of the press (media) to the public, and these in turn to politics? (shrink)

In Either/Or, Part One, Kierkegaard presents what he calls the aesthetic form of life. There he focuses on a large variety of the stereotypical views of women, from a sentimental and whining appraisal of her position in the world, through the view that sexual exploitation is an uncontrollable natural instinct and/or drive for which men are not morally responsible, to the view that woman is a jest, not to be taken seriously as a moral and responsible being, and then that (...) she is just there as a sexual object or plaything to be reflectively seduced on the male's terms and for his pleasure or rejection, whatever suits him at the moment. Needless to say, this great variety of views of the "uses" of woman has provoked a large critique, and just as predictably, that critique is as varied as the intellectual tools available for the analysis of a work that is as literary as it is philosophic. The present collection of essays treats these and many other of the most important issues raised in Either/Or in fresh and perceptive ways. Even where familiar themes are argued, the authors introduce innovative interpretive models, new approaches and new materials are appealed to, or new rebuttal arguments against previously held positions are offered. Several of the articles, for instance, appropriate or criticize methods or insights derived from postmodernism and/or feminist philosophy, an approach that would have been unlikely two decades ago. (shrink)

This collection is the first focused effort to bring modern research techniques to bear on Kierkegaard's earliest polemical writings and literary efforts as gathered in the first volume of Kierkegaard's Writings under the title Early Polemical Writings. Some of these pieces--the speech at the student union, "Our Journalistic Literature," and the rather strident, though silly, play, "The Battle between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars"--were not published during Kierkegaard's lifetime.

For the first time in English the world community of scholars is systematically assembling and presenting the results of recent research in the vast literature of Soren Kierkegaard. Based on the definitive English edition of Kierkegaard's works by Princeton University Press, this series of commentaries addresses all the published texts of the influential Danish philosopher and theologian.

This volume of the International Kierkegaard Commentary is offered to our readers, whom we invite to learn what they can here and then to become our teachers by ...

"Practice in Christianity is the second volume in what could be called the "collected Works" of "Anti-Climacus," Kierkegaard's new pseudonym. Anti-Climacus's first volume, The Sickness Unto Death, appeared just a year earlier in 1849. The use of a pseudonym is consistent with Kierkegaard's usual practice when presenting an idealized statement of his subject, be it sexual seduction or Christian theology. Anti-Climacus argues the conceptual content of Christianity against the "leading thought of the times" and also against the ethical and social (...) import of the comforts and consolations of bourgeois culture and religion which he called "Christendom." In his own mind at least, Kierkegaards presents Christianity as it must be thought and lived if it is to be authentic. The Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity can be and are read quite independently, but jointly they provide the basis of Kierkegaard's devastating critique of a secularized, culturally homogenized, and tame Christianity. The authors of the studies in this present volume, Merold Westphal, Paul R. Sponheim, Murray A. Rae, Niels Jorgen Cappelorn, Sylvia Walsh, David D. Possen, Andrew J. Burgess, Christian Fink Tolstrup, Robert L. Perkins, and Wanda Warren Berry, raise a wide spectrum of issues regarding Practice in Christianity, its theology, its moral and religious psychology, and its cultural, social, and political world" --. (shrink)

For the first time in English the world community of scholars is systematically assembling and presenting the results of recent research in the vast literature of Soren Kierkegaard. Based on the definitive English edition of Kierkegaard's works by Princeton University Press, this series of commentaries addresses all the published texts of the influential Danish philosopher and theologian.

For the first time in English the world community of scholars is systematically assembling and presenting the results of recent research in the vast literature of Soren Kierkegaard. Based on the definitive English edition of Kierkegaard's works by Princeton University Press, this series of commentaries addresses all the published texts of the influential Danish philosopher and theologian.

For the first time in English the world community of scholars is systematically assembling and presenting the results of recent research in the vast literature of Soren Kierkegaard. Based on the definitive English edition of Kierkegaard's works by Princeton University Press, this series of commentaries addresses all the published texts of the influential Danish philosopher and theologian.

Written with the general reader in mind, this collection will prove useful by both scholar and student, and will lead the general reader to encounter one of the ...