Kierkegaard's Social Theory

Despite recent attention on the social implications of his work, little has been done to articulate a substantive Kierkegaardian social theory. In this paper, I argue that Kierkegaard's A Literary Review describes four principles of social analysis. Together they reveal the social character of Kierkegaard's thought while presenting significant challenges for more traditional ‘social readings’ of his work.     

Socrates with a cane

Abstract

Key to Gadamer’s theory of hermeneutics are notions of translation, conversation, and openness. What is often not known is just how much Gadamer himself embodied those notions in his own practice as a teacher and a friend. In what follows, I speak of how the man I knew Hans-Georg Gadamer to be, illustrated some of the traits of hermeneutic theory that show that such a theory is always a practice of life and an ethical practice. Not a theoretical text but a recollection follows.     

Kierkegaard's Philosophy: Implications for Counseling

This article discusses how the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard can provide useful guidelines for the study of the counseling process. Kierkegaard's philosophy is also compared with selected contributions of Freud, Skinner, Rogers, and May and with four common themes of counseling and psychotherapy.     

Passion and Reason: Aristotelian Strategies in Kierkegaard's Ethics

Both Aristotle and Kierkegaard show that virtues result, in part, from training which produces distinctive patterns of salience. The "frame problem" in AI shows that rationality requires salience. Salience is a function of cares and desires (passions) and thus governs choice in much the way Aristotle supposes when he describes choice as deliberative desire. Since rationality requires salience it follows that rationality requires passion. Thus Kierkegaard is no more an irrationalist in ethics than is Aristotle, though he continues to be charged with irrationalism. The compatibility of an Aristotelian reading of Kierkegaard with the "suspension of the ethical" and general problems with aretaic ethical theories are treated briefly. The author argues that it is possible to preserve a realist ethics in the face of the "tradition relativism" which threatens the version of virtue ethics here attributed to Kierkegaard.     

The self in Kierkegaard's pseudonyms

Conclusion This is essentially what I take to be Kierkegaard's ontological foundation of human existence. It is the structure which both makes possible and unifies the different modes of existing which he so fully describes in his pseudonyms. The further task is one of demonstrating concretely the relation of these modes (stages) of existing to his ontology.This essay will appear in my book, Being and Existence in Kierkegaard's Pseudonyms, to be published by Princeton University Press in 1975. I would like to thank the Princeton University Pres for permission to publish a portion of the book in this journal. I would also like to acknowledge my colleagues' helpful criticisms of the original draft of this paper which I read in a departmental seminar at Iowa State University last fall. Some of their suggestions were incorporated in the final draft.     

Kierkegaard's Critique of Eudaimonism: A Reassessment

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.     

The paradox in Kierkegaard's religiousness A

The attempt to utilize the methods of science to justify one ethical code as opposed to another has the advantage of avoiding the dogmatism and question‐begging techniques characteristic of many traditional ethical theories. However, such attempts are invariably involved in value reductionism, leaving normative terms bereft of their normative import. Science is related to ethics in a number of important ways, but not in the sense that inductive evidence can justify one standard of right conduct as opposed to others.     

Diagrams: Socrates and Meno's slave

Abstract

When do two mental items belong to the same life? We could be content with the answer ‐just when they have certain volitional qualities in common. An affinity is noted between that theory and Berkeley's early doctrine of the self. Some rivals of the volitional theory invoke a spiritual or physical owner of mental items. They run a risk either of empty formality or of causal superstition. Other rivals postulate a non‐transitive and symmetrical relation in the set of mental items. They must allow in consequence either for joint ownership of one and the same mental item, or for incompatible simultaneous decisions by one and the same person, or for new forms of death. This makes them disquieting. Another rival invokes a transitive and symmetrical relation defined in terms of co‐consciousness. Even that allows for incongruous simultaneities. The volitional theory is free from such disadvantages.     

Kierkegaard's accounts of faith: Their relative centrality

This article is an attempt to clarify the concept of apatheia as it appears in the Praktikos of Evagrius of Pontus. The condition (katastasis) of apatheia is central to the Evagrian understanding of the goal of monastic life, and the Praktikos is the treatise in the writings of Evagrius which deals most thoroughly with apatheia. The thesis of the article is that apatheia should be understood in terms of the Platonic distinction between stability and movement, and apatheia, thus, appears to be two different kinds of conditions, namely imperfect apatheia, related to the daily ascetic struggle of the monks against the demons and the thoughts, and perfect apatheia, related to the peaceful condition of undisturbed prayer, in which the mind contemplates the holy Trinity.