Description
Book SynopsisKierkegaard's thought is more relevant than ever to contemporary debates about the self, truth, ethics, and religion. This study explains how to make sense of controversial ideas in Kierkegaard's work, such as wholeheartedness, subjective truth, 'the leap' into faith and 'the teleological suspension of the ethical'.
Trade Review'Professor Fremstedal conducts a compelling reconstruction of how Kierkegaard develops wholeheartedness based on his views of moral psychology, metaethics, and the ethics of religious belief … This monograph provides unique understanding and reliable resources, tackling some controversial issues, and is a timely reference worthy of being read by researchers interested in the study of Kierkegaard and his outstanding cognitive philosophy on selfhood, ethics, and religion.' Chuandai Qiao, Dialog A Journal of Theology
'While this book will serve as an indispensable resource for contemporary Kierkegaard scholarship, it also has something to offer for ongoing conversations about Kant, German Romanticism, Idealism, ethics, religious epistemology, and Kierkegaard's subsequent relevance to these areas. In this way, Fremstedal has done a tremendous service to Kierkegaard scholarship by re-presenting him as a figure worthy of immediate consideration across multiple subdisciplines of philosophical and theological inquiry and scholarship.' Charles Duke, Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion
Table of ContentsIntroduction; Part I. Self, Despair and Wholeheartedness: 1. Selfhood and anthropology; 2. Why be moral? The critique of amoralism; 3. Moral inescapability: Moral agency and meta-ethics; Part II. Morality, Prudence and Religion: 4. The critique of eudaimonism: Virtue ethics, kantianism and beyond; 5. Non-eudaimonistic ethics and religion: Happiness and salvation; 6. The 'Teleological suspension of the ethical' and Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac; 7. Moralized religion: The identity of the good and the divine; Part III. 'Subjectivity, Inwardness, is Truth': 8. 'Hidden inwardness' and humor: Kantian ethics and religion; 9. Subjective truth: 'Kierkegaard's most notorious…claim'; Part IV. Faith and Reason: 10. A leap of faith? The use of lessing, Jacobi and Kant; 11. Faith neither absurd nor irrational: The neglected reply to Eiríksson; 12. Faith beyond reason: Supra-rationalism and anti-rationalism; 13. The ethics of belief: Fideism and pragmatism; Conclusion; References; Index.
