This book explores the multiple meaning of the notion of otherness in Søren Kierkegaard’s thought. Leo Stan discusses in detail the threefold structure of human existence in Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole, both pseudonymous and self-signed.

This study represents a broad and critical overview of mainstream political interpretations of Kierkegaard's authorship throughout the twentieth century and beyond. While divided according to the classical distinction between left‐ and right‐wing politics, the analysis also includes Kierkegaard's reception in African‐American and feminist circles. Essentially, the chapter documents the contradictory and arbitrary manner in which Kierkegaard has been interpreted from a political standpoint, but it also sheds light on the original side of this hermeneutic.

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 1 Seiten: 75-98.

In this article, I embark on an analysis of Søren Kierkegaard's view of human otherness in strict correlation to his Christian philosophy. More specifically, my aim is to show that Kierkegaard's thought is essentially informed by a decisive appropriation of the soteriological category of sin which has momentous implications for Kierkegaard's views of selfhood and intersubjectivity. The main argument is that both Kierkegaard's negative evaluation of human otherness and his acerbic indictments of any collectivist interference in salvific matters cohere with (...) his appropriation of the doctrine of the Fall. At the same time, I show in what sense Kierkegaard deems human alterity to be indispensable to one's spiritual self-becoming expressed through the Christian imperative of loving the other as neighbor. Seen thus, agape, while supplementing Kierkegaard's creationistic psychology, actually becomes the necessary restorative opposite of sinfulness in the self's encounters with the distinct uniqueness of the human other. (shrink)

The following essay tackles Søren Kierkegaard’s view of temporality within a phenomenological vista. It proceeds by differentiating between an aesthetic, an ethical, and a religious relationality to time in step with Kierkegaard’s Christology and especially, with his notion of “sacred history,” largely unexplored in the scholarship. My fundamental hermeneutic assumption is that Kierkegaard’s stress on Christ’s historicity and the subsequent human task of imitation are properly understood only in a soteriological framework. That is why temporality should be conceived against the (...) backdrop of the singular self’s pursuit of redemption. My thesis will be that, since one’s encounter with the God-man is essentially historical, whilst engaging human temporality in its wholeness (i.e., selfhood’s past, present, and future), Kierkegaard’s soteriology is highly relevant for a phenomenology of Christianity, which still awaits its philosophical unfolding. (shrink)