Daniel Watts

In the first part of this essay (Sections I and II), I argue that Kierkegaard's work helps us to articulate and defend two basic requirements on searching for knowledge of one's own judgements: first, that searching for knowledge whether one judges that P requires trying to make a judgement whether P; and second that, in an important range of cases, searching for knowledge of one's own judgements requires attending to how one's acts of judging are performed. In the second part of the essay (Sections III and IV), I consider two prima facie problems regarding this conception of searching for knowledge of one's own judgements. The first problem concerns how in general one can coherently try to meet both these requirements at once; the second, how in particular one can try to attend to one's own acts of judging. I show how Kierkegaard's work is alive to both these problems, and helps us to see how they can be resolved.

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (b. 1813–d. 1855) left behind an extraordinary body of work that has had a major impact on European philosophy, and that continues to inform major debates within analytic philosophy as well. Utterly distinctive and often dazzling, Kierkegaard’s writings typically confront the reader with an enigmatic interplay between seriousness and jest and they bristle with original ideas. The range and sheer volume of these writings is difficult to take in: the output published in Kierkegaard’s lifetime alone extends to over seventy books and articles and he left besides a voluminous collection of drafts, notes, and journals. Often billed as the “father of existentialism,” Kierkegaard’s influence is in evidence not least in the work of Heidegger, Adorno, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty (but Heidegger, for one, was notoriously slow to acknowledge the debt). His work was also studied seriously by Wittgenstein, who learnt Danish for the task and went so far as to rank Kierkegaard first among 19th-century thinkers. The most obvious arena of his on-going influence is the philosophy of religion, where his work continues to inform debates around such central topics as the problem of evil, the role of evidence in religious belief and the phenomenology of religious experience. But in other areas of philosophy, too, Kierkegaard’s work has been fruitfully brought to bear; on topics such as the nature of selfhood and subjectivity, love and friendship, death and mourning, the role of literature in moral philosophy and the limits of language and thought. While his writings notably tend to cut across academic subject-divisions (and have certainly made their mark on other disciplines, too), this bibliographical entry aims to provide a guide to Kierkegaard’s reception by philosophers.

My central claim in this paper is that Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is governed by the basic aim to articulate a real dilemma, and to elicit its proper recognition as such. I begin by indicating how Kierkegaard’s works are shaped in general by this aim, and what the aim involves. I then show how the dilemmaticstructure of Fear and Trembling is obscured in a recent dispute between Michelle Kosch and John Lippitt regarding the basic aims and upshot of the book. Finally, I consider two critical questions: Why does Kierkegaard present his dilemmatic reasoning in the form of a “dialectical lyric”? And why does he write a book that aims only to articulate a dilemma, and not also to resolve it?