Alastair Hannay

This work, a chapter from Kierkegaard's first major volume, Either/Or, springs from his relationship with his fiancee, Regine Olsen. Kierkegaard fell in love with the young woman, ten years his junior, proposed to her, but then broke off their engagement a year later. This event affected Kierkegaard profoundly. Olsen became a muse for him, and a flood of volumes resulted. His attempt to set right, in writing, what he feels was a mistake in his relationship with Olsen taught him the secret of "indirect communication." The Seducer's Diary, then, becomes Kierkegaard's attempt to portray himself as a scoundrel and thus make their break easier for her. Matters of marriage, the ethical versus the aesthetic, dread, and, increasingly, the severities of Christianity are pondered by Kierkegaard in this intense work.

Written by an international team of contributors, this book offers a fresh set of interpretations of Fear and Trembling, which remains Kierkegaard's most influential and popular book. The chapters provide incisive accounts of the psychological and epistemological presuppositions of Fear and Trembling; of religious experience and the existential dimension of faith; of Kierkegaard's understanding of the relationship between faith and knowledge; of the purported and real conflicts between ethics and religion; of Kierkegaard's interpretation of the value of hope, trust, love and other virtues; of Kierkegaard's debts to German idealism and Protestant theology; and of his seminal contributions to the fields of psychology, existential phenomenology and literary theory. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and upper-level students of Kierkegaard studies, the history of philosophy, theology and religious studies.

"Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays makes seventeen of the most important papers on Kierkegaard available in one place for the first time. Their author, renowned Kierkegaard scholar Alastair Hannay, has substantially revised many of his earlier essays and prepared three new essays especially for this volume." "Written by the world's foremost Kierkegaard scholar and translator, Kierkegaard and Philosophy is an indispensable resource for all students of Kierkegaard's work."--Jacket.

Produced by Copenhagen's Soren Kierkegaard Research Centre, this volume, the first of an eleven-volume series, offers an insight into Kierkegaard's inner life. In addition to early drafts of his published works, it also contains his thoughts on events and philosophical and theological matters and ideas for future literary projects.

"In his perceptive and provocative new book, Alastair Hannay contests two prejudices that have dogged the appreciation of Soren Kierkegaard's writings. These are that to grasp their contemporary impact, the religious focus must be referred to his personal background, and that their varied voices mirror a fragmentation in his own relationship to self and society. It was for paying lip-service to their own values that Kierkegaard castigated his society, his diagnosis being that this was one of many ways in which more pressing and disturbing questions of existence were typically evaded. It is in the renowned thinker's own struggle for selfhood that Hannay sees his prescient anticipation of the current focus on issues relating to integration, acceptance and identity. By cultivating a role as the social misfit within his innate exceptionality Kierkegaard deliberately exposed himself to the problems to which an age gripped by 'identity politics' is now responding. By cleverly examining the relation between his richly conceived polemics and Kierkegaard's own preoccupation with identity, Hannay has written an essential new text for Kierkegaard scholars and students of Continental philosophy and existentialism."--