Since art is essential to the love of one’s neighbor as oneself and to love’s chief goal of building up one another, we cannot understand love without also understanding its art. Observing that praise is ubiquitous in Søren Kierkegaard’s writings, Richard McCombs interprets Kierkegaard’s Works of Love as a eulogy of love’s arts of forgiveness, peace-making, and building up one’s neighbor in maturity and charity. Kierkegaard stresses love's ability to achieve results, calling love irresistible and almost magical in overcoming obstacles to its purposes; living the life of faith and love involves skillful attention to the specificity of the episodes in an individual’s life, and the creative imagining of new ways of enacting these virtues. McCombs argues that Kierkegaard’s ideas about the art of love reveal limits or exceptions to his individualism and to his anti-consequentialism in ethics. Art and Praise in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love explores Kierkegaard’s distinct praises of love through texts like Works of Love, The Brothers Karamazov, and Middlemarch to illustrate, complement, and sometimes correct Kierkegaard’s profound account of love’s art and wisdom, suggesting ways that the art of praise bears on other questions in aesthetics, ethics, and religion.

The renowned French philosopher’s “ode to love’s power to unite in the face of eternity, and its optimism in the face of pain” (Publishers Weekly). In a world rife with consumerism, where online dating promises risk-free romance and love is all too often seen as a mere variant of desire and hedonism, Alain Badiou believes that love is under threat. Taking to heart Rimbaud’s famous line “love needs reinventing,” In Praise of Love is the celebrated French intellectual’s passionate treatise in defense of love. For Badiou, love is an existential project, a constantly unfolding quest for truth. This quest begins with the chance encounter, an event that forever changes two individuals, challenging them “to see the world from the point of view of two rather than one.” This, Badiou believes, is love’s most essential transforming power. Through thought-provoking dialogue edited from a conversation between Badiou and Truong, a vibrant cast of thinkers are invoked: Kierkegaard, Plato, de Beauvoir, Proust, and more, create a new narrative of love in the face of twenty-first-century modernity. Moving, zealous, and wise, Badiou’s “paean to the anticapitalist, antiessentialist, unifying power of love” urges us not to fear it but to see it as a magnificent undertaking that compels us to explore others and to move away from an obsession with ourselves (Publishers Weekly). “Finally, the cure for the pornographic, utilitarian exchange of favors to which love has been reduced in America. Alain Badiou is our philosopher of love.” —Simon Critchley, author of The Faith of the Faithless

"One of Soren Kierkegaard's most important writings, Works of Love is a profound examination of the human heart, in which the great philosopher conducts the reader into the inmost secrets of Love. "Deep within every man," Kierkegaard writes, "there lies the dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the household of millions upon millions." Love, for Kierkegaard, is one of the central aspects of existence; it saves us from isolation and unites us with one another and with God. This new edition of Works of Love features an original foreword by Kierkegaard scholar George Pattison."

In this volume fifteen eminent scholars illuminate the broad and often underappreciated variety of the nineteenth‐century Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard’s engagements with literature and the arts. The essays in Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts, contextualized with an insightful introduction by Eric Ziolkowski, explore Kierkegaard’s relationship to literature (poetry, prose, and storytelling), the performing arts (theater, music, opera, and dance), and the visual arts, including film. The collection is rounded out with a comparative section that considers Kierkegaard in juxtaposition with a romantic poet (William Blake), a modern composer (Arnold Schoenberg), and a contemporary singer‐songwriter (Bob Dylan). Kierkegaard was as much an aesthetic thinker as a philosopher, and his philosophical writings are complemented by his literary and music criticism. Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts will offer much of interest to scholars concerned with Kierkegaard as well as teachers, performers, and readers in the various aesthetic fields discussed. CONTRIBUTORS: Christopher B. Barnett, Martijn Boven, Anne Margrete Fiskvik, Joakim Garff, Ronald M. Green, Peder Jothen, Ragni Linnet, Jamie A. Lorentzen, Edward F. Mooney, George Pattison, Nils Holger Petersen, Howard Pickett, Marcia C. Robinson, James Rovira

Ethical Silence: Kierkegaard on Communication, Education, andHumility examines a new area of Kierkegaard scholarship: the ethical value of silence. Through exegesis of Kierkegaard’s later writings, works in what is known as his second authorship, Sergia Hay argues that silence is an essential element of his Christian ethics. Starting with an overview of Kierkegaard’s ideas concerning ethics and communication, Hay builds a case for a Kierkegaardian notion of ethical silence by showing how silence contributes to the fulfillment of ethical imperatives by halting chatter, setting the “fundamental tone” for ethical activity, curbing excessive self-love, and providing another mode for educating and expressing love. Most importantly, silence can be used to humble the self and elevate the neighbor, creating conditions of Christian equality. Ethical silence is not the silence of the ineffable or what cannot be said, this is the silence of what can be said but should not.

On Art and Selfhood lies at the intersection of existentialism and the philosophy of art. On the philosophy of art side, it addresses questions about why art matters and how we ought to appreciate it. On the existentialism side, it attends to questions pertaining to authenticity or authentic selfhood. That is to say, it focuses on issues and problems having to do with our personal identity or our sense of who we are. The goal of the book is to bring together these two topics in a productive manner by showing that works of art matter partly because they can help us with the project of selfhood. In other words, works of art are important in part because they can offer us much needed guidance and support as we try to figure out who we really are. To make the case for this thesis, On Art and Selfhood draws on the works of the Danish thinker, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55). It mines his writings for insights regarding aesthetics and personal identity, and then uses these insights to contribute to current discussions of these topics. Thus, the book speaks not only to those with interests in contemporary analytic philosophy but also to those with interests in historical scholarship on Kierkegaard.

The various kinds and conditions of love are a common theme for Kierkegaard, beginning with his early Either/Or, through "The Diary of the Seducer" and Judge William's eulogy on married love, to his last work, on the changelessness of God's love. Works of Love, the midpoint in the series, is also the monumental high point, because of its penetrating, illuminating analysis of the forms and sources of love. Love as feeling and mood is distinguished from works of love, love of the lovable from love of the unlovely, preferential love from love as the royal law, love as mutual egotism from triangular love, and erotic love from self-giving love. This work is marked by Kierkegaard's Socratic awareness of the reader, both as the center of awakened understanding and as the initiator of action. Written to be read aloud, the book conveys a keenness of thought and an insightful, poetic imagination that make such an attentive approach richly rewarding. Works of Love not only serves as an excellent place to begin exploring the writings of Kierkegaard, but also rewards many rereadings.