Colloquia Spring 2010

25.02.1010
13:15 – 15:00 Andrew Henscheid:” Love’s Authority: Kierkegaard and the Question of Autonomy” .

Are the moral ideals of love and autonomy compatible? Beginning with an analysis of Kant and the German romantics, I develop an understanding of two types of autonomy—rational and aesthetic—and then trace their presence in Either/Or, in the writings of the Judge and the Aesthete. As an existential position, however, autonomy rests on an interpretation of the self as a kind of authority which does not entirely agree with the picture of loving in Works of Love. Love generates a critique of these two forms of autonomy: the imperative logic and structure of love are irreducible to reason, and love’s bond to actuality precludes the self-creative irony of aesthetic autonomy. Thus, as an improvement on these two existential positions, I aim to show how love—despite its offense to autonomy—could be a legitimate source of moral authority.

11.03.2010
 13:15 – 15:00 Carl Hughes “‘The First Love,’ ‘The Woman Who Was a Sinner’: Theatrical and Liturgical Stagings”

This presentation will compare two very different texts from the beginning and the end of Kierkegaard’s authorship: Aesthete A’s review of Scribe’s play The First Love in Either/Or, and the Discourse “The Woman Who Was a Sinner” in Three Discourses at the Communion on Friday. In particular, I will focus on how these two texts represent and solicit desire in their respective theatrical and liturgical contexts. I will suggest that, despite all of the important differences between Kierkegaard’s portrayal of the aesthetic and the religious, his attitudes toward the theater and theatricality can shed light on the nature of his rhetoric in even his explicitly religious texts. I will argue that his Communion Discourse on “The Woman Who Was a Sinner” can be interpreted as a kind of “staging,” which seeks to elicit an ever more intense desire for God.

18.03.2010 
13:15 – 15:00 Matias Møl Dalsgaard: “On Personhood and the Limitations to Narrative Thinking”

 What makes a healthy person? A healthy life-narrative or a healthy will? Recent philosophical accounts of personhood as well as a number of recent Kierkegaard readings have been emphasizing—and over-emphasizing, I will argue—the narrative side of the equation. Based on a paper I have recently written on the topic, I would like to discuss Kierkegaardian themes pertaining the question about will vs. narrative. My paper will be distributed prior to the colloquium and will not be read at the colloquium since it is relatively long (ca. 30 pages).

15.04.2010
13:15 – 15:00 Francoise Surdez: “Kierkegaard’s Repetition and its Concrete Implications in Situations of Crisis and Solitude”

 In this paper I will show how Kierkegaard’s insights provide a basis for a research model which is applicable in pastoral counseling. Instead of denying or avoiding despair, adequate pastoral care must address the lonely, isolated, or outcast individual and guide her or him through personal crises. The aim of this process, articulated so well in Kierkegaard’s book Repetition and in his theory and practice of writing, is to regain a joyous and fulfilled life.

22.04.2010
13:15 – 15:00 Diego Giordano: “Kierkegaard’s Reception of Lessing through Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion”

 In my paper I try to show how the question of the historicity of Jesus Christ, i.e. of Christianity, faced by Kierkegaard in Philosophical Fragments and Postscript, borrows its theoretical approach from Lessing (Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft), that is the starting point, or rather the neutral field, from which Kierkegaard advances against the Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, in a osmotic relationship that links these three philosophers.
Indeed the relationship Kierkegaard/Hegel is very difficult to analyze and, depending on the various interpretations, we have Kierkegaard consciously and fully Hegelian (Thulstrup), or in a state of ferment but confused about the speculative idealism (Fenger), or critical of the Hegelianism insofar as he is hostile towards Heiberg and Martensen (Stewart).
Nevertheless, both considering the books owned by Kierkegaard, and proceeding to determine the Danish (Heiberg and Martensen) and German (Marheineke and Daub) reception of Hegel, we can perhaps realize how the development of the “Lessing’s problem,” and the consequent answer given by Kierkegaard in Philosophical Fragments, is possible solely by relating it to Hegel and the heated debate that arose soon after his death by his philosophical system (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion). In other words the Hegelian Philosophy of Religion, mediated by the reading of Lessing, is the basis for the next comprehension of Christianity on the part of Kierkegaard, as well as of his controversy against Hegel’s philosophy.
To address himself to Lessing means to start from the strong assumption of examining the problem of historical Jesus in isolation from the thought of Christ. The target of Kierkegaard is twofold: on the one hand, he shatters the objectiveness of the historical Christianity comparing the secularized Christianity on the basis of its (self) alienation (Selbstentfremdung) from the primitive Christianity and the original Christian doctrine; on the other hand he lays the foundations for a transcendental metaphysics that presupposes the subjectivity as ground, and he makes of it the condition of possibility of knowledge.
If the transcendental philosophy of German idealism becomes the methodology of the knowledge of God, since only through the dis-closure (Unverborgenheit) of the Mind all the others έσχατα are legitimized, for Kierkegaard the subjectivity becomes methodology of the knowledge of God insofar as God is the absolute τέλος in function of which the relative τέλη of the human life make sense.

29.04.2010
13:15 – 15:00 Margherita Tonon: “The Problem of Mediation in Kierkegaard and Adorno”

 The purpose of this paper is two-fold: on the one hand, I intend to explore Kierkegaard’s position with regard to the Hegelian notion of mediation and, on the other, I intend to assess Adorno’s criticism of Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy with reference to this concept of mediation. I will try to determine whether or not Kierkegaard does away with mediation altogether, as argued by Adorno, and with what kind of consequences. I will try to argue, with Adorno, that Kierkegaard’s rejection of mediation in its Hegelian form turns out to be problematic in its abstract separation of subjectivity from the object, but at the same time, I will try to demonstrate, against Adorno, that another form of mediation is at play here: a form of mediation that preserves inter-subjective rationality and communicability. Ultimately, I will try to argue that what is at stake in Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegelian mediation is directed at the same target at which Adorno’s re-appropriation of such a concept also aims, i.e., the retrieval of individual experience and the critique of totalizing thinking.

06.05.2009
13:15 – 15:00 Adam Buben: “The Existential Compromise in the History of the Philosophy of Death”

I begin by offering an account of two key strains in the history of philosophical dealings with death. Both strains initially seek to diminish fear of death by appealing to the idea that death is simply the separation of the soul from the body. According to the Platonic strain, death should not be feared since the soul will have a prolonged existence free from the bodily prison after death. With several dramatic modifications, this is the strain that is taken up by much of the mainstream Christian tradition. According to the Epicurean strain, death should not be feared since the tiny particles that make up the soul leave the body and are dispersed at the moment of death, leaving behind no subject to experience any evil that might be associated with death. Although informed by millennia of further scientific discovery, this is the strain picked up on by contemporary atheistic, technologically advanced mankind.
My primary goal is to demonstrate that philosophy has an often-overlooked alternative to viewing death in terms of this ancient dichotomy. This is the alternative championed by Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger. Although both thinkers arise from the Christian tradition, they clearly react to Epicurean insights about death in their work, thereby prescribing a peculiar way of living with death that the Christian tradition seems to have forgotten about.
Despite the association of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, there is a fundamental difference between them on the subject of death. In Being and Time Heidegger seems to rely on the phenomenology of death that Kierkegaard provides in texts such as “At a Graveside.” It is interesting to notice, however, that this discourse, especially when seen in the light of Kierkegaard’s more obviously religious works, might only be compelling to the aspiring Christian. If so, then perhaps there is a tension in both Heidegger’s “methodologically atheistic” appropriation of Kierkegaard’s ideas about death, and Heidegger’s attempt to make these ideas compelling to the aspiring human. My secondary goal is to demonstrate that Heidegger takes the “existential philosophy of death” too far when he incorporates it into his early ontological project.