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)

A non-violent position drawn from the Anabaptist tradition (‘two-kingdom dualism’) is contrasted with the Christian pacifism with which that position is commonly conflated. It is argued that two-kingdom dualism more effectively leverages the philosophical and practical features of its particularly Christian character than does Christian pacifism – and that these features may have implications beyond the philosophy of religion.

Scholarly debate about Kierkegaard’s fideism focuses upon whether his voluntarism—the doctrine that religious faith can be simply willed—is practicable or credible. This paper proposes that a close reading of Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxiety reveals that there is a role for both the will and the intellect in Kierkegaard’s concept of faith. Kierkegaard arrives at a compatibilism that emphasizes the roles of both the intellect and the will. The intellect perceives a “moment” that paradoxically intersects time and eternity (...) and assents to a skeptical argument that one cannot understand how things and events come into existence. And beyond simply recognizing that belief is not unreasonable, the intellect perceives an internal logic to faith in a theological aesthetic—Johannes Climacus’s “poem” in Philosophical Fragments. Against the standard view of Kierkegaard’s voluntarism, this argument for compatibilism shows how the intellect combined with the will forms the “eyes of faith.”. (shrink)

The Christian tradition affirms that faith is a virtue. Faith is a multifaceted reality, though, encompassing such diverse aspects as belief, trust, obedience, and more. Given this complexity, it is no surprise that various thinkers emphasize different aspects of faith in accounting for faith’s status as a virtue. In this paper I join Søren Kierkegaard in arguing that faith is a passion, and that faith is a virtue because it disposes the person of faith to proper emotional responses. The paper (...) has three sections. First, I lay the groundwork for understanding faith as a passion by explaining the relationship between passions and emotions. Drawing on the works of Kierkegaard, Merold Westphal, and Robert C. Roberts, I distinguish two senses of passion, and show how these senses are related to each other and to faith. The second section uses the account of faith developed in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to develop the idea that passional faith is a deep, identity-forming attachment to God. Finally, I explicate the idea that passional faith, so understood, functions as an emotion disposition. I do so by expounding part one of Kierkegaard’s Christian Discourses, which explores some of the ways in which faith disposes one away from certain emotions and toward other emotions. (shrink)

Focusing on the grammar and vocabulary of virtue in Kierkegaard’s upbuilding works, it is argued that the Danish philosopher represents a Christian conception of the moral life that is distinct from but—contrary to Alasdair MacIntyre’s claim—not completely opposed to Aristotelian and Thomistic virtue ethics. Although the realities of sin and salvation transcend virtue ethics based purely on human nature, it is demonstrated that this does not prevent Kierkegaard from speaking constructively about human nature, its teleology (a teleological conception of the (...) self) and about the virtues. Yet, from a Christian “upbuilding” perspective, general features of human nature must be transformed profoundly, which implies more than a harmonious perfection or completion of nature (Aquinas), but less than the complete replacement of nature by grace. Since this can be seen as a particular contribution to virtue ethics, in this specific sense, Kierkegaard may be called a virtue ethicist. (shrink)

Philosophers, theologians, physicists, and psychologists join their efforts to reflect on the crucial issues of limit and infinity, time and eternity, empty space and material space. The volume offers an invaluable contribution to some of the most important issues of our times: questions on God and consciousness are discussed in parallel with quantum theory, black holes, the inflationary universe, the Big Bang, and string theory, from different perspectives and angles, ranging from neuroscience to AI.

In the 17th century, ‘reflexivity’ was coined as a new term for introspection and self-awareness. It thus was poised to serve the instrumental function of combating skepticism by asserting a knowing self. In this Cartesian paradigm, introspection ends in an entity of self-identity. An alternate interpretation recognized how an infinite regress of reflexivity would render ‘the self’ elusive, if not unknowable. Reflexivity in this latter mode was rediscovered by post-Kantian philosophers, most notably Hegel, who defined the self in its self-reflective (...) encounter with an other, and whose full articulation would occur at the final culmination of Reason's evolution. In the rising tide of 19th-century individualism, Emerson and Kierkegaard formulated constructions both in debt to, and in opposition against, Hegelian metaphysics. For each, although employing distinct strategies of self-consciousness, ‘the self’ reached its apogee through divine encounter. Characterized by personal responsibility and individual choice, their philosophies would later be subsumed by secular existentialists committed to defining moral individualism and asserting the possibilities for human freedom and selfauthentication. (shrink)

This volume announces a new era in the philosophy of God. Many of its contributions work to create stronger links between the philosophy of God, on the one hand, and mathematics or metamathematics, on the other hand. It is about not only the possibilities of applying mathematics or metamathematics to questions about God, but also the reverse question: Does the philosophy of God have anything to offer mathematics or metamathematics? The remaining contributions tackle stereotypes in the philosophy of religion. The (...) volume includes 35 contributions. It is divided into nine parts: 1. Who Created the Concept of God; 2. Omniscience, Omnipotence, Timelessness and Spacelessness of God; 3. God and Perfect Goodness, Perfect Beauty, Perfect Freedom; 4. God, Fundamentality and Creation of All Else; 5. Simplicity and Ineffability of God; 6. God, Necessity and Abstract Objects; 7. God, Infinity, and Pascal's Wager; 8. God and (Meta-)Mathematics; and 9. God and Mind. (shrink)

Visual forms of episodic memory and anticipatory imagination involve images that, by virtue of their perspectival organization, imply a notional subject of experience. But they contain no inbuilt reference to the actual subject, the person actually doing the remembering or imagining. This poses the problem of what (if anything) connects these two perspectival subjects and what differentiates cases of genuine memory and anticipation from mere imagined seeing. I consider two approaches to this problem. The first, exemplified by Wollheim and Velleman, (...) claims that genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations are phenomenally unselfconscious, with the co-identity of the notional and actual subjects secured by a determinate causal history. The second approach posits some distinctive phenomenal property that attaches to genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations and serves to experientially conflate the notional and actual subject. I consider a version of the second approach, derived from Kierkegaard’s discussions of phenomenal contemporaneity, and argue that this approach can better account for the possibility of affective alienation from the selves we were and will be: the way in which our sense of self and awareness of our causal history can sometimes come apart. (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)

In this article, I embark on an analysis of Søren Kierkegaard's view of human otherness in strict correlation to his Christian philosophy. More specifically, my aim is to show that Kierkegaard's thought is essentially informed by a decisive appropriation of the soteriological category of sin which has momentous implications for Kierkegaard's views of selfhood and intersubjectivity. The main argument is that both Kierkegaard's negative evaluation of human otherness and his acerbic indictments of any collectivist interference in salvific matters cohere with (...) his appropriation of the doctrine of the Fall. At the same time, I show in what sense Kierkegaard deems human alterity to be indispensable to one's spiritual self-becoming expressed through the Christian imperative of loving the other as neighbor. Seen thus, agape, while supplementing Kierkegaard's creationistic psychology, actually becomes the necessary restorative opposite of sinfulness in the self's encounters with the distinct uniqueness of the human other. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to clash the problem of forgiveness as formulated in contemporary secular and Christian ethics with Kierkegaard’s considerations concerning this issue. Kierkegaard’s thought is increasingly used in the modern debate on forgiveness. It is therefore worth investigating whether Kierkegaard’s considerations are really able to overcome in any way contemporary disputes concerning this problem or enrich our thinking in this area. The main thesis of this paper states that there is a fundamental, ontological difference between Kierkegaard’s understanding (...) of forgiveness and that of modern thinkers. While the Danish philosopher refers to the transcendent reality of spirit, where the act of forgiveness is always performed by God, in contemporary ethical and Christian thought, forgiveness is first and foremost formulated from an immanent point of view that appeals to the world of human values. This difference is demonstrated by analyzing the four main themes corresponding to the most important issues taken up in the contemporary debate on forgiveness. These are: the victim-offender relation, the conditionality and unconditionality of forgiveness, the issue of condonation, and the problem of the unforgivable. As a result of the analyses presented herein, the impossibility of directly applying Kierkegaard’s transcendent theses to ethical thought of the immanent variety will be shown. (shrink)

This paper examines the seemingly unlikely rapport between the ‘Christian existentialist’, radically Protestant thinker, Søren Kierkegaard and French classicist and historian of philosophy, Pierre Hadot, famous for advocating a return to the ancient pagan sense of philosophy as a way of life. Despite decisive differences we stress in our concluding remarks, we argue that the conception of philosophy in Hadot as a way of life shares decisive features with Kierkegaard’s understanding of the true ‘religious’ life: as something demanding existential engagement (...) from its proponent, as well as the learning or recitation of accepted doctrines. The mediating figure between the two authors, the paper agrees with Irina, is Socrates and his famous irony. In order to appreciate Kierkegaard’s rapport with Hadot, then we first of all consider Hadot’s treatment of the enigmatic ‘old wise man’ who remains central to Kierkegaard’s entire authorship. However, to highlight Hadot’s Socratic proximity to Kierkegaard, we set up Hadot’s Socrates against the contrasting portrait readers can find in John M. Cooper’s recent work on Socrates and philosophy as a way of life. Part II of the essay turns back from Hadot’s and Kierkegaard’s Socrates towards Hadot’s own work, and argues—again moving beyond both Gregor and Irina’s works on Hadot and Kierkegaard—that the shape of Hadot’s ‘authorship’, including his remarkably classical style, can be understood by way of Kierkegaard’s notion of indirect communication. In our concluding remarks, in the spirit of Kierkegaard, we pinpoint the fundamental difference between the two thinkers, arguing that for Hadot in contrast to Kierkegaard, a stress on existential commitment in no way speaks against the philosophical defence of a form of rational universalism. Reading Hadot via Kierkegaard allows us to appreciate Hadot’s novelty as attempting to ‘squaring the circle’ between an emphasis on subjectivity and, as it were, the subjective dimensions of philosophers’ pursuit of rational universality. (shrink)

This paper takes the position that the aim of existential teaching, i.e., teaching where existential questions are addressed, consists in educating the students in light of subjective truth, where the students are ‘educated’ to exist on their own, i.e., independent of the teacher. The question is whether it is possible to educate in light of existence. It is, in fact impossible, as existence is a subjective matter, meaning that it must be determined individually. In this way the existential teaching appears (...) thus: even though existence cannot be determined educationally, as it is a subjective matter, it does require some kind of education. However, the teacher cannot make use of pedagogical means that coerce the students to take responsibility for their subjective truth. A pedagogical ‘expedient’ is nonetheless required, which deprives of all types of constraint but still opens up for the students taking responsibility for their subjective truth. I argue that this expedient must be irony, but not all types of irony. I therefore discuss which conception of irony the existential teaching should and should not be connected with. (shrink)

Several readers of Kierkegaard have proposed that his works are a good source for contemporary investigations of virtues, especially theistic and Christian ones. Sylvia Walsh has recently offered several arguments to cast doubt on the thesis that Kierkegaard can be profitably read as a “virtue ethicist.” Examination of her arguments helps to clarify what virtues, as excellent traits of human character, can be in a moral outlook that ascribes deep sin and moral helplessness to human beings and their existence and (...) salvation entirely to God’s grace. The examination also clarifies the relationship between virtues and character and between the practices of virtue ethics and character ethics. Such clarification also may provide a bridge of communication between Kierkegaard scholarship and scholars of virtue ethics beyond the theistic communities. In particular, I’ll argue that a character ethics that is not a virtue ethics would be suboptimal as an aid to the formation of Christian wisdom and sanctification. Kierkegaard’s character ethics is a virtue ethics. (shrink)

In today’s world we appear to place a premium on happiness. Happiness is often portrayed, directly or indirectly, as one of the key aims of education. To suggest that education is concerned with promoting unhappiness or even despair would, in many contexts, seem outlandish. This paper challenges these widely held views. Focusing on the work of the great Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, I argue that despair, the origins of which lie in our reflective consciousness, is a defining feature of human (...) life. Education, I maintain, should not be seen as a flight from despair but as a process of deepening our understanding of suffering and its potentially pivotal role in our humanisation. In developing these ideas, I draw on Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death and Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, among other sources. (shrink)

This article examines the importance of doubt in Western philosophy, with particular attention to the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Miguel de Unamuno. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus ventures down the pathway of doubt, finds it perplexing and difficult and discovers that he is unable to return to his pre-doubting self. In despair, the meaningfulness of his life is called into question. Unamuno, a great admirer of Kierkegaard, acknowledges the suffering that accompanies doubt while affirming the pivotal role of uncertainty, (...) despair and struggle in realising our humanity. From Unamuno, we can acquire a keener sense of the part education has to play in both forming us as doubting beings and allowing us to work constructively with the despair engendered by this formation. (shrink)

Running like a leitmotif through Peter Roberts’ recently published philosophico-educational writings there is a humanistic thread, which this article picks out. In order to ascertain the quality of this humanism, Roberts is positioned in relation to a pair of extant humanisms: radical and integral. Points of comparability and contrast are identified in several of the writer’s genre-crossing essays. These texts, it is argued, rectify deficiencies in how the two humanisms envision alternatives to capitalism. Roberts skilfully teases out the non-obvious futurological (...) implications of the work of a diverse array of authors, spanning the boundaries of philosophy, social criticism, and literature. In so doing, he underscores the intimate connection between personal self-transformation and ideal-driven social transformation. Further, Roberts challenges humanists of both radical and integral stripes to reconsider the moral grounds of their critique of capitalism. (shrink)

The central idea of this paper is that Michel Foucault and Søren Kierkegaard are unexpected allies in the investigation into the relation between madness and reason. These thinkers criticize reason’s presumption of purity and call into question reason’s isolation from madness. Strategies of indirect communication and regard for paradox from Kierkegaard’s nineteenth-century works find new ground in Foucault’s twentieth-century archaeological undertaking as Foucault illuminates “both-and” moments in the history of madness, uncovering points where rationalism paradoxically conceives of madness or where (...) madness is not unreasonable. Furthermore, for both thinkers, form and content meet, as Kierkegaard and Foucault’s occasionally “delirious lyricism” (in the phrase of Dominick LaCapra) exemplifies the intertwining of logical and illogical forces. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a reading of Søren Kierkegaard's Climacean works (Fragments and Postscript) in which I focus on their specific dissimilarities, but also on the important dialectical relationship between them. My central claim is that when we consider Kierkegaard's larger project in his authorship to encourage believers to practice a Christian existence characterized by tension, we begin to see the crucial shared role these works play for Kierkegaard's purposes. To begin, I outline the theological and polemical background to (...) Kierkegaard's account of Christian existence by focusing on one of the central existential dualities in his thought, namely that of grace and works. In order to avoid falling into one extreme or the other, Kierkegaard argues for an account of faith as restlessness, which I identify as crucial to the Christian life. With this framework, I turn to Fragments and Postscript to draw out their respective emphases on gift and task, and I follow this with a discussion of how the dialectical relation between these emphases fulfills and upholds the account of tension that we have developed. (shrink)

This article examines the concept of existence underlying Carl Schmitt’s political philosophy—a concept is that Heidegger largely shares. Can such a conception do justice to our political life? Or is it, in fact, inimical to it? The crucial issue here is that of political identity and the role that violence plays in its formation. The article concludes by examining Jan Patočka’s account of existence as motion and applying it to our political commitments.

René Girard speaks of the return of the religious as a “return of the sacred… in the form of violence.” This violence was inherent in the original “sacrificial system,” which deflected communal violence onto the victim. In this article, I argue that there is a double return of the sacred. With the collapse of the original sacrificial system, the sacred first reappears in the legal order. When this loses its binding claim, it reappears in the political order. Here, my claim (...) will be that Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political is not simply structurally similar to Girard’s conception of the sacrificial system. It is actually a manifestation of this. In this political return of the religious, the religious and the political systems are conflated. What prevents us from seeing this is the self-concealment that is essential to the sacrificial act, a self-concealment that also characterizes its twofold return. (shrink)

The essential task of the philosophy of style is to uncover the irreducibility of the singular to any kind of universal, static structure or metalinguistic code. Style is not only a surplus element that exceeds propositional meaning, but also a clue of the ineradicable contingency of “intersubjective”‐communicational relationships. The receiver must respect the unique individuality of the sender's style as what demonstrates the cognitive inexhaustibility of the world. Consequently, philosophy can no longer regard literature as foreign and incorrigible by asserting (...) a radical difference of genre and thereby reserving truth exclusively for itself. Rather, I go on to argue, the difference is merely one of quantity. The picture of the world drawn by literature is simply fuller and richer than any comparatively monochromatic system of philosophical propositions. However, within the history of philosophy, there have been instances when the philosophical import of literature has been accorded its due. One example is the dialogical approach of early German Romanticism. The other example is a writer most frequently considered the purest thinker of philosophical sense and meaning – namely, Ludwig Wittgenstein. I conclude by reading Wittgenstein as a philosopher concerned, above all, with the ineffable that style reveals. (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)

Using Buddhist thought, explores and challenges the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Søren Kierkegaard is often considered to be one of the most vocal critics of German idealism. The present paper analyzes the philosophical similarity between Friedrich Schelling ’s early idealistic work and Kierkegaard ’s existential writings, endeavoring to display Schelling ’s epic 1809 publication Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom as a possible forerunner to Kierkegaard. This juxtaposition reveals concrete similarity that supports the thesis that Schelling ’s work could have been of great inspirational value for Kierkegaard, especially Kierkegaard (...) ’s core concepts such as freedom, morality and God. However, Schelling ’s early work is primarily appreciated as a philosophy of nature, and therefore fundamentally different from Kierkegaard ’s theistic-psychological writings. The present paper tentatively opposes this distinction, concluding that if Schelling really is a forerunner to Kierkegaard, then we ought to appreciate Kierkegaard ’s writings as conveying more than a theological message. The conclusion suggests that Kierkegaard ’s writings should be interpreted in a broader philosophical context, closer to the metaphysical idealism he is often assumed to resist. (shrink)

Next SectionBecause of the radically incarnational nature of the Christian understanding of ethics and bioethics, according to Kierkegaard, there has always been an infinite gulf between Christian bioethics and secular bioethics. However, the process of the secularization of the public square has made this gulf more apparent and salient for the current ethical debates in biomedicine and the culture more generally.

There has been a shift from teaching to learning, the so-called process of ‘learnification’, which promotes the idea that teaching should be primarily concerned with the creation of rich learning environments and scaffolding student learning. In doing so, this process of ‘learnification’ has also attacked the idea that teachers have something to teach and that students have something to learn from their teachers. The influence of constructivism, and thinkers like Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner in this paradigm shift is quite evident; (...) however, this gives rise to a tension in what a teacher is and what teaching entails, because the teacher, by definition, is someone who has something to teach students, and not merely a facilitator of the learning process. Moreover, because of constructivism and ‘learnification’, current educational practices and policies seem to pay little attention to the importance of ‘relations’ and ‘the encounter with the Other’, which become merely desirable by-products. In this article I criticise constructivism and ‘learnification’ by proposing that the teacher is a community ‘builder’ and teaching a ‘situational revelation’, while also emphasising the importance of ‘relations’ in the educational process. The starting point for my discussion is a much neglected passage of I and Thou where Martin Buber discusses the importance of the ‘living centre’ [lebendigen Mitte] for ‘true community’ [Die wahre Gemeinde] formation. (shrink)

Feminist scholars adopt wide-ranging views of self-sacrifice: their critiques claim that women are inordinately affected by Christianity's valorization of self-sacrifice and that this traditional Christian value is inherently misogynistic and necrophilic. Although Søren Kierkegaard's Works of Love deems Christian love essentially sacrificial, love, in his view, sets significant limits on the role of self-sacrifice in human life. Through his proposed response to one who requests forgiveness, “Do you now truly love me?” Kierkegaard offers a model of forgiveness that subverts traditional (...) ideals of the self-sacrificing and submissive woman while keeping love central. The question asserts self-love, involves redoubling and double danger, and expresses a refusal to imitate Christ's suffering. I propose a reading in keeping with Grace Jantzen's vision for a feminist philosophy of religion, which reads against the grain and “seeks to break through to new ways of thinking that may open up divine horizons.” My reading is further supported by Kierkegaard's contention that everything essentially Christian bears a double meaning. In light of the subversive potential found in the discrepancy between apparent love and actual love, as well as the duty to name the sin of one who has behaved in an unloving manner, I argue that Kierkegaard's philosophy of love resists simplistic understandings of self-sacrificing love. (shrink)

This essay tries to show that there exist several passages where Kierkegaard (and his pseudonyms) sketches an argument for the existence of God and immortality that is remarkably similar to Kant's so-called moral argument for the existence of God and immortality. In particular, Kierkegaard appears to follow Kant's moral argument both when it comes to the form and content of the argument as well as some of its terminology. The essay concludes that several passages in Kierkegaard overlap significantly with Kant's (...) moral argument, although Kierkegaard ultimately favors revealed faith over natural theology in general and Kant's moral faith in particular. Whereas Kant uses the moral argument to postulate the existence of God and immortality, Kierkegaard mainly uses it as a reductio ad absurdum of non-religious thinking. (shrink)

By way of an interaction with Kierkegaard’s Point of View, this paper attempts to show the extent to which Kierkegaard’s Repetition was a poetic repetition of his own life. By comparing several of his published texts with journal entries and letters to friends, this paper traces the extent and degree of Kierkegaard’s poetic reflection and corresponding lack of existential immediacy. At its most extreme, this paper argues that Kierkegaard did not really exist in the typical sense of the term; or, (...) more precisely, that he only existed as a poetic repetition, an apotheosized ideal. Kierkegaard lived only insofar as he wrote himself into poetry. (shrink)