The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard

by Richard McCombs

Richard McCombs presents S�ren Kierkegaard as an author who deliberately pretended to be irrational in many of his pseudonymous writings in order to provoke his readers to discover the hidden and paradoxical rationality of faith. Focusing on pseudonymous works by Johannes Climacus, McCombs interprets Kierkegaardian rationality as a striving to become a self consistently unified in all its dimensions: thinking, feeling, willing, acting, and communicating. McCombs argues that Kierkegaard's strategy of feigning irrationality is sometimes brilliantly instructive, but also partly misguided. This fresh reading of Kierkegaard addresses an essential problem in the philosophy of religion--the relation between faith and reason.

Genres: Philosophy

264 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Cal Davie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kierkegaard is a very difficult author to get ones head around. McCombs displays how Kierkegaard plays with characters and concepts to really get the reader to think, and that there's more coherence in his writings than the apparent incoherence.