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)

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)

This article deals with hope – and its importance – by analysing the little-known analysis of hope found in Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard present hope as essential to moral agency, arguingthat hope should never be given up, even if it is not supported by experience. This articlegives an interpretation of the strong claims about the necessity of hope found in Kierkegaardwhich tries to reconstruct some of Kierkegaard’s central claims, arguing that Kierkegaard can be used to sketch a distinction between justified and unjustified (...) hope. (shrink)

According to a traditional interpretation of Kierkegaard, he endorses a strong form of direct doxastic voluntarism on which we can, by brute force of will, make a “leap of faith” to believe propositions that we ourselves take to be improbable and absurd. Yet most leading Kierkegaard scholars now wholly reject this reading, instead interpreting Kierkegaard as holding that the will can affect what we believe only indirectly. This paper argues that Kierkegaard does in fact endorse a restricted, sophisticated, and plausible (...) version of direct doxastic voluntarism. On Kierkegaard’s view, when we take ourselves to be in an epistemically permissive situation, we have the ability to form outright beliefs (but not credences) at will in virtue of our ability to voluntarily 1) open or close inquiry and 2) determine our attitude towards epistemic risk. (shrink)

On the dominant contemporary accounts of how practical considerations affect what we ought to believe, practical considerations either encroach on epistemic rationality by affecting whether a belief is epistemically justified, or constitute distinctively practical reasons for belief which can only affect what we ought to believe by conflicting with epistemic rationality. This paper argues that Søren Kierkegaard offers a promising alternative view on which practical considerations can affect what we ought to believe without either encroaching on or (necessarily) conflicting with (...) epistemic rationality by determining which among the epistemically permitted outright doxastic attitudes one should all‐things‐considered adopt. (shrink)

For Kant, the moral law is the causal law of freedom. However, it is not an explanatory causal law. It is instead a causal law of imputation: it is a law according to which we can be held responsible for the actions the law declares necessary; that is, it is a law according to which we can be considered the causes of whether or not we act lawfully. In this way, the moral law makes possible a kind of causality that (...) is a “third thing” between natural necessity and blind chance. This essay traces the origins of this view to the Antinomy of Pure Reason of the first Critique and shows how it is refined in Kant’s foundational texts in practical philosophy of the 1780s and in his reflections on the nature of human evil from the 1790s. (shrink)

Contra widespread readings of Karoline von Günderrode’s 1805 “Idea of the Earth ” as a creative adaptation of Schelling’s philosophy of nature, this article proposes that “Idea of the Earth” furnishes a moral account of the human relation to the natural world, one which does not map onto any of the more well-known romantic or idealist accounts of the human-nature relation. Specifically, I argue that “Idea of the Earth” responds to the great Enlightenment question concerning the human vocation, but from (...) a distinctive romantic-idealist angle. I begin by demonstrating the influence of Fichte’s 1800 Vocation of Humanity on Günderrode’s thinking, which involves an investigation of both Fichte’s text and Günderrode’s critical response to it. I then turn to “Idea of the Earth” where I analyse Günderrode’s understanding of nature and the self in light of her critique of Fichte, and thereby distinguish her position from Fichte’s and from the position espoused by her fellow romantics and idealists. By reading “Idea of the Earth” alongside Fichte’s text and Günderrode’s remarks on it, this article sheds new light on both Günderrode’s understanding and defence of Naturphilosophie – against Fichte’s critique of it – and her distinctive contribution to romantic philosophies of nature. (shrink)

In his writings on moral philosophy, Bishop Joseph Butler adopts an identifiably “constitutivist” strategy because he seeks to ground normativity in features of agency. Butler's constitutivist strategy deserves our attention both because he is an influential precursor to much modern moral philosophy and because it sheds light on current debates about constitutivism. For example, Butler's approach can easily satisfy the “error constraint” that is often thought to derail modern constitutivist approaches. It does this by defining actions relative to the kind (...) of being who performs them, instead of relative to the circumstances of their performance. This gives Butler a conceptually stable account of something that is both fully an action yet morally bad, for which an agent might be held morally responsible. Should modern constitutivists wish to model their views on Butler's in order to satisfy the error constraint, they need not adopt all his theological and other commitments, but they will have to avoid the currently popular constitutivist strategy of deriving normative force from the inescapability of a given principle. (shrink)

Interpreters are less univocal than one might think in assessing Søren Kierkegaard's attitude toward eudaimonism. Through an analysis of several key texts from across Kierkegaard's authorship, I argue that existing interpretations do not convincingly address the relationship between Kierkegaard's critique of eudaimonism and his mid-nineteenth-century context, which was dominated by post-Kantian idealists. While I am sympathetic to aspects of deontological and aretaic interpretations, a contextual reading shows that his critique centers on what he diagnoses as the enclosure of the modern (...) self. This puts his critique of eudaimonism in the purview of his moral psychology and in continuity with his critique of romanticism. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that cases of radical selftransformation (cases in which an agent willfully changes a foundational element of their motivational structure) constitute an important philosophical puzzle. Though our inclination to hold people responsible for such changes suggests that we regard radical transformation as (in some sense) self-determined, it is difficult to conceive how a transformation that extends to the heart of an agent’s practical life can be attributed to the agent at all. While I contend that the (...) best way to solve this puzzle is to deny that radical transformations are in fact self-determined, many maintain the opposite. The defense of my thesis involves showing how the conditions that must be met in order to coherently attribute transformation to an agent are not satisfied in cases of radical transformation. Radical transformation is, thus, something that happens to an agent, not something that is done by her. (shrink)

This article tries to make sense of the concept of the highest good (eternal bliss) in Søren Kierkegaard by comparing it to the analysis of the highest good found in Immanuel Kant. The comparison with Kant’s more systematic analysis helps us clarify the meaning and importance of the concept in Kierkegaard as well as to shed new light on the conceptual relation between Kant and Kierkegaard. The article argues that the concept of the highest good is of systematic importance in (...) Kierkegaard, although previous research has tended to overlook this, no doubt due to Kierkegaard’s cryptic use of the concept. It is argued that Kierkegaard’s concept of the highest good is much closer to Kant’s than what previous research has indicated. In particular, Kant and Kierkegaard see the highest good not only as comprising of virtue and happiness (bliss), but also as being the Kingdom of God. (shrink)

Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus famously defines faith as a risky “venture” that requires “holding fast” to “objective uncertainty.” Yet puzzlingly, he emphasizes that faith requires resolute conviction and certainty. Moreover, Climacus claims that all beliefs about contingent propositions about the external world “exclude doubt” and “nullify uncertainty,” but also that uncertainty is “continually present” in these very same beliefs. This paper argues that these apparent contradictions can be resolved by interpreting Climacus as a belief‐credence dualist. That is, Climacus holds that (...) beliefs and credences (i.e., degrees of belief) are two irreducibly distinct types of mental states. Beliefs are resolutions that close inquiry, thereby excluding doubt and reflecting subjective certainty by disregarding the possibility of error. Credences, by contrast, reflect assessments of evidential probabilities, thereby encoding a recognition of “objective uncertainty” by acknowledging the possibility of error. In addition to solving a vexing interpretive puzzle and showing how Kierkegaard anticipates contemporary views about the nature of belief and credence, this paper demonstrates that Kierkegaard developed a sophisticated account of the nature of belief, doubt, and certainty that merits serious philosophical consideration. (shrink)

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant calls purposiveness the “lawfulness of the contingent”. I argue that this should be interpreted not as lawfulness assumed in order to remove unacceptable mechanical indeterminacy, but rather as an additional kind of lawfulness which, in the case of organisms, inexplicably coincides with mechanical determination. Schelling adapts Kant’s notion of natural purposiveness in his own conception of the relation between mechanism and organism. He states in his 1798 work, On the World Soul, (...) that nature is “lawless in its lawfulness, and lawful in its lawlessness”. This should be interpreted similarly: there is a coincidence of two orders of lawfulness in nature. However, while Kant maintains that the coincidence or unity of these two orders is inexplicable for beings like us, Schelling explains the unity by assigning these laws to distinct levels of operation in nature. Organic organization is generated by a second-order operation of an organic principle on the first-order mechanical forces that are characteristic of matter. Schelling thereby builds on Kant’s third Critique framework in a creative way in order to offer a more fully unified account of nature. In this account, mechanism and organism maintain distinct roles but are both grounded in a further, higher principle. (shrink)

Vladimir Solovyov was a philosopher of culture who sought to understand the essence of the most central and deep cultural crisis, as he spoke of Russia in the twentieth century. He has often been interpreted as a close follower of Schelling, someone who just took the basic methodology and concepts from Schelling without any deep contemplation of his own. The goal of this article is to reconsider one of the most widespread misconceptions, according to which Solovyov is a Russian Schellingian. (...) Despite a certain resemblance in style and occasionally similarly sounding arguments, Solovyov was not just a rewriter of Schelling or his ardent follower. The second aim of the paper is to reconstruct the concepts of culture in Solovyov and Schelling. The two aims are strongly connected. In this respect, this paper is less an attempt to summarize Solovyov and Schelling and compare their ideas, than a speculative attempt to speak about the philosophy of culture and to represent the philosophy of Solovyov and Schelling. On my reading, despite many terminological and argumentative parallels, Solovyov and Schelling were pursuing fundamentally different tasks. Their systems cannot be viewed as identical, as it is often the case; rather, Solovyov’s philosophy begins where Schelling’s ends. The fundamental difference between the two systems will be demonstrated based on the analysis of two writings: Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Solovyov’s Lectures on Divine Humanity. (shrink)

Long neglected, Schelling’s 1809 Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom has been the subject of renewed contemporary interest with scholars linking it to debates in ontology, psychology, and social philosophy. This paper argues, however, that its fundamental importance lies in bringing to our attention the way in which our moral categories are grounded in conceptions of metaphysics. To do so, it suggests that Schelling focuses on two questions: first, does evil have positive being? And second, why do some (...) individuals commit evil acts while others do not? In response to the first, Schelling criticises Augustine’s insistence that evil entails a privation of being by developing an original account of metaphysics and, by extension, evil that insists that being entails an autopoietic process whereby a dark, chaotic, differentiating abyss expresses itself in actual, empirical being. By associating evil with this dark abyss, Schelling holds that ‘evil’ not only has actual being but forms the differentiating foundation of actual existence. This brings him to the second question, namely, why some individuals choose to actualize this dark abyss while others do not. In contrast to Kant’s appeal to an unknowable noumenal decision that can subsequently be altered, Schelling suggests that the choice of evil is an unconscious one that cannot subsequently be changed. The paper concludes by raising two critical questions about Schelling’s analysis relating to the determinism inherent to his account of moral choice and whether it, in fact, actually explains why some moral agents choose evil and others do not. (shrink)

The present paper suggests to consider Kierkegaard’s use of Abraham’s story in Fear and Trembling in regulative terms, that is, to consider it as a model – not for our moral behaviour but rather for our religious behaviour. To do so, I first rely on recent literature to argue that Kierkegaard should be regarded as a distinctively post-Kantian philosopher: namely, a philosopher who goes beyond Kant in a way that is nevertheless true to the spirit of Kant’s original critical philosophy. (...) Then, I present a post-Kantian reading of Fear and Trembling, focusing on the problematic implications that result from comparing this text with Hegel’s theory of recognition. Finally, I submit that sacrifice in Fear and Trembling is a regulative notion in a Kantian sense. This interpretation addresses some of the most problematic aspects of the text. I conclude that the regulativity of sacrifice may be regarded as an important and perhaps an essential component of Kierkegaard’s overall philosophical strategy. (shrink)

: In this essay, I argue that Kierkegaard endorses a “grace model” of ethical transformation – that radical normative change is not a function of agent-choice, rational or otherwise. After showing how grace functions in Kierkegaard’s account of religious transformation, I go on to argue that he offers a parallel account in the case of ethical conversion, the latter drawing from a description of transformation detailed in Kierkegaard’s Repetition. There we find an example of ethical transformation that challenges received interpretations (...) of the mechanics of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic-to-ethical transition. In the same way that God’s love is said to transform the heart of the Christian, Kierkegaard thinks that certain ethical encounters transform the desires and commitments of the aesthete. (shrink)

Kant developed a distinctive method of philosophical argumentation, the method of transcendental argumentation, which continues to have contemporary philosophical promise. Yet there is considerable disagreement among Kant's interpreters concerning the aim of transcendental arguments. On ambitious interpretations, transcendental arguments aim to establish certain necessary features of the world from the conditions of our thinking about or experiencing the world; they are world-directed. On modest interpretations, transcendental arguments aim to show that certain beliefs have a special status that renders them invulnerable (...) to skeptical doubts; they are belief-directed. This paper brings Kierkegaard's thesis of the “subjectivity of truth” to bear on these questions concerning the aim of transcendental arguments. I focus on Kant's argument for the postulate of God's existence in his Critique of Practical Reason and show that Kierkegaard's thesis of the subjectivity of truth can help us construe the argument as both belief and world directed. Yet I also argue that Kierkegaard's thesis of the subjectivity of truth can help us understand the source of our dissatisfaction with Kant's transcendental arguments: It can help us understand that dissatisfaction as an expression of what Stanley Cavell calls the “cover of skepticism,” the conversion of metaphysical finitude into intellectual lack. (shrink)

The explicit topic of Fear and Trembling's third Problema (the longest single section, accounting for a third of the book's total length), the theme of Abraham's silence stands not far in the background in every other section, and its importance is flagged by the pseudonym—Johannes de silentio—under which Kierkegaard had the book published. Here I aim to defend an interpretation of the meaning of the third Problema's central claim—that Abraham cannot explain himself, 'cannot speak'—and to argue on its basis for (...) an interpretation of the work as a whole. (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)

This paper distinguishes between two rationalist readings of Either/Or: the Rational Argument Interpretation, according to which the aim of the book is ultimately to offer a rational argument in favor of living ethically, and the Rational Presupposition Interpretation, according to which the pseudonymous authors presuppose that it is rational to live ethically. The paper argues in favor of . In particular, it argues that the fundamental presuppositions of Either/Or are those of Kant’s moral philosophy and rational religion. At the heart (...) of Kant’s arguments for the practical postulates lies an “existential moment”: Kant’s practical arguments are subjectively valid in virtue of the personal decision of the individual to do his duty. According to the Rational Presupposition Interpretation advanced here, Either/Or is best understood as an attempt to communicate indirectly and to confront the reader with the significance of personal choice for inhabiting a hopeful moral life-view. (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)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.