Volume 30, Issue 1

The various pseudonymous authors of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or employ ill-defined and seemingly inconsistent notions of friendship. In this paper, I examine the different uses of friendship, including some conspicuous references to friendship and attention in a Greek sense. I then consider several possible interpretations of this Greek friendship. These include friendship that follows the model described by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics , the kind of midwifery Socrates describes in the Theaetetus , and the ancient Greek practice of xenia, or guest-friendship.

Fear and Trembling ’s enigmatic weaning analogies have received a variety of interpretations, recently presenting them as analogizing the relationship between God, Abraham, and Isaac as mother, breast, and child—an insight offering fertile new discussions. Our interest is to continue developing this interpretation by highlighting the role of Isaac in Fear and Trembling , as he is often treated only marginally. Adopting this perspective reveals the importance Kierkegaard places on living faith. We argue the Akedah is a radical illustration of the transmission of faith and its reliance on faithful activity to inspire the appropriation of faith and subjective upbuilding.

In this paper, I develop an account of “maieutic understanding” as the proximate goal of Kierkegaardian maieutics (midwifery). Maieutic understanding entails grasping one’s failure to know essential truths and the inability to know those truths through objective understanding. I argue that the concept of maieutic understanding, which is a purely negative, preliminary form of subjective understanding, best explains how Kierkegaard aimed to get his readership to transition from a mode of objective understanding to subjective understanding proper (e. g., faith), serving as a bridge between the two and being taken up into the latter.

The aim of this study is to analyze Kierkegaard’s concept of suicide, based on the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments and The Sickness unto Death. I claim that this is an essential concept for thinking about the development of the individual, according to Kierkegaard, but at the same time it is to be emphasized that suicide can take on different meanings in the latter’s opinion: Suicide can be committed, first, when the subject withdraws from existence through thought; second, it can take on a symbolic meaning and, finally, a meaning that is only revealed in Christianity, in which suicide is shown as a threat to the concrete life of the one who is aware of the fact that he/she exists before God, bringing together the symbolic and real meaning of suicide. During the development of the different facets that the act of annihilating oneself entails, it is to be shown that each sense corresponds to a degree of awareness of the importance of suffering for human life and, above all, that the concept of suicide is a linguistic act: reflecting on such a concept is an action that is inseparable from the way in which we communicate it. I would like to dedicate the present article to my deceased father: Wherever you are, I hope, more than anything, that you are at peace. Moreover, I would like to thank FAPESP, which awarded me the research grant without which it would not have been possible to write this article (n° 2024/02876 – 5).

This article examines how the concept of faith in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling can be understood as a response to an experience of crisis arising from the perceived injustice of the external world. Initially, this crisis isolates the individual and prevents him from truly participating in state and society. I contrast this movement of isolation with the ethical movement of becoming a universal individual as described in both Either/Or and Fear and Trembling. The faithful individual does not remain isolated; through faith, he establishes a new relation to life with others in state and society. Rather than withdrawing from this world and fixating on an ideal world beyond it, the faithful individual trusts that our efforts to strive for justice here and now are meaningful. I discuss some characters from Fear and Trembling —the tax collector, Sarah, and Gloucester—that serve as (counter)‌examples for this more social and practical interpretation of faith.

Due to its complexity and intricacy, Kierkegaard’s authorship can be considered a work of “linguistic architecture.” In this paper I will show that a parallel can be drawn between the spiritual places and the physical places, such as landscapes, nooks, and buildings, starting from the early Gilleleje journals, which inspired the Otteveiskrog in “In Vino Veritas,” and continuing with the later writings Works of Love and The Sickness unto Death , where the focus is on building and inhabiting a house. I will conclude my analysis by mentioning a built environment, the family tomb, which Kierkegaard had already planned in detail in 1846.

A central thesis in Kierkegaard’s work is that the ethical life is subject to the duty of becoming manifest (“ det er ethvert Menneskes Pligt at blive aabenbar ”). The text first examines what this means for the relevant pseudonyms, revealing the duty to be multifaceted. Yet there is something that unites these facets: they appear as aspects of the “consciousness” (or self-relation) ultimately demanded of the individual, assuming the acknowledgment of a personal final judgment. The duty to become manifest in actuality thus signifies the subjective urgency to work on this ultimate consciousness, which accompanies the appropriation of “judgment.”

This article explores the social dimension of silence in two sets of Kierkegaard’s discourses on the lilies and the birds, from 1847 and from 1849. This exploration is pursued through attention to the themes of emplacement and of breathing. The article shows that by 1849 Kierkegaard conceived of our emplacement, and also of the silence in which we affirm our emplacement, as shared: in finding the moment and finding the place, we also find fellow creatures sharing it with us. The sociality of silence Kierkegaard affirms here finds its basis not in comparison but in the recognition of shared emplacement.

In this article, I would like to address the role of melancholy in Kierkegaard’s thinking. I will show that Kierkegaard refers to the concepts of ancient melancholy and medieval acedia. Thus, it can be seen that Kierkegaard’s conceptions of melancholy, on the one hand, touch on Aristotle’s Problema XXX, 1 and, on the other hand, radicalize and universalize the concept of medieval acedia. In addition, I will make an instructive reference to Heidegger’s thinking. In Heidegger’s work, as in Kierkegaard’s, there are references to the ancient thinking of melancholy, and the implications of his analysis of being can be linked to the medieval concept of acedia. I will argue that thinking about melancholy through the philosophy of Kierkegaard and Heidegger helps to understand melancholy as a way to achieve a new understanding of the self and the world, to reflect on actual values and to open up philosophical thinking. I will therefore show that Heidegger, in following Kierkegaard in his assumption that melancholy is a fundamental mood of philosophy, is not necessarily wrong.

Adler’s purported revelation in December 1842 was a sign of religious confusion for Kierkegaard. To modern readers it has proven difficult to make sense of Adler’s actions, and the current view seems to be that he was mentally disturbed. In the present article I wish to propose that there is in fact a logic to Adler’s claims concerning his revelatory experience, when this is seen in its wider historical and cultural context. Adler’s revelation corresponds with the rise of the left Hegelian movement in Denmark at the beginning of the 1840s. I wish to demonstrate that this unlikely connection holds the key.

In this paper, I will argue that Kierkegaard’s conception of sociality and responsibility can shed critical light on Levinas’ ethics of absolute alterity. Although there are many similarities between both accounts, there is at least one important distinction: Levinas’s ethics conceives of responsibility in terms of an asymmetrical relation between self and other. By contrast, the relationship between ego and alter retains a fundamental reciprocity in Kierkegaard’s conception, precisely by including God as a “middle term” in that relationship. I will furthermore present arguments for why I think that Kierkegaard’s middle-term conception is superior to the category of the Third with which Levinas seeks to remedy the most obvious problems of his account.

Kierkegaard as a thinker is hard to characterize, and it is debatable whether he can be classified as a theologian. Although his education was in theology, he did not pursue the path of an academic theologian, nor was he involved in ecclesial structures, and at the end of his life he even provoked an intense conflict with the leadership of the Church of Denmark. Nonetheless, his authorship experienced an extensive reception in theology and inspired numerous influential theologians from the Germanophone, Anglophone and Francophone world. In the present article, I first trace the early controversies about Kierkegaard’s theological legacy and subsequently map the complex reception in both Protestant and Catholic theology. I identify a variety of motifs and emphases that later theologians adopted from Kierkegaard highlighting the convergences and divergencies of their respective receptions. In my discussions I take into account the newest research provided by the project Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources.

The aim of this paper is a deeper exploring and rethinking of the mottos of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or from the perspective of Theses Towards Trinitarian Ontology by Klaus Hemmerle, a well-known German Catholic philosopher and theologian in the 2 nd half of the 20 th century. Firstly, the text introduces the frame of Hemmerle’s text and concentrates on his conception of speech. Secondly, the article examines the two mottos of Kierkegaard’s above-mentioned work (of part one and two, respectively) in their wider context and interprets them in the light of Hemmerle’s thinking. Finally, the paper tries to point out the perspectives of such an interpretation, suggesting some trajectories for further investigation. This publication was funded by the project “Trinitarian Ontologies: A New Philosophical Investigation into Trinitarian Relationality” (JG_2024_002) implemented within the Palacký University Young Researcher Grant.

Anthropogenic climate change calls for an ethical response and a new ethical framework fit for the new conditions of the Anthropocene. In this paper, I argue that Søren Kierkegaard provides some of the building blocks for such a framework. Kierkegaard advocates, what I, along with Timothy Morton, call a dark ecology, a concept I reconstruct in two steps: 1) by analyzing Kierkegaard’s anthropogenesis, I show how the individual can respond ethically across the abyss of deep time, and 2) I argue that the condition for this response is embedded in Kierkegaard’s concept of nature.

Although Zia Nai-zin, the Chinese philosopher and theologian, was the editor of the first Chinese translation of Kierkegaard’s writings, studies of Kierkegaard’s influence on Zia’s theology are limited. His theology of neo-in-ism (新唯中論) remarks Zia’s contribution to Sino-Christianity, i. e. the Christian doctrines of incarnation and the Unity of Divinity and Humanity and the Confucian Doctrine of the mean , which is essentially about the unity of Heaven and Humans, complement each other. While Zia himself did not relate his theology of neo-in-ism to his studies of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, this paper argues that Kierkegaard’s implicit influence on Zia’s thoughts could be found in two aspects: firstly, Zia’s criticism of New Confucians’ failure to distinguish religiousness and morality is inspired by Kierkegaard’s three stages of life, and, secondly, Zia’s reinterpretation of the Confucian idea of the Unity of Heaven and Humans align with Kierkegaard’s concepts of contemporaneity and God-man relationship. Yet this paper also revealed an implicit disagreement between Zia’s and Kierkegaard’s thoughts: different from Kierkegaard’s individualistic approach to the God-man relationship, Zia also highlights the unity of individuality and sociality.

In this article I offer a historical introduction to (I.) and an English translation of (II.) the fragment “On the Concept of Irony,” written by Poul Martin Møller. In the 1830s, several intellectuals of the Danish Golden Age were involved in an intense debate on the notion of irony, an idea that was typically regarded as harmful from a social and cultural point of view. Møller participated in the debate with this essay, which would remain unfinished, but which arguably influenced the analysis that Kierkegaard would present years later in his dissertation. The translation is based on the first printed version of “On the Concept of Irony,” published in the Efterladte Skrifter af Poul M. Møller , vols. 1 – 6, 2nd ed., ed. by Chr. Winther, F.C. Olsen, Chr. Thaarup, and L.V. Petersen, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1848 – 50, vol. 3, 1848, pp. 152 – 158. The page numbers of this version appear in square brackets in my translation. The point is to facilitate referencing for readers.

This article presents an annotated German translation of Magnús Eiríksson’s “My Work as an Author” (1875), which can be regarded as his literary testament. In the secondary literature, Eiríksson is primarily known as a critical contemporary of Kierkegaard in Copenhagen. Despite writing over 20 monographs and around 50 articles in Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic, Eiríksson’s work as a whole has received little scholarly attention. In this final article, written in Danish, Eiríksson summarizes the key ideas of his life’s work, which this translation makes accessible to a wider audience.