Kierkegaard's 'Concluding Unscientific Postscript'
A Critical Guide

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 new 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.

Reviews & endorsements

"....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

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Product details

• Date Published: September 2010
• format: Hardback
• isbn: 9780521897983
• length: 272 pages

• dimensions: 235 x 161 x 11 mm
• weight: 0.56kg
• availability: Available