Kierkegaard's 'Concluding Unscientific PostScript'

Sren 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.