Kierkegaard's 'Concluding Unscientific Postscript'
A Critical Guide

These 2010 essays offer a plurality of critical approaches to Kierkegaard's fundamental text of existential philosophy and explore its contemporary relevance.

Rick Anthony Furtak (Edited by)

9780521897983, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 July 2010

272 pages
23.5 x 16.1 x 1.1 cm, 0.56 kg

'One of the most noteworthy features of Kierkegaard's 'Concluding Unscientific Postscript': A Critical Guide is that it lives up to its subtitle. This collection truly is a guide to the work as a whole … [It] contains significant steps forward in our understanding of this complex text, the difficulty of which continues to reward the sharpest critical study.' Jeffrey Hanson, Australian Catholic University

Søren Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript has provoked a lively variety of divergent interpretations for a century and a half. It has been both celebrated and condemned as the chief inspiration for twentieth-century existential thought, as a subversive parody of philosophical argument, as a critique of mass society, as a forerunner of phenomenology and of postmodern relativism, and as an appeal for a renewal of religious commitment. These 2010 essays written by international Kierkegaard scholars offer a plurality of critical approaches to this fundamental text of existential philosophy. They cover hotly debated topics such as the tension between the Socratic-philosophical and the Christian-religious; the identity and personality of Kierkegaard's pseudonym 'Johannes Climacus'; his conceptions of paradoxical faith and of passionate understanding; his relation to his contemporaries and to some of his more distant predecessors; and, last but not least, his pertinence to our present-day concerns.

Introduction Rick Anthony Furtak
1. The 'Socratic secret': the postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs M. Jamie Ferreira
2. Kierkegaard's Socratic pseudonym: a profile of Johannes Climacus Paul Muench
3. Johannes Climacus' revocation Alastair Hannay
4. From the garden of the dead: Johannes Climacus on religious and irreligious inwardness Edward F. Mooney
5. The Kierkegaardian ideal of 'essential knowing' and the scandal of modern philosophy Rick Anthony Furtak
6. Lessing and Socrates in Kierkegaard's Postscript Jacob Howland
7. Climacus on subjectivity and the system Merold Westphal
8. Humor and irony in the Postscript John Lippitt
9. Climacus on the task of becoming a Christian Clare Carlisle
10. The epistemology of the Postscript M. G. Piety
11. Faith and reason in Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript C. Stephen Evans
12. Making Christianity difficult: the 'existentialist theology' of Kierkegaard's Postscript David R. Law
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy: c 1600 to c 1900 [HPCD]