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Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

Overview

Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy has been a major influence in the development of 20th century philosophy, especially Existentialism and Postmodernism. Kierkegaard was a 19th century Danish philosopher who has been called the "Father of Existentialism". His philosophy also influenced the development of existential psychology.

Kierkegaard criticized aspects of the philosophical systems that were brought on by philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel before him and the Danish Hegelians. He was also indirectly influenced by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. He measured himself against the model of philosophy which he found in Socrates, which aims to draw one's attention not to explanatory systems, but rather to the issue of how one exists.

One of Kierkegaard's recurrent themes is the importance of subjectivity, which has to do with the way people relate themselves to (objective) truths. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, he argues that "subjectivity is truth" and "truth is subjectivity." What he means by this is that most essentially, truth is not just a matter of discovering objective facts. While objective facts are important, there is a second and more crucial element of truth, which involves how one relates oneself to those matters of fact. Since how one acts is, from the ethical perspective, more important than any matter of fact, truth is to be found in subjectivity rather than objectivity.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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It now seems as if we had not yet shown forth much of the Socratic philosophy, for we have merely kept to the principle; but the main point with Socrates is that his knowledge for the first time reached this abstraction. The Good is nevertheless no longer as abstract as the _νοῦς_ of Anaxagoras, but is the universal which determines itself in itself, realizes itself, and has to be realized as the end of the world…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
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Now it is the endeavour of philosophy to _prove_ such a unity, to show that it lies in the very nature of thought and subjectivity, to be inseparable from being and objectivity. In these circumstances therefore, philosophy, whatever estimate may be formed of the character of these proofs, must in any case be glad to see it shown and maintained that its maxims are facts of consciousness, and thus in harmony with…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
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That ‘to be true’ _means_ to be thought in a certain way is, therefore, certainly false. Yet this assertion plays the most essential part in Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ of philosophy, and renders worthless the whole mass of modern literature, to which that revolution has given rise, and which is called Epistemology. Kant held that what was unified in a certain manner by the synthetic activity of thought was _ipso…
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica
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Philosophers who discussed Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Humboldt University of Berlin

Place in the tradition

Part of Absurdism.

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