The Essential Kierkegaard (ebook)

Argumento de The Essential Kierkegaard (ebook)

This is the most comprehensive anthology of Søren Kierkegaard's works ever assembled in English. Drawn from the volumes of Princeton's authoritative Kierkegaard's Writings series by editors Howard and Edna Hong, the selections represent every major aspect of Kierkegaard's extraordinary career. They reveal the powerful mix of philosophy, psychology, theology, and literary criticism that made Kierkegaard one of the most compelling writers of the nineteenth century and a shaping force in the twentieth. With an introduction to Kierkegaard's writings as a whole and explanatory notes for each selection, this is the essential one-volume guide to a thinker who changed the course of modern intellectual history.

The anthology begins with Kierkegaard's early journal entries and traces the development of his work chronologically to the final The Changelessness of God. The book presents generous selections from all of Kierkegaard's landmark works, including Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Works of Love, and The Sickness unto Death, and draws new attention to a host of such lesser-known writings as Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions and The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air. The selections are carefully chosen to reflect the unique character of Kierkegaard's work, with its shifting pseudonyms, its complex dialogues, and its potent combination of irony, satire, sermon, polemic, humor, and fiction. We see the esthetic, ethical, and ethical-religious ways of life initially presented as dialogue in two parallel series of pseudonymous and signed works and later in the "second authorship" as direct address. And we see the themes that bind the whole together, in particular Kierkegaard's overarching concern with, in his own words, "What it means to exist; . . . what it means to be a human being."

Together, the selections provide the best available introduction to Kierkegaard's writings and show more completely than any other book why his work, in all its creativity, variety, and power, continues to speak so directly today to so many readers around the world.

"The crowning achievement of [the Hongs'] monumental translation of all of Kierkegaard's published writings.... A rich and stimulating volume.... A book for everyone with an interest in Kierkegaard, from the first-time reader to the more experienced."--Bruce H. Kirmmse, editor of Encounters with Kierkegaard0INTRODUCTION ix
Early journal Entries 3
From the Papers of One Still Living 13
The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates 20
Either/Or, A Fragment of Life, I 37
Either/Or, A Fragment of Life, II 66
Four Upbuilding Discourses 84
Fear and Trembling 93
Repetition 102
Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy 116
Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum. Est 126
The Concept of Anxiety 138
Prefaces 156
Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions 164
Stages on Life's Way 170
Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments 187
"The Activity of a Traveling Esthetician and How
He Still Happened to Pay for the Dinner" 247
Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and The Present Age. A Literary Review 252
Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits 269
Works of Love 277
Christian Discourses 312
The Lily in the Field and the Bird o the Air 333
Two Ethical-Religious Essays 339
The Sickness unto Death 350
Practice in Christianity 373
Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays 385
For Self-Examination [First series] 393
Judge for Yourself! For Self-Examination, Second series 404
The Book on Adler 411
Faedrelandet Articles and The Moment 424
On My Work as an Author and The Point of View
for My Work as an Author 449
The Changelessness of God 482
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 493
NOTES 495
BIBLIOGRAPHY 505
INDEX 507