Søren Kierkegaard – Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Current champion in Philosophy’s Longest Sentences contest — Kierkegaard

4 Comments / History of Philosophy / Stephen Hicks

Reviving this contest for readers: What is the longest sentence ever written by a philosopher? I mean the kind of sentence that, as you are reading it through — trying to hold the context and decipher the meaning — flows majestically onwards, or meanders along deceptively, with occasional side streams (and parenthetical remarks), until your cerebrum […]

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Søren Kierkegaard in Explaining Postmodernism

Leave a Comment / Philosophy, Religion / Stephen Hicks

In Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard defends faith by going on the offensive against reason: “Faith requires the crucifixion of reason.” For more on the context of Kierkegaard’s irrationalism and its implications for postmodernism, see p. 98 of my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism from Rousseau to Foucault. Information about other editions and translations is available at this

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What Is Faith? Seven definitions

4 Comments / Epistemology, Religion / Stephen Hicks

To reason is to integrate perceptual evidence into concepts, propositions, and theories. By contrast, what is faith? Below are seven definitions of faith. The definitions are in my words, but they are taken from my readings of seven philosophers of religion: William James, Søren Kierkegaard, C. S. Lewis, George H. Smith, Basil Mitchell, R. M.

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Kierkegaard, Luther, and Tertullian

Leave a Comment / Religion / Stephen Hicks

Stephen Hicks here discusses quotations on religious faith from Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Luther, and Tertullian. This is from Part 3 of Professor Hicks’s Philosophy of Education course. 1 clip: Previous: Phase Three: “I found it necessary to deny reason …” Next: The story of Abraham. Return to the Philosophy of Education page. Return to the

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Irrationalism from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche [EP]

5 Comments / Epistemology, History of Philosophy, Philosophy / Stephen Hicks

[This excerpt is from Chapter 2 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault] Epistemological solutions to Kant: Irrationalism from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche The Kantians and the Hegelians represent the pro-reason contingent in nineteenth-century German philosophy. While the Hegelians pursued metaphysical solutions to Kant’s unbridgeable gap between subject and object, in the process

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