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Kierkegaard: First Existentialist or Last Kantian?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

R. Z. Friedman
R. Z. Friedman
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Philosophy, St Michael's College, University of Toronto
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Extract

Kierkegaard's leap of faith is one of the most thoroughly explored topics in modern philosophy. What can yet another inquiry into this notion hope to achieve? A number of significant things, I think, of both historical and systematic value.

The main contention of this paper is that the leap of faith, often associated with the emergence of existentialism, is Kierkegaard's response to a problem which is essentially Kantian in origin and structure. Kierkegaard wants to accomodate both the Kantian interpretation of morality as rational command and Kant's insistence on morality as the sole point of access to religion, while rejecting the Kantian moralization of religion and rationalization of faith. The leap of faith is not, as existentialism would have it, an absolute beginning in philosophy or in individual reflection but a transition from morality to religion within an essentially Kantian context.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , June 1982 , pp. 159 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

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page 159 note 2 ibid. pp. 18, 54.

page 160 note 1 Kierkegaard, , Either/Or, trans. Swenson, David F.. and Swenson, Lillian Marvin (Garden City: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1959), 1: 20, 74.Google Scholar See also Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 226.Google Scholar

page 160 note 2 Ibid.

page 160 note 3 ibid. pp. 92, 304.

page 160 note 4 Kierkegaard, , Either/Or, trans. Lowrie, Walter (Garden City: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1959), pp. 44, 61; 2:41, 61.Google Scholar

page 160 note 5 ibid. p. 21.

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page 161 note 4 This is, I believe, the significance of Kierkegaard's analysis in ‘Ultimatum’, Either/Or, 2: 341–56.Google Scholar

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