ABSTRACTIn this article, the intention is twofold. To introduce and substantiate Søren Kierkegaard’s notion of love and to put this notion in relation to the Romantics. The article is divided into six sections. I first offer a brief description of Kierkegaard’s view on the Romantics, his affections and his disagreements. Secondly, I will introduce Kierkegaard’s own notion of love that rest partly on Plato’s view on eros as passion, partly on the biblical definitions of love in 1 John and Matthew. (...) Thirdly, I will present Kierkegaard’s notion of love as a double urge to love and to be love and contrast this double-bound urge with Anders Nygren’s notion of eros and agape and C. S. Lewis’ differentiation between Need-Love and Gift-Love. In the fourth section, I will discuss the relation between human and divine love. In the fifth section, I will introduce Kierkegaard’s notion of being in love as preferential love. And finally, in the sixth paragraph, I will address Kierkegaard’s view on neighbor love. (shrink)

Personal Identity theorists as diverse as Derek Parfit, Marya Schechtman and Galen Strawson have noted that the experiencing subject (the locus of present psychological experience) and the person (a human being with a career/narrative extended across time) are not necessarily coextensive. Accordingly, we can become psychologically alienated from, and fail to experience a sense of identity with, the person we once were or will be. This presents serious problems for Locke's original account of “sameness of consciousness” constituting personal identity, given (...) the distinctly normative (and indeed eschatological) focus of his discussion. To succeed, the Lockean project needs to identify some phenomenal property of experience that can constitute a sense of identity with the self figured in all moments to which consciousness can be extended. I draw upon key themes in Kierkegaard's phenomenology of moral imagination to show that Kierkegaard describes a phenomenal quality of experience that unites the experiencing subject with its past and future, regardless of facts about psychological change across time. Yet Kierkegaard's account is fully normative, recasting affective identification with past/future selves as a moral task rather than something merely psychologically desirable (Schechtman) or utterly contingent (Parfit, Strawson). (shrink)

Though there are significant points of overlap between Michelle Kosch's reading of Fear and Trembling and my own, this paper focuses primarily on a significant difference: the legitimacy or otherwise of looking to paradigmatic exemplars of faith in order to understand faith. I argue that Kosch's reading threatens to underplay the importance of exemplarity in Kierkegaard's thought, and that there is good reason to resist her use of Philosophical Fragments as the key to interpreting the 'hidden message' of Fear and (...) Trembling. Key to both claims is the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. I also briefly sketch an alternative reading of the 'hidden message', one in which Kierkegaard's Christian commitments play a notably different role. (shrink)