Soren Kierkegaard Epistemology And Psychology Kierkegaard And The Recoil From Freedom

Kierkegaard's Psychology, filled with penetrating analyses of the most central and important problems of psychology, opens a new window to understand these enduring problems through a Kierkegaardian lens. Explanations cover the full spectrum of expected topics: sexuality and the damages connected to moralistic condemnation of sexuality; identity and awareness; escape and despair; instinct, guilt, defense, and self-delusion; anxiety, duplicity, conflict, and crisis; the state of encapsulation in which the individual rejects communication with the world and circles around himself; and the list goes on to include varieties of neurosis and psychosis. Parallels are made to Freudian and post-Freudian psychology, but the accent is put on Kierkegaard's major psychological project, namely, the analysis that obduracy, that sin, which consists in rejecting the possibility of being helped, in turning down recovery and clinging to one's own state of despair in spiteful love of it, leads individuals into the tragic zone of perpetually cherishing their own states of crisis. In the end, readers who either have no knowledge of Kierkegaard's concept of existentialism or a wrong notion of it, will be surprised to discover how very straightforward and realistic the Kierkegaardian problems are.

In recent years interest in the thought of Kierkegaard has grown dramatically, and with it the body of secondary literature has expanded so quickly that it has become impossible for even the most conscientious scholar to keep pace. The problem of the explosion of secondary literature is made more acute by the fact that much of what is written about Kierkegaard appears in languages that most Kierkegaard scholars do not know. Kierkegaard has become a global phenomenon, and new research traditions have emerged in different languages, countries and regions. The present volume is dedicated to trying to help to resolve these two problems in Kierkegaard studies. Its purpose is, first, to provide book reviews of some of the leading monographic studies in the Kierkegaard secondary literature so as to assist the community of scholars to become familiar with the works that they have not read for themselves. The aim is thus to offer students and scholars of Kierkegaard a comprehensive survey of works that have played a more or less significant role in the research. Second, the present volume also tries to make accessible many works in the Kierkegaard secondary literature that are written in different languages and thus to give a glimpse into various and lesser-known research traditions. The six tomes of the present volume present reviews of works written in Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish.

By exploring the works of both Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Søren Kierkegaard, Lydia B. Amir finds a rich tapestry of ideas about the comic, the tragic, humor, and related concepts such as irony, ridicule, and wit. Amir focuses chiefly on these two thinkers, but she also includes Johann Georg Hamann, an influence of Kierkegaard's who was himself influenced by Shaftesbury. All three thinkers were devout Christians but were intensely critical of the organized Christianity of their milieux, and humor played an important role in their responses. The author examines the epistemological, ethical, and religious roles of humor in their philosophies and proposes a secular philosophy of humor in which humor helps attain the philosophic ideals of self-knowledge, truth, rationality, virtue, and wisdom.