The Corsair Affair

The Corsair affair has been called the "most renowned controversy in Danish literary history." At the center is S�ren Kierkegaard, whose pseudonymous Stages on Life's Way occasioned a frivolous and dishonorable review by Peder Ludvig M�ller. M�ller was associated with The Corsair, a publication notorious for gossip and caricature. The editor was Me�r Goldschmidt, an acquaintance of Kierkegaard's and an admirer of his early work. Kierkegaard struck back at not only M�ller and Goldschmidt but at the paper as a whole. The present volume contains all of the documents relevant to this dispute, plus a historical introduction that recapitulates the sequence of events surrounding the controversy. Parts I (Article) and II (Addenda) contain articles both signed by and attributed to Kierkegaard in response to the affair. A supplement includes writings pertaining to the Corsair affair by Goldschmidt and M�ller, as well as unpublished pieces by Kierkegaard from his journals and papers. Although the immediate occasion was literary, for Kierkegaard the issues as well as the consequences were ethical, social, philosophical, and religious. Howard Hong argues that the most important consequence was wholly unexpected and unintended: the second phase of Kierkegaard's authorship.

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.

The Corsair affair has been called the "most renowned controversy in Danish literary history." At the center is Søren Kierkegaard, whose pseudonymous Stages on Life's Way occasioned a frivolous and dishonorable review by Peder Ludvig Møller. Møller was associated with The Corsair, a publication notorious for gossip and caricature. The editor was Meïr Goldschmidt, an acquaintance of Kierkegaard's and an admirer of his early work. Kierkegaard struck back at not only Møller and Goldschmidt but at the paper as a whole. The present volume contains all of the documents relevant to this dispute, plus a historical introduction that recapitulates the sequence of events surrounding the controversy. Parts I (Article) and II (Addenda) contain articles both signed by and attributed to Kierkegaard in response to the affair. A supplement includes writings pertaining to the Corsair affair by Goldschmidt and Møller, as well as unpublished pieces by Kierkegaard from his journals and papers. Although the immediate occasion was literary, for Kierkegaard the issues as well as the consequences were ethical, social, philosophical, and religious. Howard Hong argues that the most important consequence was wholly unexpected and unintended: the second phase of Kierkegaard's authorship.

Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, André Breton, Rousseau, Simone de Beauvoir: who could imagine a better group of walking companions? In this engaging and invigorating book, Bruce Baugh takes us on a philosophical tour, following in the footsteps and thoughts of some great philosophers and thinkers. How does walking reveal space and place and provide a heightened sense of embodied consciousness? Can walking in André Breton’s footsteps enable us to "remember" Breton’s experiences? A chapter on Sartre and Beauvoir investigates walking in relation to anxiety and our different ways of responding to our bodies. Walking in the Quantocks, Baugh seeks out the connection between Coleridge’s walking and his poetic imagination. With Rousseau and Nietzsche, he examines the link between solitary mountain walks and great thoughts; with Kierkegaard, he looks at the urban flâneur and the disjunction between outward appearances and spiritual inwardness. Finally, in Sussex and London, Baugh explores how Virginia Woolf transposed a Romantic nature pantheism to London in Mrs. Dalloway. Philosophers’ Walks provides a fresh and imaginative reading of great philosophers, offering a new way of understanding some of their major works and ideas.

In Philosophical Fragments the pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus explored the question: What is required in order to go beyond Socratic recollection of eternal ideas already possessed by the learner? Written as an afterword to this work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript is on one level a philosophical jest, yet on another it is Climacus's characterization of the subjective thinker's relation to the truth of Christianity. At once ironic, humorous, and polemical, this work takes on the "unscientific" form of a mimical-pathetical-dialectical compilation of ideas. Whereas the movement in the earlier pseudonymous writings is away from the aesthetic, the movement in Postscript is away from speculative thought. Kierkegaard intended Postscript to be his concluding work as an author. The subsequent "second authorship" after The Corsair Affair made Postscript the turning point in the entire authorship. Part One of the text volume examines the truth of Christianity as an objective issue, Part Two the subjective issue of what is involved for the individual in becoming a Christian, and the volume ends with an addendum in which Kierkegaard acknowledges and explains his relation to the pseudonymous authors and their writings. The second volume contains the scholarly apparatus, including a key to references and selected entries from Kierkegaard's journals and papers.

This book explains how gossip contributes to knowledge. Karen Adkins marshals scholarship and case studies spanning centuries and disciplines to show that although gossip is a constant activity in human history, it has rarely been studied as a source of knowledge. People gossip for many reasons, but most often out of desire to make sense of the world while lacking access to better options for obtaining knowledge. This volume explores how, when our access to knowledge is blocked, gossip becomes a viable path to knowledge attainment, one that involves the asking of questions, the exchange of ideas, and the challenging of preconceived notions.

A small, insignificant-looking intellectual with absurdly long legs, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a veritable Hans Christian Andersen caricature of a man. A strange combination of witty cosmopolite and melancholy introvert, he spent years writing under a series of fantastical pseudonyms, lavishing all the splendor of his magnificent mind on a seldom-appreciative world. He had a tragic love affair with a young girl, was dominated by an unforgettable Old Testament father, fought a sensational literary duel with a popular satiric magazine, and died in the midst of a violent quarrel with the state church for which he had once studied theology. Yet this iconoclast produced a number of brilliant books that have profoundly influenced modern thought. In this classic biography, the celebrated Kierkegaard translator Walter Lowrie presents a charming and warmly appreciative introduction to the life and work of the great Danish writer. Lowrie tells the story of Kierkegaard's emotionally turbulent life with a keen sense of drama and an acute understanding of how his life shaped his thought. The result is a wonderfully informative and entertaining portrait of one of the most important thinkers of the past two centuries. This edition also includes Lowrie's wry essay "How Kierkegaard Got into English," which tells the improbable story of how Lowrie became one of Kierkegaard's principal English translators despite not learning Danish until he was in his 60s, as well as a new introduction by Kierkegaard scholar Alastair Hannay.