The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard
ISBN: 9780253006578
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Indiana University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Kierkegaard Søren 1813–1855; Faith and reason -- Christianity; Philosophical theology;

Richard McCombs presents Søren Kierkegaard as an author who deliberately pretended to be irrational in many of his pseudonymous writings in order to provoke his readers to discover the hidden and paradoxical rationality of faith. Focusing on pseudonymous works by Johannes Climacus, McCombs interprets Kierkegaardian rationality as a striving to become a self consistently unified in all its dimensions: thinking, feeling, willing, acting, and communicating. McCombs argues that Kierkegaard's strategy of feigning irrationality is sometimes brilliantly instructive, but also partly misguided. This fresh reading of Kierkegaard addresses an essential problem in the philosophy of religion--the relation between faith and reason.


Richard McCombs teaches at St. John's College in Santa Fe.

hidden image for function call