Kierkegaard's 'Concluding Unscientific Postscript': A Critical Guide

by Rick Anthony Furtak (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780511850363
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/29/2010
Series:	Cambridge Critical Guides
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	432 KB

About the Author

Rick Anthony Furtak is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College. His publications include Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity (2005) and Rilke's 'Sonnets to Orpheus' (2007). A devoted teacher of existential thought, he has published widely on a variety of topics in moral psychology and in the philosophy of literature.

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

"....a guide of any merit should be welcome, and this one surely will be.... This book is remarkably free of typos or editing errors of any kind. It is to be highly recommended both for Kierkegaard scholars and for novices or those who want to explore for the first time one of the major works of a writer whom Wittgenstein praised as the greatest religious writer of the 19th century."
—Norman Lillegard, University of Tennessee-Martin, Philosophy in Review

"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. That it serves as such is no small achievement, and it is surely a credit to the editor, Rick Anthony Furtak.... The dozen essays collected here speak to the largest themes of this notoriously difficult and overlong work and stay admirably focused on what the reader needs to keep in mind very generally to come to grips with the text.... This collection overall 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, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

From the Publisher