Concluding

Søren Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript has provoked a lively variety of divergent interpretations for a century and a half. It has been both celebrated and condemned as the chief inspiration for twentieth-century existential thought, as a subversive parody of philosophical argument, as a critique of mass society, as a forerunner of phenomenology and of postmodern relativism, and as an appeal for a renewal of religious commitment. These 2010 essays written by international Kierkegaard scholars offer a plurality of critical approaches to this fundamental text of existential philosophy. They cover hotly debated topics such as the tension between the Socratic-philosophical and the Christian-religious; the identity and personality of Kierkegaard's pseudonym 'Johannes Climacus'; his conceptions of paradoxical faith and of passionate understanding; his relation to his contemporaries and to some of his more distant predecessors; and, last but not least, his pertinence to our present-day concerns.

The writings of Kierkegaard continue to be a fertile source for con temporary philosophical thought. Perhaps the most interesting of his works to a philosopher is the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments. The Fragments is a brief, algebraic piece in which the author attempts to put forward the central teachings of Christianity in philosophical terminology. The. work is addressed to a reader who has a philosophical bent and who may therefore be tempted to relate to Christianity via such questions as: Can the truth of Christian ity be established? The analysis of the Fragments establishes that this way of relating to Christianity is misguided, since Christianity and phil osophy are categorically different. Having done this, the author turns his attention in the Postscript to the question of how an individual human being can properly establish a relationship to Christianity. In order to become a Christian, one must first of all exist. "Nothing more than thatP' one may be tempted to think. Yet at the very core of the Postscript is the notion that to exist as an individual human being is difficult. The author goes so far as to claim that men have forgotten what it means to exist.

This book draws upon the work of Georg Simmel to explore the limits, tensions and dynamism of social life through a close analysis of the works produced in the final years of his life and reveals what they might still offer some 100 years later. Focusing on the relationships between worlds, lives and fragments in these works, David Beer opens up a conceptual toolkit for understanding life as both an individual experience and as a deeply social phenomenon. Taking the reader through artistic and musical forms of inspiration, to the problems of culture and on to the conceptual understanding of lived experience, the book illuminates the richness of Simmel’s ideas and thinking. This sophisticated dialogue with Simmel’s lesser known later works will provide fresh insights for students and scholars of cultural and social theory and pave the way for a reinvigorated engagement with his ideas.

In the first comprehensive commentary on Soren Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript the eminent Kierkegaard specialist Niels Thulstrup clarifies the book's intricate allusions to the thought and literature of its own and past ages. A central work both in Kierkegaard's authorship and in the history of philosophy, the Postscript breaks completely with a long tradition of religious and philosophical thought. In his introduction and commentary, presented here in translation from the Danish, Professor Thulstrup explains this break and the unique relationship of the work to Kierkegaard's other books. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.