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Signs of the Times: Kierkegaard's Diagnosis and Treatment of Hegelian Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2013

Clare Carlisle
Clare Carlisle*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool, Clare.Carlisle@liverpool.ac.uk
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Abstract

In his 2003 book Kierkegaard's Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Jon Stewart challenges the classical interpretation of Kierkegaard's response to Hegelian philosophy. Stewart convincingly argues that Kierkegaard's work addresses Danish Hegelians rather than Hegel himself. However, in my view the conclusion Stewart draws from this — that Kierkegaard's thought on the whole has much less to do with Hegel than earlier commentators have presumed — goes too far in undermining the philosophical and historical significance of Kierkegaard's work, and, perhaps more importantly, closes down too quickly the question of his relation to Hegelian philosophy. The following passage exemplifies Stewart's position:

Given that the two are doing quite different things, it is not clear why a comparison of their views is supposed to be fruitful in the first place … The presumption for Kierkegaard having made a philosophical criticism of Hegel is that [Kierkegaard] himself is a philosopher and shares with Hegel a certain common understanding of the nature and office of the discipline. A genuinely philosophical criticism would only make sense if there were a common basis of this kind. If, by contrast, Kierkegaard is not a philosopher in the same sense of the word, then it is not clear why he should be conceived as giving a philosophical criticism of Hegel. It seems rather that given the disparate nature of their respective projects, such a criticism would be at cross-purposes. (Stewart 2003: 636–37, emphasis in original)

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , Spring/Summer 2010 , pp. 45 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2010

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