Kierkegaard and the Life of Faith: The Aesthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious in Fear and Trembling [Hardcover]

Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling is one of the most widely read works of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of religion. While several commentaries and critical editions exist, Jeffrey Hanson offers a distinctive approach to this crucial text. Hanson gives equal weight and attention to all three of Kierkegaard's problems, dealing with Fear and Trembling as part of the entire corpus of Kierkegaard's production and putting all parts into relation with each other. Additionally, he offers a distinctive analysis of the Abraham story and other biblical texts, giving particular attention to questions of poetics, language, and philosophy, especially as each relates to the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Presented in a thoughtful, well-informed, and fresh manner, Hanson's claims are original and edifying. This new reading of Kierkegaard will stimulate fruitful dialogue on well-traveled philosophical ground.

Jeffrey Hanson is Research Associate in the Program for Integrative Knowledge and Human Flourishing at Harvard University's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He is editor ofKierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experimentand (with Michael R. Kelly) ofMichel Henry: The Affects of Thought.

A thorough, considered, and provocative treatment of what justifiably remains Kierkegaard's most famous book.

Jeffrey Hanson persuasively demonstrates that Fear and Trembling contains a variety of different styles, each of which colors the content being conveyed, and to the extent that we draw the connection between style and content, we gain an even stronger impression of the various arguments in Kierkegaard's best known book.

Hanson gives a nuanced and deeply informed reading of Kierkegaard's pictures of religious faith as they are articulated in Fear and Trembling, perhaps the most arresting and complex work in the Dane's authorship. Faith is linked to love and to gracefully weathering catastrophe, perhaps invilC(