Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy A Fractured Dialectic (Michael ONeill Burns) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Kierkegaard and Contemporary Philosophy
This paper considers several recent attempts to account for the nature of Kierkegaard’s intellectual project: namely those proposed by postmodern, pragmatist, and Wittgensteinian commentators. I argue that each of these approaches fails to account for key claims Kierkegaard makes about his own project.
Entry to “Dialectic” in Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, Ashgate Publising Ltd, Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen, Volume 15, Tome II: Kierkegaard's Concepts: Classicism to Enthusiasm, Copenhague, Dinamarca, Marzo 2014, pp. 165-170.
On Søren Kierkegaard: dialogue, polemics, lost intimacy, and time
Ars Disputandi, 2008
As the readers get to know in the Preface, the chapters assembled in this book are a record of wrestling with Kierkegaard's central themes: passion, irony, subjectivity, ethics, prayer, repetition, Augenblick (Øieblikket), poetry, self-articulation, words, responsibility, the restless heart, requited and unrequited time, love. Mooney's investigation reviews a panorama of themes and a plurality of approaches to Kierkegaard's vast work. As he rightly remarks, there are many Kierkegaards (or many of his inventions) one might meet here, where theology and philosophy, literature and ethics can mingle in mutual attractions and interanimations. The book is divided into three Parts, containing thirteen Chapters altogether. Part One (Chapters 1-4) is entitled 'Kierkegaard: A Socrates in Christendom.' It focuses on the central role that Socrates and his thought have played for Kierkegaard's own way of thinking. In Part Two (Chapters 5-9) on 'Love, Ethics, and Tremors in Time' Mooney unfolds his hermeneutics of charity by analyzing two recent Kierkegaard biographies and the early pseudonymous writings from 1843-44. Part Three (Chapters 10-13) is dedicated to 'Plenitude, Prayer, and an Ethical Sublime'-with special consideration of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. The initial chapters circle around Socrates, who is presented as Kierkegaard's exemplar first to last, a figure who embodies and testifies to a way of becoming at once poetic, ethical, and religious. The vista of Mooney's attention in Part One is the 'broad setting or ambiance of Kierkegaard's conspectus' (8). Chapter 1 introduces Kierkegaard as a new Socratic midwife, mentoring us in the interest of setting free. His literary experiments and sketches of contrasting ways of life provoke and puzzle us. 'As we allow Kierkegaard to engage us existentially, scholarly Kierkegaard-interpretation becomes interlaced with the intimacies of self-examination.' (6) He is guiding us through the trajectories of our own becoming, through the pain and joy and danger of transformation, in search for the self or soul, the vital core and confluence of the virtues, moods and passions that give life. We are underway, a labyrinth in flux, as Mooney puts it poetically: 'Like an ever-changing riverbed, the self's terrain is constantly under reconstruction' (9). 'Knowing' myself seems as impossible as catching myself in motion, as stepping
Daphne Hampson, Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique, Oxford: OUP 2013, xiii + 344 pp
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 2018
The choice of these works is defensible. Unfortunately, the basic thesis of the book is not.1 The first chapter, entitled "Kierkegaard's Intellectual Context," looks at the history of theological thought, focusing primarily on Lutheranism, from the period of the Enlightenment until the first part of the nineteenth century, the period of Kierkegaard's authorship. Hampson rightly points out that insufficient attention is given to the Lutheran context in which Kierkegaard 1 Several of the points in this review were made earlier in posts to the blog Piety on Kierkegaard.
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 1998
The subject of this paper is Kierkegaard's complex and ambivalent relationship with philosophical scepticism. I shall argue that in important ways Kierkegaard himself can be classified as a sceptic, but I also want to locate the real divergence between his views and those of the sceptical tradition. Since this tradition itself has been widely misunderstood, this will involve some clarification of what the real aims and views of the sceptics were. To understand both Kierkegaard's closeness to the sceptical tradition, and the way in which he eventually departs from that tradition is, I think, helpful to us in trying to gain a clear overview of Kierkegaard's contribution to epistemology, and to understanding how he relates his epistemology to the existential concerns for which he is best known. His famous/notorious slogan, 'Truth is Subjectivity' is best appreciated against the background of his concern with scepticism. To put it in a nutshell, scepticism forces us to look to our subjectivity for the truth, because it demonstrates the inability of objective reasoning to gain truth, and demonstrates that on its own ground. Scepticism represents the self-destruction of the objective reason, when pushed beyond its proper limits. I