Browsing by Subject "Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813-1855."
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Item Kierkegaard and modern moral philosophy : conceptual unintelligibility, moral obligations and divine commands.(2009-04-03T15:24:16Z) Cantrell, Michael A.; Evans, C. Stephen.; Philosophy.; Baylor University. Dept. of Philosophy.We moderns have lost a grasp on some of our most commonly used moral concepts. Or rather, the moral concepts that we use everyday have, in our grasp, lost the intelligibility they once enjoyed. Contemporary moral judgments are linguistic survivals from practices that have been largely abolished in many spheres of modern society. And although we continue to use the same expressions, many of our moral utterances are now lacking in content, due to our having relinquished the conditions for their intelligibility. Elizabeth Anscombe argued for this thesis in her 1958 article, “Modern Moral Philosophy.” I demonstrate that there are good reasons to believe that Anscombe’s diagnosis of our modern moral predicament is correct before turning to point out that Anscombe was not the first to propose such a radical picture of our moral situation. Over a century before Anscombe, Søren Kierkegaard diagnosed the disorder of our modern moral language and thought and worked to identify, expose and correct modernity’s conceptual confusions. Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of the disorder of our modern moral language and thought has remarkable commonalities with Anscombe’s. Nevertheless, whereas Anscombe famously suggested that we would do well to abandon our use of the moral “ought” and of the notions of moral “right”, “wrong” and “obligation,” Kierkegaard prescribes a different solution. Instead of jettisoning our unintelligible moral concepts, Kierkegaard suggests, we should recover a divine law conception of ethics that would render our moral language and thought intelligible once again. I argue that such a recovery of a divine law conception of ethics is a viable option; specifically, I argue that a divine command theory of moral obligation—conceived as a special case of a social theory of obligation and developed with an eye toward the essential roles played by both institutional rules and the virtues—is theoretically defensible and deserves to be taken as a serious metaethical option by contemporary ethical theorists.Item Kierkegaard's dialectic of the one and the many : a Platonic quest for existential unity.(2009-08-25T16:21:41Z) Nam, Andrew S.; Evans, C. Stephen.; Philosophy.; Baylor University. Dept. of Philosophy.The dissertation argues that Kierkegaard's major philosophical works overall offer faith in Christ as the only genuine solution to 'the problem of the one and the many.' The problem lies with the apparently contradictory properties of 'being' (e.g., universal/particular, infinite/finite, etc.), that—speaking most generally—everything has the same being insofar as it exists and yet each thing has a different being, its own being, from every other. The solution then must be one of 'dialectical unity,' the kind of unity that validates both contradictories equally. Kierkegaard argues that the one/many problem is really the problem of freedom, for the very consciousness of the contradiction arises from sinning against God, our self-conscious misrelation of 'being' by loving the finite infinitely. Therefore, unity cannot be obtained at the theoretical—metaphysical-epistemological—level, but rather, must be practically realized by becoming a dialectically unified self, achieving 'existential unity.' To explain the thesis, I conceptually reconstruct Kierkegaard's stages of existence theory in terms of this dialectical problem: the contradiction between the aesthetic (capable of affirming particularity only) and the ethical (universality) gets resolved in a higher dialectical unity, the religious. Kierkegaard describes faith in Christ as the self's final telos, the highest form of existential unity, explaining the final religious stage by comparing and contrasting Christian categories of existence with the corresponding philosophical categories in Plato's works, specifically meant to address the one/many problem. Three Christian/Platonic counterparts are explained here: (1) the general characteristic of faith as 'repetition' vs. the philosophical existence characterized by recollection; (2) the ontological 'moment' of the God/man and the epistemological 'moment' of faith in Christ vs. Plato's idea of 'the instant' in the Parmenides in addressing the problem of universals; (3) love of the neighbor vs. Platonic Eros. I shall analyze the one/many dialectic in these Platonic and Christian categories so as to clarify Kierkegaard's claim that only the fully lived life of faith, characterized by a dynamic love relation between God and the self and the resulting progressive revelation of divine love in and from the self, can reconcile the one and the many.Item The separation of love and state : C. S. Lewis and Søren Kierkegaard as political allies.(2012-08-08) Pardo, Travis R.; Beckwith, Francis.; Church and State.; Baylor University. Institute of Church-State Studies.Does a limited government limit neighbor-love? Through their writings, C. S. Lewis and Søren Kierkegaard have inspired many individuals to “love thy neighbor,” yet these authors do not call for government to fulfill the command to love others. This is inconsistent, critics say, for neighbor-love ought to have political dimensions as well; in fact, love requires more government, not less. But Lewis and Kierkegaard favor a small and limited government. They are “generous liberal givers” on the individual level but “absolute conservative restrictors” on the collective political level. Why? These two men do not directly answer this charge of inconsistency, but this essay aims to extract three possible answers from their theology and political philosophy. All three answers agree that neighbor-love has social but not political implications: (1) the Argument from Corruption: sin hinders love; (2) the Argument from Force: a person cannot be forced to love by government since love requires consent; and (3) the Argument from the Holy Spirit: neighbor-love is divine love and the government does not have access to it; but the Church does have access by way of the Holy Spirit. If true, the Holy Spirit may be a missing variable in Church-State calculations for a model of Low State, High Church.