Kierkegaard's 'Concluding Unscientific Postscript' by Rick Anthony Furtak

Kierkegaard's 'Concluding Unscientific Postscript' by Rick Anthony Furtak

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 2010 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.

'One of the most noteworthy features of Kierkegaard's 'Concluding Unscientific Postscript': A Critical Guide is that it lives up to its subtitleThis collection truly is a guide to the work as a whole … [It] contains significant steps forward in our understanding of this complex text, the difficulty of which continues to reward the sharpest critical study.' Jeffrey Hanson, Australian Catholic University

Rick Anthony Furtak is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College. He is the author of Wisdom in Love (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005) and Knowing Emotions (Oxford University Press, 2018), and the editor of essay collections on Kierkegaard and Thoreau. His poetry, including translations, has appeared in such periodicals as Blue Unicorn, The Healing Muse, Illuminations (which nominated him for Pushcart Prize consideration), Janus Head, The Lyric, The Raintown Review, and Southern Indiana Review, and the volume As a Patient Thinks about the Desert (Atmosphere Press, 2021). He is Book Series Editor for the newly launched Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy and Poetry.