The President's Class | Stages along Life's Way: How We Become Who We Are Greg Salyer, Ph.D. Learn more about PRS, online classes, and find sources of practical and profound wisdom at www.prs.org/.
I visited Kierkegaard's grave in Copenhagen. Hans Christian Anderson is buried about 50 yds away.....AND Regina Olsen is also buried in the same cemetery.
12:50 He says, quote: I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away - yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ----------- and wanted to shoot myself.”
One of the better kierkegaard lectures I've had the pleasure of hearing on here. I also immediately trust any professor who's favorite philosopher is kierkegaard.
Agreed :) few people like Kierkegaard who were truly trustworthy to listen to and if someone says he's their favorite it raises my respect and eyelids immediately. God rest
Do you maybe have a few other lectures you enjoyed on Kierkegaard? I also loved the clarity of this one, and I find myself faced with a lot of amateurish clutter when I just search for Kierkegaard on RU-vid. I’d appreciate if you could recommend some. Thanks!
As a ‘13 UVA philosophy graduate, it shames me how little attention is granted Kierkegaard in today’s institutions. Regardless, I found him and, like the speaker, view him as my favorite philosopher.
The lecturer also forgets to mention Kierkegaard's digression into a story about "the Merman" in the middle of his analysis of the story of Abraham and Isaac. :)Lol
Decent lecture but not everyone moves into the religious mode. The ethical which is the universal, everyone can be in. Aesthetic which is the material, is a default, but the religious is a leap of faith that not many take. Refer Abraham piece in Fear and Trembling, first essay.
I take objection to Kierkegaard's use of Abraham's leap of faith as a central theme and point of his self proclaimed "irrational" philosophy in fear and trembling. It's almost as if to posit Abraham's actions were not premeditated and preceded by his many interactions and reasonings with GOD. The "Leap of faith" woes and implications can even be worse than any sort of systematic philosophy Kierkegaard feared.
Soren Kierkegaard never wrote to become a philosopher. He was studying and graduated from the seminary, and spent a short time as a priest, who wrote and preached in Church on Sundays. His many Christian discourses are not discussed of course as much as we discuss his personal diaries and journals... Regine Olsen was likely a girl who he would have wanted to marry, but he is becoming a priest! He went to Berlin alone to sow his wild oats and does not speak much of these trips except that they were about having a good time with friends, and he implies a woman who he may have had a child with, etc. etc. His life is the life of many of us, just simply made public, and because his writing is so damn interesting. He is saying NOTHING in his writing, it was a past-time if you like, only meaningful to himself, the joke is on you the Reader who might find it all absurdly comical... which is exactly what amuses this lecturer here. The Bookbinder or printer is always the last person to touch a book, after the authors, the editors, the publishers, ad infinitum. Think about it. That's all S. K. did... hopefully you'll find something you enjoyed in his writing, and just remember it all ends in death anyway, whatever! Soren Kierkegaard, simply a man, perhaps a poet, an entertaining writer.
To say Socrates was sentenced to death and killed himself instead is historially wrong. He was forced to kill himself by taking the hamlock given to him by the prison warden. It was the form of execution he was sentenced to. According the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Simon Blackburn, Oxford 2008) a Socratic Irony is "Socrates' irritating tendency to praise his hearers while undermining them, or to disparage his own superior abilities while manifesting them". A good exemple was the TV-Inspector Columbo who always disparaged his own talent to make the suspects believe he was an idiot and thereby induced them to utter contradictions or to make other mistakes they wouldn't have made otherwise.
Thank you for a great presentation on the most interesting philosopher of the 19th century. I highly recommend a fairly new book on him by philosopher Claire Carlisle.
you understand Kierkegaard was foremost a Christian - in the real sense of it being esoteric and on one level a methodology for change - so he meant it when he said he "chose" the faith based path over love of women. It was clearly sacrificial but the alternate was to repeat the pain of eros in loving something in the material over the spiritual. and thats because he already had the power of a man who sees the truth or if you prefer a truth... thanks for the lecture
David Foster Wallace and Ludwig Wittgenstein had the same idea as Umberto Eco: "the best way to explain fully is to tell jokes". I think that's one of the reasons why the funniness of jokes is quite hard to gasp as we were teached since we were children that jokes are meant to be easy to understand.
