On S Ren Kierkegaard

Selected as a Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement 'This lucid and riveting new biography at once rescuses Kierkegaard from the scholars and shows why he is such an intriguing and useful figure' Observer Søren Kierkegaard, one of the most passionate and challenging of modern philosophers, is now celebrated as the father of existentialism - yet his contemporaries described him as a philosopher of the heart. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen analysing love and suffering, courage and anxiety, religious longing and defiance, and forging a new philosophical style rooted in the inward drama of being human. As Christianity seemed to sleepwalk through a changing world, Kierkegaard dazzlingly revealed its spiritual power while exposing the poverty of official religion. His restless creativity was spurred on by his own failures: his relationship with the young woman whom he promised to marry, then left to devote himself to writing, haunted him throughout his life. Though tormented by the pressures of celebrity, he deliberately lived amidst the crowds in Copenhagen, known by everyone but, he felt, understood by no one. When he collapsed exhausted at the age of 42, he was still pursuing the question of existence: how to be a human being in this world? Clare Carlisle's innovative and moving biography writes Kierkegaard's remarkable life as far as possible from his own perspective, conveying what it was like to be this Socrates of Christendom - as he put it, living life forwards yet only understanding it backwards.

This volume contains a new translation, with a historical introduction by the translators, of two works written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. Through Climacus, Kierkegaard contrasts the paradoxes of Christianity with Greek and modern philosophical thinking. In Philosophical Fragments he begins with Greek Platonic philosophy, exploring the implications of venturing beyond the Socratic understanding of truth acquired through recollection to the Christian experience of acquiring truth through grace. Published in 1844 and not originally planned to appear under the pseudonym Climacus, the book varies in tone and substance from the other works so attributed, but it is dialectically related to them, as well as to the other pseudonymous writings. The central issue of Johannes Climacus is doubt. Probably written between November 1842 and April 1843 but unfinished and published only posthumously, this book was described by Kierkegaard as an attack on modern speculative philosophy by "means of the melancholy irony, which did not consist in any single utterance on the part of Johannes Climacus but in his whole life. . . . Johannes does what we are told to do--he actually doubts everything--he suffers through all the pain of doing that, becomes cunning, almost acquires a bad conscience. When he has gone as far in that direction as he can go and wants to come back, he cannot do so. . . . Now he despairs, his life is wasted, his youth is spent in these deliberations. Life does not acquire any meaning for him, and all this is the fault of philosophy." A note by Kierkegaard suggests how he might have finished the work: "Doubt is conquered not by the system but by faith, just as it is faith that has brought doubt into the world!."

Chronicles Kierkegaard's intellectual and spiritual development through selected writings

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), little known or read outside of Denmark in his own day, has come to be widely appreciated for his affirmation of the Christian faith and his critique of the human condition. He is responsible for one of the major currents of twentieth-century thought, existentialism, which emphasizes the priority of existence over essence. Christian existentialism appropriated his insights for theology and ethics, stressing human experience, freedom, and the commitment of faith. Elements of his approach are found in Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, Reinhold Niehuhr, and Karl Rahner. Kierkegaard tried to clarify for his contemporaries the nature of Christianity, stressing that no philosophical system could explain the human condition. He emphasized the subjectivity of truth and could not refrain from attacking the cold formality and indifference of the state church of his day. In this book, Dr. Duncan guides the reader critically and skillfully through Kierkegaard's life and works. Book jacket.

A part of Harper Perennial’s special “Resistance Library” highlighting classic works that illuminate the “Age of Trump”: Soren Kierkegaard’s stunningly prescient essay on the dangers of mass media—particularly advertising, marketing, and publicity. An essential read as we reckon with, and try to understand, the media forces that have helped create our present political moment. “The Present Age shows just how original Kierkegaard was. He brilliantly foresaw the dangers of the lack of commitment and responsibility in the Public Sphere. When everything is up for endless detached critical comment as on blogs and cable news, action finally becomes impossible.”— Hubert L. Dreyfus, University of California, Berkeley “A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but there is immediate publicity everywhere.”— From The Present Age In The Present Age (1846), Søren Kierkegaard analyzes the philosophical implications of a society dominated by the mass-media. What makes the essay so remarkable is the way it seems to speak directly to our time—i.e. the Information Age—where life is dominated by mere “information” not true “knowledge.” Kierkegaard even goes so far as to say that advertising and publicity almost immediately co-opts and suppresses revolutionary actions/thoughts. The Present Age is essential reading for anyone who wishes to better understand the modern world.

The Danish philosopher, theologian, and author Søren Kierkegaard is widely considered to be one of the most important and wide-ranging religious thinkers of the modern age. He is known as the father of existentialism, but his work was also influential on theories of modernism, theology, Western culture, church politics, and the Christian faith. His wit, imagination and humor have inspired a generation of followers, from Woody Allen to Franz Kafka. But how did this inattentive schoolboy rise to critique the work of great thinkers such as Hegel and the German romantics? Who was the real (and unusual) person writing behind so many pseudonyms? And in what way are Kierkegaard’s concepts still relevant today? In this absorbing new biography, Alastair Hannay unravels the mystery of Søren Kierkegaard’s short but momentous career. Looking at both Kierkegaard the thinker and the person, Hannay describes this controversial figure’s key concepts and major works alongside the major incidents in his private and public life. From Kierkegaard’s longing for selfhood as expressed at the age of twenty-two, to a self-provoked spat with a satirical weekly that has caused him to be caricatured to this day, to a verbal assault on the Church in the months prior to his early death at the age of forty-two, Søren Kierkegaard is the fascinating story of a man destined to become a thorn in the side of society.

Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony, and the Crisis of Modernity examines the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, a unique figure, who has freeired, provoked, fascinated, and irritated people ever since he walked the streets of Copenhagen. At the end of his life, Kierkegaard said that the only model 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 is The 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 later famous books such as Either/Or and Fear and Trembling.

Now recognized as one of the nineteenth century's leading psychologists and philosophers. Kierkegaard was among other things the harbinger of exisentialisim. In FEAR AND TREMBLING he explores the psychology of religion, addressing the question 'What is Faith?' in terms of the emotional and psychological relationship between the individual and God. But this difficult question is addressed in the most vivid terms, as Kierkegaard explores different ways of interpreting the ancient story of Abraham and Isaac to make his point.