Search Results

“... sense from which they suffer is in fact a form of rational judgment.’ This is precisely what Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was contending about his own age, with a prophetic accuracy which now seems almost uncanny. His word for what Mr Levin is describing here is ‘at raisonere’, ‘to reason’, but to reason in a very special way, a way ...”

“... Søren Kierkegaard spent much of the summer of 1855 staring out of the windows of his cramped second-floor apartment in the centre of old Copenhagen, across the road from the Church of Our Lady. He knew the building well, but the prospect did not please him. As a student, hapless and heavily in debt, he used to take communion there with his ancient and immovably melancholy father; but that was long ago, and he had been an erratic and inconsistent churchgoer since that time ...”

“... to his fingertips – a fact Cornwell fails to make enough of. Like his Danish contemporary Søren Kierkegaard, he practised an intensely subjective faith which finds God not – in 18th-century fashion – in the evidence of the external world but in the depths of the self. This was a convenient as well as a sincerely held conviction, since in the ...”

“... repudiate as merely playing the game of the philosophers he officially scorns. (He wishes he were Søren Kierkegaard but is condemned to be Hilary Putnam.) In the first chapter, on the prospects for artificial intelligence, he makes some fairly familiar, but telling, points about the obstacles in the way of simulating human reasoning, criticising his own ...”

“... and ‘died defending an abused horse’. And it is delightful to reflect that the ‘selfish’ Søren Kierkegaard was so idle that he ‘published little in his lifetime’. Readers may also be entertained to find, however, that Fernández-Armesto’s colourful details have a tendency to be wrong. Saussure gave his celebrated lecture courses in ...”

“... of the cocktails don’t matter (though it does raise a smile that they have to attend the Sören Kierkegaard Dining-Room). Stylish metaphors are suddenly welcome (a neighbour of Albert’s, an investor, steers his Fairlane ‘into his driveway with one index finger, as if dialling his broker’), but one becomes aware of The Corrections as a quite ...”

“... readers, are we not others too? In 1964, Levinas attended a conference in Paris on Soren Kierkegaard – a writer who, with his religious passion for the paradoxical absoluteness of existence, would seem like a natural neighbour for Levinas, even a model. The conference was addressed by Levinas’s old antagonist Sartre, who might have been expected ...”

“... way for philosophically interesting reasons. A number of them have come from peripheral nations: Kierkegaard from Denmark, Derrida and Cixous from Algeria, Kristeva from Bulgaria. Some of them (Marx, Freud, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Derrida) were of Jewish or partly Jewish background, and thus already semi-outsiders. Two of the most prominent were gay ...”

“... or a form of puppetry without the puppets; and according to the assiduous theatregoer Søren Kierkegaard this kind of vocal play may even be a fundamental phase in the art of existence itself. Kierkegaard had no patience with theological notions of ventriloquism, but he (or rather his pseudonym Constantin ...”

“... set his possibly empty crosses high up in an unpeopled mountain landscape; the Danish pastor Søren Kierkegaard turned on his Church with loathing and contempt. Coleridge never managed to be alienated to this degree: he loved the idea of the Church as communion and community, just as, when a wretched husband and an unloved lover, he believed that ...”