Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review
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Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Self-Knowledge: A History |
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Editors | Ursula Renz |
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Place of Publication | Oxford |
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Publisher | OUP |
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Pages | 205-222 |
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Number of pages | 18 |
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ISBN (Electronic) | 9780190630553 |
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ISBN (Print) | 9780190226428 |
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DOIs | |
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Publication status | Published - 5 Jan 2017 |
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Name | Oxford Philosophical Concepts |
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Abstract
Throughout his authorship, Kierkegaard shows an intense fascination with Socrates and Socratic self-knowledge. This chapter traces, in roughly chronological order: (1) the young Kierkegaard’s autobiographical reflections on self-knowledge, when first coming to understand his task as an author; (2) Socrates as a negative figure in The Concept of Irony - where self-knowledge is understood in terms of separation from others and the surrounding society - and the contrast with the Concluding Unscientific Postscript’s treatment of Socrates as an exemplary “subjective thinker”; (3) in Either/Or, the connection between self-knowledge and self-transparency, and the link between self-knowledge and “choosing oneself”, understood as willing receptivity; (4) in writings such as The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death, the importance of sin and our utter dependence upon God for the question of whether self-knowledge is ever really possible; and (5) in Judge for Yourself! and related journal entries, a more precise specification of what Christian self-knowledge might amount to. I aim to show that, in his account of self-knowledge as much as elsewhere, treatments of Kierkegaard as a proto-existentialist risk misleadingly downplaying the deeply and explicitly Christian nature of his thought.
Notes
This document is a draft of a chapter that has been published by Oxford University Press in Ursula Renz, ed., Self-Knowledge: a history, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), ISBN 9780190226428, eISBN 9780190630553.
ID: 8570881