On Kierkegaard and the Truth: 1 (Paul L. Holmer Papers)

Paul L. Holmer (1916-2004) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota (1946-1960) and Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School (1960-1987). Among his many acomplishments Holmer was one of the most significant American students of Kierkegaard of his generation. Although written in the 1950s and 1960s Holmers theological and philosophical engagement with Kierkegaard challenges much in the contemporary scholarly discussions of this important thinker. Unlike many Holmer refuses reductionist readings that tie Kierkegaard to any particular school. He likewise criticizes biographical readings of Kierkegaard much in vogue recently seeing Kierkegaard rather as an indirect communicator aiming at his readers own ethical and religious capacities. Holmer also rejects popular existentialist readings of Kierkegaard seeing him as an analyzer of concepts while at the same time denying that he is a crypto-analyst. Holmer criticizes the attempt to construe Kierkegaard as a didactic religious thinker appreciating Kierkegaards cool descriptive objectivity and his ironic and stylistic virtuosity. In his important reading of Kierkegaard on truth Holmer pits Kierkegaard against those who see truth empirically idealistically or relativistically. Holmers carefully textured account of Kierkegaards conceptual grammar of truth in ethical and religious contexts fifty years after it was penned addresses immediately current discussions of truth meaning reference and realism versus antirealism relativism and hermeneutics. It will be of great interest to all interested in Kierkegaard and his importance for contemporary theology and philosophy. This is the first volume of The Paul L. Holmer Papers which includes also volume 2 Thinking the Faith with Passion: Selected Essays and volume 3 Communicating the Faith Indirectly: Selected Sermons Addresses and Prayers. Paul L. Holmer was and is still a largely unheralded Kierkegaard scholar and analytic philosopher. This volume and the collected works series it introduces should do a lot to correct that oversight in both fields. We owe the editors both of whom were Holmers students a great deal of thanks for their labor of love. -Robert L. Perkins Stetson University Paul Holmer was one of the most interesting and original religious thinkers in mid-twentieth-century America yet he is little known today. So[enter back slash through O]ren Kierkegaard was his central scholarly interest and his unusual and provocative reading of Kierkegaard is important. -David Kelsey Yale Divinity School Almost fifty years ago Paul Holmer finished a manuscript about Kierkegaard but then left it unpublished. Instead emulating Socrates Holmer spent the following decades focused on encouraging Yale Kierkegaard students to examining their own lives with intellectual rigor. The result was a revolution in American Kierkegaard scholarship . . . -Andrew J. Burgess The University of New Mexico With the two-hundredth anniversary of Kierkegaards birth approaching in 2013 what a treat to have Paul L. Holmers long awaited and now posthumous On Kierkegaard and the Truth to clarify Kierkegaards status as a philosopher and the role of logic and reason in his thought. A master philosopher and teacher himself Holmer knew how to cut to the very essence of a thinkers thought as he does here with Kierkegaards. -Sylvia Walsh Stetson University Professor Paul L. Holmer was the doyen of Kierkegaard studies for much of the later part of the twentieth century. His jargon-free writings are crisp clear epiphanic and always in earnest . . . -Gordon Marino St. Olaf College David J. Gouwens is Professor of Theology at Brite Divinity School. He is the author of Kierkegaards Dialectic of the Imagination (1989) and Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (1996). Lee C. Barrett III is Stager Professor of Theology at Lancaster Theolo