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10 books match the query 'Kierkegaard, Søren'

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Kierkegaard And The Ends Of Language

Geoffrey A. Hale

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

A timely and original intervention in our understanding of this major philosopher through the lens of his influence on others

What do we read when we read Kierkegaard? How do we know? Insisting that Kierkegaard remains a far more enigmatic and paradoxical writer than is often assumed, Geoffrey A. Hale argues that the best way to approach Kierkegaard’s work and understand its significance for our own thought is to retrace its formative influence on major intellectuals of the early twentieth century.

In mutually reflective readings of Kierkegaard’s foundational texts through the work of three pivotal authors—Franz Kafka, Theodor Adorno, and Rainer Maria Rilke—Hale shows how each of these writers draws attention to the unwavering sense of human finitude that pervades all of Kierkegaard’s work and, with it, the profoundly unsettling indeterminacy in which it results. It is the very limitations of language, Hale argues, that hold it open to meaning, to interpretation, and thus to freedom. Resisting clear circumscription in this way, Kierkegaard’s work becomes all the more fruitful to us—and all the more challenging—to the extent that it resists our understanding.

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Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist

An Experiment

Jeffrey Hanson

Northwestern University Press, 2010

Kierkegaard has undoubtedly been an influence on phenomenological thinking, but he has rarely if ever been read as a phenomenologist himself. Recent developments in phenomenology have expanded our conception of the discipline itself and the varieties of experience it can address. Is it possible that Kierkegaard, a canonical figure by any measure, can be reappraised in light of these developments? Or more radically, is it possible that the frontiers of phenomenological investigation were already broached by Kierkegaard even before phenomenology was formally defined by Husserl?

In Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experiment, Jeffrey Hanson embarks on a project to locate Kierkegaard within the current phenomenological discussion. This work is an experiment inasmuch as the plausibility of the undertaking itself will be determined only by the outcome. Some of the contributors clearly regard it as possible to read Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist. Others plainly do not and will contest the very hypothesis that forms the basis of this experiment.

As with any experiment, the larger discussion will determine its success, but Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist lays the groundwork for two exciting possibilities: first, that Kierkegaard scholarship will be renewed, and second, that the meaning of phenomenology itself will be reconsidered.

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Kierkegaard as Psychologist

Vincent A. McCarthy

Northwestern University Press, 2015

Kierkegaard’s psychological thought has always been acknowledged as very rich—Reinhold Niebuhr hailed him as the greatest psychologist of the soul since Augustine—and has had a major influence on Heidegger, Sartre, and existential psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, his accomplishment has not always been fully appreciated, in part because it is so scattered across his works. As Vincent McCarthy demonstrates in Kierkegaard as Psychologist, Kierkegaard was pursuing “psychology” before there was a formally recognized academic field bearing that name, and a coherent thread runs through the so-called pseudonymous works. McCarthy elucidates often-difficult texts, highlights the rich psychological dimension of Kierkegaard’s thought, and provides an introduction for the nonspecialist and a commentary on Kierkegaard’s psychology that will interest both specialists and nonspecialists, while engaging in rich comparisons with such figures as Freud and Heidegger.

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Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts

Edited by Eric Ziolkowski

Northwestern University Press, 2018

In this volume fifteen eminent scholars illuminate the broad and often underappreciated variety of the nineteenth‑century Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard’s engagements with literature and the arts.

The essays in Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts, contextualized with an insightful introduction by Eric Ziolkowski, explore Kierkegaard’s relationship to literature (poetry, prose, and storytelling), the performing arts (theater, music, opera, and dance), and the visual arts, including film. The collection is rounded out with a comparative section that considers Kierkegaard in juxtaposition with a romantic poet (William Blake), a modern composer (Arnold Schoenberg), and a contemporary singer‑songwriter (Bob Dylan). Kierkegaard was as much an aesthetic thinker as a philosopher, and his philosophical writings are complemented by his literary and music criticism.

Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts will offer much of interest to scholars concerned with Kierkegaard as well as teachers, performers, and readers in the various aesthetic fields discussed.

CONTRIBUTORS: Christopher B. Barnett, Martijn Boven, Anne Margrete Fiskvik, Joakim Garff, Ronald M. Green, Peder Jothen, Ragni Linnet, Jamie A. Lorentzen, Edward F. Mooney, George Pattison, Nils Holger Petersen, Howard Pickett, Marcia C. Robinson, James Rovira

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Kierkegaard

Construction of the Aesthetic

Theodor Adorno

University of Minnesota Press, 1989

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Meaning and Mortality in Kierkegaard and Heidegger

Origins of the Existential Philosophy of Death

Adam Buben

Northwestern University Press, 2016

Death is one of those few topics that attract the attention of just about every significant thinker in the history of Western philosophy, and this attention has resulted in diverse and complex views on death and what comes after. In Meaning and Mortality, Adam Buben offers a remarkably useful new framework for understanding the ways in which philosophy has discussed death by focusing first on two traditional strains in the discussion, the Platonic and the Epicurean. After providing a thorough account of this ancient dichotomy, he describes the development of an alternative means of handling death in Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, whose work on death tends to overshadow Kierkegaard's despite the undeniable influence exerted on him by the nineteenth-century Dane. Buben argues that Kierkegaard and Heidegger prescribe a peculiar way of living with death that offers a kind of compromise between the Platonic and the Epicurean strains.

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The Chattering Mind

A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk

Samuel McCormick

University of Chicago Press, 2020

From Plato’s contempt for “the madness of the multitude” to Kant’s lament for “the great unthinking mass,” the history of Western thought is riddled with disdain for ordinary collective life. But it was not until Kierkegaard developed the term chatter that this disdain began to focus on the ordinary communicative practices that sustain this form of human togetherness.

The Chattering Mind explores the intellectual tradition inaugurated by Kierkegaard’s work, tracing the conceptual history of everyday talk from his formative account of chatter to Heidegger’s recuperative discussion of “idle talk” to Lacan’s culminating treatment of “empty speech”—and ultimately into our digital present, where small talk on various social media platforms now yields big data for tech-savvy entrepreneurs.

In this sense, The Chattering Mind is less a history of ideas than a book in search of a usable past. It is a study of how the modern world became anxious about everyday talk, figured in terms of the intellectual elites who piqued this anxiety, and written with an eye toward recent dilemmas of digital communication and culture. By explaining how a quintessentially unproblematic form of human communication became a communication problem in itself, McCormick shows how its conceptual history is essential to our understanding of media and communication today.

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