Kant and Kierkegaard are two philosophers who are not usually bracketed together. Yet, for one commentator, Ronald Green, in his book Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt , a deep similarity between them is seen in the centrality both accord to the notion of freedom. Kierkegaard, for example, in one of his Journal entries, expresses a ‘passion’ for human freedom. Freedom is for Kierkegaard also linked to a paradox that lies at the heart of thought. In Philosophical Fragment Kierkegaard writes (...) about the ‘paradox of thought’: ‘the paradox is the passion of thought […] the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without the passion.’. (shrink)

The Bologna Framework for higher education has agreed on three “cycle descriptors”—knowledge, skill and general competence—which are to constitute the learning outcomes and credit ranges for the three cycles of higher education: The Bachelor, the Master and the PhD. In connection with the implementations of the national qualification framework these descriptors initiated a new debate on the possibility of Bildung within higher education in Norway. Pursuing this question of whether the triad knowledge, skill and general competences makes possible or prevents (...) Bildung within higher education I argue that regardless of how one conceptualizes Bildung, one must say something about the kind of thinking that initiates a process transforming knowledge to become internalised so as to influence one’s choices and actions. A vital aim for the initiative of the Bologna process as envisioned in the Bologna Declaration 1999 was to develop a “Europe of Knowledge”. Underpinning this and other educational documents it appears that lack of knowledge is seen as an important explanation to todays many challenges. A confidence in knowledge per se as having a transformative power in itself seems to be a belief supporting the knowledge policy that dominates official documents. Following Kierkegaard and his critique of becoming objective as nurturing disinterestedness, I am critical to an understanding of knowledge as transformative in itself if knowledge primarily is understood as objective knowledge. In this paper I argue that in order to take responsibility for the knowledge one holds, a thinking which Kierkegaard calls subjective is an important contribution to one kind of thinking involved if knowledge shall initiate a transformation of one’s life and thus foster responsibility. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders certain of Kierkegaard's criticisms of Hegel's theoretical philosophy in the light of recent interpretations of the latter. The paper seeks to show how these criticisms, far from being merely parochial or rhetorical, turn on central issues concerning the nature of thought and what it is to think. I begin by introducing Hegel's conception of "pure thought" as this is distinguished by his commitment to certain general requirements on a properly philosophical form of inquiry. I then outline Hegel's (...) strategy for resolving a crucial problem he takes himself to face. For his account of the nature of thought depends upon the idea of a form of inquiry in which nothing whatsoever is presupposed; but this idea appears basically paradoxical inasmuch as the mere act of beginning to inquire in a certain way embodies an assumption about how it is appropriate to begin. Turning to Kierkegaard, I consider a key objection to the effect that Hegel's strategy for resolving this paradox depends on the incoherent idea of a purely reflexive act of thinking. Finally, I draw out some central features of the alternative account of "situated" thought and inquiry which Kierkegaard presents as distinctively Socratic. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the view that only practical reasons are normative reasons for belief. This requires viewing beliefs as the predictable results of our actions. I will show how this fits with our intuitions about mental autonomy. The remainder of the paper consists in a defense against a series of objections that may be expected against this position. The paper concludes with a metaphilosophical explanation about our conflicting intuitions regarding the normativity of rationality.

In this article, I examine the possible thought experimenting qualities of Soren Kierkegaard's novel Fear and Trembling and in which way it can be explanatory. Kierkegaard's preference for pseudonyms, indirect communication, Socratic interrogation, and performativity are identified as features that provide the narrative with its thought experimenting quality. It is also proposed that this literary fiction functions as a Socratic-theological thought experiment due to its influences from both philosophy and theology. In addition, I suggest three functional levels of the fictional (...) narrative that, in different ways, influence its possible explanatory force. As a theoretical background for the investigation, two accounts of literary cognitivism are explored: Noel Carroll's Argument Account and Catherine Elgin's Exemplification Account. In relation to Carroll's proposal, I conclude that Fear and Trembling develops a philosophical argumentation that is dependent on the reader's own existential contribution. In relation to Elgin's thought, the relation between truth and explanatory force is acknowledged. At the end of the article, I argue that it is more accurate to see the explanatory force of Fear and Trembling in relation to its exploratory function. (shrink)

Reason, religion, and public culture have been of significant interest recently, with critics reevaluating modernity's conception of secularism and calling for a “postsecular” public discourse. Simultaneously, one sees rising religious fundamentalisms and a growing style of antirationalism in public debate. These conditions make a reconceptualization of public reason necessary. The main goals of this article are to establish agnostic public reason as the conceptual guide and normative ethic for public debate in liberal democracies by considering the secular/religious reason boundary explicitly (...) and to argue that this ethic of public reason requires a commitment to reason giving and a particular epistemic attitude but that it does not, nor should it, take precedence over first-order judgments. An ethics of citizenship based on the process of reason giving with the appropriate epistemic stance might be one step toward rectifying the problem of an increasing separation between enclave publics, even if, by design, it cannot solve fundamental disagreement. (shrink)

Manifold expressions of a particular critique appear throughout Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous corpus: for Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms faith is categorically not a first immediacy, and it is certainly not the first immediate, the annulment of which concludes the first movement of Hegelian philosophy. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms make it clear that he holds the Hegelian dogmaticians responsible for the promulgation of this misconception, but when Kierkegaard’s journals and papers are consulted another transgressor emerges: the renowned anti-idealist F.D.E. Schleiermacher. I address the extent (...) to which this particular indictment is justified; over-against Gerhard Schreiber, I argue that this characterization of Schleiermacher’s view of religion is indeed a de facto critique. I begin by presenting and demonstrating the ubiquity of the phenomenon at the heart of Schleiermacher’s conception of perfect God-consciousness, then proceed to apply criticisms raised by Kierkegaardian pseudonyms Judge William, Vigilius Haufniensis, Johannes Climacus, and Anti-Climacus, supplemented with concerns raised by Kierkegaard himself, in order to demonstrate that these criticisms do indeed apply to and problematize Schleiermacher’s view. (shrink)

In his influential book After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre identifies Kierkegaard's view of ethics with that of Kant. Both Kant and Kierkegaard, according to MacIntyre, accept the modern paradigm of moral activity for which freedom of the will is the ultimate basis. Ronald M. Green, in Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt, accepts and deepens this alignment between the two thinkers. Green argues that Kierkegaard deliberately obscured his debt to Kant by a systematic “misattribution” of his ideas to other thinkers, and (...) to classical philosophy in particular. This essay argues that MacIntyre and Green are mistaken in identifying Kierkegaard with the Kantian tradition of moral autonomy and that they overlook his debt to the classical conception of virtue. In casting Kierkegaard in the role of the quintessential exponent of a modern conception of freedom, they have perhaps overlooked one of the greatest critics of moral autonomy who has ever lived. (shrink)

In the following short essay I set out the key insights and main arguments by chapter of Alison Assiter’s Kierkegaard. This text is an important contribution to the general subject matter of realizable well-being. In a final section I discuss possible elaborations and limitations and challenges to the problem of morals and ethics that can and are developed from a metaphysic of the person.

This article argues that church colleges of higher education, in their desire to be distinctive, can benefit from rethinking the relationship between the philosophical and the religious in order to retrieve a view of higher education as ‘upbuilding’. This will be achieved by illustrating how the central idea of speculative philosophy—that our learning about truth occurs in and through the phenomenology of aporetic experiences of the conditions of possibility—can contribute to the debate within church colleges regarding what is different about (...) their higher education. In short I will argue that Hegel and Kierkegaard (amongst others) find the aporetic experience of contingency to be of absolute significance. In what follows I will show how the religious and the philosophical are both constitutive of that absolute significance and how, when allowed to re-form each other, then together (and apart) they commend the kind of ‘upbuilding’ higher education that church colleges espouse. (shrink)

To date, there have been few attempts to compare the thought of Confucius and Kierkegaard, and these few attempts have focused on the contrast between Kierkegaard’s stress on the individual and Confucius’s emphasis on the social aspect of human existence. In this article, I point instead to substantial agreement between the analyses of ethical existence offered by Confucius and two of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous figures, Judge William of Either/Or and Johannes Climacus of The Concluding Unscientific Postscript . I seek to use (...) this parallelism to better discern the specific character of Confucius’s religious consciousness. (shrink)

I argue for an approach to Philosophical Fragments that allows it to be philosophical and fragmentary, and that pays particular attention to the fragments, or crumbs, that seem least important. One such overlooked crumb is the theory of merely human education in the book—education that does not enlist God as the teacher, where humans simply try to teach and learn from each other. I argue that Philosophical Fragments defends this theory of education with several reductio ad absurdum proofs that are (...) especially useful because they clarify why merely human education so often fails. Finally I apply the theory of merely human education in Philosophical Fragments to Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole and argue that it gives us a paradigm for understanding all of Kierkegaard’s texts that is more fundamental than the distinction between direct and indirect communication. (shrink)

G. F. Stout is famous as an early twentieth century proselyte for abstract particulars, or tropes as they are now often called. He advanced his version of trope theory to avoid the excesses of nominalism on the one hand and realism on the other. But his arguments for tropes have been widely misconceived as metaphysical, e.g. by Armstrong. In this paper, I argue that Stout’s fundamental arguments for tropes were ideological and epistemological rather than metaphysical. He moulded his scheme to (...) fit what is actually given to us in perception, arguing that our epistemic practices would break down in an environment where only universals were given to us. (shrink)

The article critically engages Menachem Fisch’s account of normative frameworks, in particular of (rational) transitions between them. I argue, first, that exposure to the normative criticism leveled at us by other human beings is indeed “capable of destabilizing normative commitment” to one’s own underlying framework beliefs and standards, as Fisch holds; however, closer scrutiny reveals that such exposure is neither sufficient nor necessary but rather accidental in this respect. Second, I will try to show that Søren Kierkegaard’s account of how (...) people fundamentally change their mind provides resources for both a substantial critique of Fisch and a more adequate understanding of the transitions in question. The article argues, third, that Fisch’s framework model – though meaningful, in fact heuristically indispensable in and as of itself – has robust transcendental implications which as such are being ignored, if not directly denied by Fisch and, precisely by being ignored or denied, unnecessarily weaken the overall plausibility of his account. Finally, and ex post, I will address an important objection raised by some commentators. (shrink)

Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling presents a reductio ad absurdum regarding the time-spans subject to moral evaluation. The text's classic dilemma depends on assuming that we only evaluate discrete, contextless instants. The pseudonymous author constantly seeks the single instant or moral “photograph” that indicates Abraham's status. Doing so, however, extracts scripture's moral legislation out from narrative, resulting in theological paralysis and thereby requiring an alternative temporal vocabulary for evaluating Abraham. Fear and Trembling contains an under-explored alternative that sets Abraham within (...) the covenantal narrative's temporality. The paper explores the consequences of shifting from evaluating instants to evaluating narrative durations, showing that while Genesis 22 remains a challenging episode, it also offers a model of imaginative faith, fidelity to promises, and hope in the face of trauma that focusing on moral instants overlooks. (shrink)

The article shows the “Appendix” to Søren Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments to be a response to Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity. While previous studies have detected some influence by Feuerbach on Kierkegaard, they have so far discovered little in the way of specific responses to Feuerbach’s ideas in Kierkegaard’s published works. The article first makes the historical argument that Kierkegaard was very likely reading Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity while he was writing Philosophical Fragments, as several of Kierkegaard’s journal entries from that (...) period discuss Feuerbach in relation to central ideas in Fragments. The article then shows how Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus inverts Feuerbach’s projection theory, turning it against critics like Feuerbach. At the heart of Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity is the claim that religion is a conceptual illusion, whereby the individual projects his or her personal limits onto the species and then projects the unlimited onto a supposed divine being. Furthermore, Feuerbach sees Christianity as rife with absurdities that tell against its reasonableness. In exploring a hypothetical transcendent avenue toward the truth, Climacus inverts both of these philosophical moves. He argues that on the transcendent hypothesis, the immanentist critic is himself a victim of an “acoustical illusion”: the absolute paradox of the appearance of the god in time is in fact not judged by, but rather judges, the critic as absurd. In inverting and not repudiating Feuerbach’s critique, Climacus reveals the critic as a Socratic figure who displays the heights—and ultimately, the limits—of secular philosophy’s capabilities. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough scholars increasingly recognize the debts of twentieth-century Roman Catholic theologians to Søren Kierkegaard, no one has yet traced this influence to Joseph Ratzinger. As is frequently observed, Ratzinger’s most famous book, Introduction to Christianity, opens with a meditation on a Kierkegaardian parable from Either/or. We argue that Ratzinger’s use of Kierkegaard extends well beyond this opening image, to some central moments in his articulation of the idea of God, Christology, and theological anthropology. Upon closer inspection, we argue, Ratzinger’s use (...) of these arguments is owing to the fact that his diagnosis of the ills of contemporary society and the orientation of contemporary Christian theology is the same as that of Kierkegaard, despite their seemingly different contexts. Identifying the Kierkegaardian influence on Introduction to Christianity helps draw our attention to the necessarily ‘introductory’ character of Christianity, which otherwise risks being lost. (shrink)

When I cruise the forty-three television channels available to me (and that's basic cable), simultaneously being enchanted and disgusted by much that I see (a kind of Kantian sublime), I cannot help but think that the culture in which I find myself is less articulate than ever. For this situation perhaps the 43rd President of the United States could serve as a useful emblem—a joke that is all too easy to make. But such a diagnosis of the low standard of (...) my culture's literacy might also be too easy to make. For it is the case that America's traditional anti-intellectualism reaches new heights in our current, hypermediated milieu: we now have more venues than ever to disseminate undisciplined, uncreative thought (think, for example, of all the burgeoning blogs). On the other hand, such hypermediation amounts to an explosion of symbolization. Language is everywhere, and hence there is the demand to use it instrumentally well. Again, an image from the U.S. presidency is emblematic. Think of President Clinton's infamous line to the intrepid Independent Counsel: "It depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." Such a line could represent the pervasive urge to absolutely precise articulation, controlling one's words to an extreme degree. Another emblem could be the common academic paper where a writer has masterfully summarized and explained the words of another thinker, rendering them more accessible but probably not more desirable. One could read this situation dialectically: the moment when concern for the value of language seems lowest is also the moment when the demand for controlling language is highest. Beyond dialectics, however, I take the demand for absolute articulation as a jumping-off point for considering an idea that might appear to have nothing to do with this implicit yet persistent demand—the concept of presence. More specifically, I want to consider how a particular rendering of this concept affects what we might call the divine and its relationship to an ostensibly secular culture, and I also want to consider some lines from Emerson and how they can lead one to think of the divine as presence, a presence that requires an absence, a presence that to some extent is an absence. According to this encounter with Emerson, thinking about the presence and absence of the divine has to do with the way one takes up writing. (shrink)