Journey Through Dread On Kierkegaard Heidegger And Sartre By Arland Ussher

There can be no doubt that most of the thinkers who are usually associated with the existentialist tradition, whatever their actual doctrines, were in one way or another influenced by the writings of Kierkegaard. This influence is so great that it can be fairly stated that the existentialist movement was largely responsible for the major advance in Kierkegaard's international reception that took place in the twentieth century. In Kierkegaard's writings one can find a rich array of concepts such as anxiety, despair, freedom, sin, the crowd, and sickness that all came to be standard motifs in existentialist literature. Sartre played an important role in canonizing Kierkegaard as one of the forerunners of existentialism. However, recent scholarship has been attentive to his ideological use of Kierkegaard. Indeed, Sartre seemed to be exploiting Kierkegaard for his own purposes and suspicions of misrepresentation and distortions have led recent commentators to go back and reexamine the complex relation between Kierkegaard and the existentialist thinkers. The articles in the present volume feature figures from the French, German, Spanish and Russian traditions of existentialism. They examine the rich and varied use of Kierkegaard by these later thinkers, and, most importantly, they critically analyze his purported role in this famous intellectual movement.

Many people consider Martin Heidegger the most important German philosopher of the twentieth century. He is indisputably controversial and influential. Athough much has been written about Heidegger, this may be the best single volume covering his life, career, and thought. For all its breadth and complexity, Heidegger's perspective is quite simple: he is concerned with the meaning of Being as disclosure. Heidegger's life was almost as simple. He was a German professor, except for a brief but significant period in which he supported the Nazi regime. While that departure from philosophy continues to haunt his name and work, one must question whether his thought from 1912 to 1976 should be measured by the yardstick of his politics from May, 1933, through February, 1934. Th is anthology addresses his complex but simple thought and his simple but complex life. In a real sense, Sheehan claims, there is no content to Heidegger's topic and legacy, only a method. But method must not be taken to mean a technique or procedure for philosophical thinking. Rather, the topic of Heidegger's thought and his pursuit of that topic, the "what" and the "how," are one and the same thing. Heidegger writes, "Alles ist Weg," "Everything is way," and man's Being is to be on-the-way in essential movement. Heidegger, argues in our essence we humans are the topic and the point is not to be led there so much as to come to know what we already know and to become what we already are. This brilliant collection confirms this truism, and is an excellent introduction to the work of this seminal thinker.

Kierkegaard has always enjoyed a rich reception in the fields of theology and religious studies. This reception might seem obvious given that he is one of the most important Christian writers of the nineteenth century, but Kierkegaard was by no means a straightforward theologian in any traditional sense. He had no enduring interest in some of the main fields of theology such as church history or biblical studies, and he was strikingly silent on many key Christian dogmas. Moreover, he harbored a degree of animosity towards the university theologians and churchmen of his own day. Despite this, he has been a source of inspiration for numerous religious writers from different denominations and traditions. Tome III explores the reception of Kierkegaard's thought in the Catholic and Jewish theological traditions. In the 1920s Kierkegaard's intellectual and spiritual legacy became widely discussed in the Catholic Hochland Circle, whose members included Theodor Haecker, Romano Guardini, Alois Dempf and Peter Wust. Another key figure of the mid-war years was the prolific Jesuit author Erich Przywara. During and especially after World War II Kierkegaard's ideas found an echo in the works of several trend-setting Catholic theologians of the day such as Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac and the popular spiritual author Thomas Merton. The second part of Tome III focuses on the reception of Kierkegaard's thought in the Jewish theological tradition, introducing the reader to authors who significantly shaped Jewish religious thought both in the United States and in Israel. These theologians represent a variety of religious and political backgrounds: the spiritual world of Hasidism, Modern Orthodox Judaism of Mithnaggedic origin, and Modern Religious Zionism.

McCandlish Phillips, whose by-line has been familiar to readers of The New York Times since 1955, has looked into just about every corner of the city and has written about nearly every aspect of its life. New York is not the same city today as it was yesterday. You cannot set foot in the same New York twice. Yet you can capture its momentary essence in City Notebook. One of the best metropolitan reporters of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s has brought together his best pieces on the City’s life. You will learn, for example, about the “rainbow rain” that sometimes falls on the City, about the Great Bee Roundup, the Case of the Garrulous Parrot, the Small World of Melvin Krulewitch, and the fate of the Gowanus Canal. The reality of New York is made up of millions of such instances, a mosaic of people, places, and things. The ones in this book have been chosen because they are compulsively fascinating, utterly irreplaceable, or just very funny. Gay Talese has called McCandlish Phillips “one of the best reporters” on The Times. People who know his byline relish his crisp style and dry wit.

History doesn't have to mean only an effort to know the past. It can be instead, according to Kierkegaard, a willful and personal choice regarding the creation of the future. Kierkegaard offers us an amazing new approach to the problem of what is history and who makes it.