This book challenges the widespread view of Kierkegaard’s idiosyncratic and predominantly religious position on mimesis. Taking mimesis as a crucial conceptual point of reference in reading Kierkegaard, this book offers a nuanced understanding of the relation between aesthetics and religion in his thought. Kaftanski shows how Kierkegaard's dialectical-existential reading of mimesis interlaces aesthetic and religious themes, including the familiar core concepts of imitation, repetition, and admiration as well as the newly arisen notions of affectivity, contagion, and crowd behavior. Kierkegaard’s enduring relevance to the malaises of our own day is firmly established by his classic concern for the meaning of human life informed by reflective meditation on the mimeticorigins of the contemporary age. Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Kierkegaard, Continental philosophy, the history of aesthetics, and critical and religious studies. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

How does our conception of possibility contribute to our understanding of self and world? In what sense does the possible differ from the merely probable, and what would it mean to treat possibility as part of the real? This book is an opportunity to see Kierkegaard as contributing to a distinctive phenomenology, ontology, and psychology of possibility that addresses the question of our existential relationship to the possible. The term 'possibility' (Mulighed) and its variants occur with curious frequency across Kierkegaard's writings. Key to Kierkegaard's understanding of the self, possibility is linked to a number of core concepts in his works: from imagination, anxiety, despair, and 'the moment' to the idea in The Sickness Unto Death that “God is that all things are possible”. Responding to what he sees as a Hegelian and Aristotelian misunderstanding of possibility, Kierkegaard offers a novel reading of the possible that, in turn, directly influences 20th-century philosophers such as Heidegger, Deleuze, and Derrida. Kierkegaard gives a rich account of how anxiety and despair, as lived experiences of possibility, not only show us the contingency and fragility of the systems and identities we presently inhabit but also reveal a more fundamental contingency that demands a new way of relating to the possible. For Kierkegaard, hope, faith, and love are attitudes in which meaning is forged by embracing contingency. In a time of political, social, and environmental uncertainty Kierkegaard's work on radical possibility seems more relevant than ever.

The Abased Christ is the first monograph to be devoted exclusively to Søren Kierkegaard’s Christological masterpiece, Practice in Christianity. Alongside an argument for a new translation of the work’s title, it offers detailed textual commentary on a series of themes in Practice in Christianity, such as the person of Christ, contemporaneity, imitation, and Kierkegaard’s philosophy of history. Anti-Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Practice in Christianity, presents to his readers a uniquely challenging understanding of who Christ is and what it means to follow him. The Christ of Anti-Climacus is not the glorious Christ who abides with the Father in heaven, but the abased Christ who is poor, marginal, offensive, and persecuted. Throughout Practice in Christianity, we are called not only to perceive the abased Christ, but to follow after him. The Abased Christ aims to enrich historical theologians’ appreciation of Kierkegaard’s Christology. However, it concludes by grappling with questions of power, agency, and sacrifice which have been at the forefront of contemporary theology in the 20th and 21st centuries, thereby suggesting how we might make sense of Kierkegaard’s Christology today.

This book explores Kierkegaard’s significance for bioethics and discusses how Kierkegaard’s existential thinking can enrich and advance current bioethical debates. A bioethics inspired by Kierkegaard is not focused primarily on ethical codes, principles, or cases, but on the existential 'how' of our medical situation. Such a perspective focuses on the formative ethical experiences that an individual can have in relation to oneself and others when dealing with medical decisions, interventions, and information. The chapters in this volume explore questions like: What happens when medicine and bioethics meet Kierkegaard? How might Kierkegaard’s writings and thoughts contribute to contemporary issues in medicine? Do we need an existential turn in bioethics? They offer theoretical reflections on how Kierkegaard’s existential thinking might contribute to bioethics and apply Kierkegaardian concepts to debates on health and disease, predictive medicine and enhancement, mental illness and trauma, COVID-19, and gender identity. Kierkegaard and Bioethics will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Kierkegaard, bioethics, moral philosophy, existential ethics, religious ethics, and the medical humanities.

Kierkegaardian Phenomenologies, edited by J. Aaron Simmons, Jeffrey Hanson, and Wojciech Kaftanski, offers a substantive, diverse, and timely consideration of phenomenological engagements within the thought of Søren Kierkegaard. Featuring original essays from a distinguished collection of established and emerging global scholars representing different schools of thought, this volume explains how the interest in a phenomenological reading of Kierkegaard is not only vital, but continues to grow in importance by cultivating new readers and inviting old readers to revisit their views. Divided into four parts—"Phenomenological Explorations", "On Hearing and Seeing", "Rethinking Faith and Despair", and "Kierkegaard and New Phenomenology"—this collection not only reflects the current state of scholarly conversations in both Kierkegaardian studies and phenomenological research, but also envisions new directions in which they should go, exploring ways that a Kierkegaardian approach to phenomenology might help us to re-envision Kierkegaard scholarship and re-enliven phenomenological philosophy.

New developments in positive psychology have evolved into the 2nd and 3rd waves, going beyond the individual and positive focus towards complex systems, multi-cultures, and the existential positive psychology of transcending suffering. The present project aims at developing a general theory of well-being that integrates all the above changes as the new frontier of positive psychology. At a time when humanity is threatened by all kinds of existential crises, from climate change to nuclear war, from ideological polarization to a widening income gap, we need to develop a big-picture theoretical framework showing that happiness is not just for those living in peace and prosperity, but also for those struggling in dire poverty and war-ravaged countries like Ukraine, not just for the self, but also for others, not just for the present, but also for future generations. This broader approach towards wellbeing opens up new vistas for research and interventions.

This fully revised and updated 2nd edition provides a comprehensive reference guide to existentialism, featuring key chapters on key existentialist thinkers, as well as chapters applying existentialism to subject areas ranging across politics, literature, feminism, religion, the emotions, cognitive science, and poststructuralism. Contemporary developments in the field of existentialism that speak to issues of identity and exclusion are explored in 4 new chapters on race, gender, disability, and technology, whilst the 5th new chapter new chapter outlines analytic philosophy's complicated relationship to existentialism. Presenting the field of existentialism beyond the European tradition, this edition also includes a new key thinker chapter on Frantz Fanon, alongside Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and de Beauvoir, as well as new engagement with the work of scholars on race and existentialism, including Lewis R. Gordon, George Yancy, and Richard Wright. The resources section at the end of the book includes an updated A to Z glossary, and timeline of key events, texts and thinkers in existentialism, as well as a list of relevant organisations, and an annotated guide to further reading, making this 2nd edition an invaluable text for scholars and students alike.