Kierkegaard's account of the life of faith turns on an astonishing claim: a person living faithfully continually enjoys, and takes part in, everything. What can this assertion actually mean? The pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, Johannes de silentio, imagines what such a human being might look like; indeed, as de silentio puts it, 'He looks just like a tax collector'. This seemingly ordinary person, in his 'movements' of faith, finds infinite significance and an absorbing joy in his environment, from moment to moment. How does he do it? This characterization of faithful comportment is unique in the Kierkegaardian corpus, and becomes the tantalizing centerpiece of an exploration of the Kierkegaardian self. Sheridan Hough embarks on a groundbreaking 'existential/ phenomenological' investigation of the uncanny abilities of the faithful life through an analysis of Kierkegaard's 'spheres of existence'; each sphere reveals a specific kind of significance, and indeed a way of 'being in the world'. Hough employs a distinctively original narrative voice, one that examines Kierkegaard's ontology from the perspective of his pseudonymous voices, and from the characters that they create. This approach is both descriptive and diagnostic: by understanding what someone living out an aesthetic, ethical, or a religious existence seeks to achieve, the phenomenon of the faithful life, and its demands, comes into sharper focus. This faith is not simply some thought about God's greatness-indeed, the 'propositional content' of faith is a central issue of the book. Instead, Hough argues that Kierkegaardian faith is the hallmark of the fullest flowering of a human life, one achieved in ways only hinted at in the demeanor of the cheerful and enigmatic 'tax collector,' an existential task in which 'temporality, finitude is what it is all about'.

Kierkegaard's account of the life of faith claims that a person living faithfully continually enjoys, and takes part in, everything. What can this mean? Sheridan Hough imagines how such a person might look: 'just like a tax collector'. He embarks on an 'existential-phenomenological' investigation of the faithful life through an analysis of Kierkegaard's 'spheres of existence', each revealing a specific kind of significance, and a way of 'being in the world'. Hough examines Kierkegaard's ontology from the perspective of his pseudonymous voices, and from the characters they create.

This book is a study of Kierkegaard's conception of the self through the lens of a minor character in Fear and Trembling.

No thinker has reflected more deeply on the role of religion in human life than Søren Kierkegaard, who produced in little more than a decade an astonishing number of works devoted to an analysis of the kind of personality, character, and spiritual qualities needed to become an authentic human being or self. Understanding religion to consist essentially as an inward, passionate, personal relation to God or the eternal, Kierkegaard depicts the art of living religiously as a self through the creation of a kaleidoscope of poetic figures who exemplify the constituents of selfhood or the lack thereof. The present study seeks to bring Kierkegaard into conversation with contemporary empirical psychology and virtue ethics, highlighting spiritual dimensions of human existence in his thought that are inaccessible to empirical measurement, as well as challenging on religious grounds the claim that he is a virtue ethicist in continuity with the classical and medieval virtue tradition.

The book brings together the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard with that of another prominent proto-existentialist thinker, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Asking the question: "What constitutes an authentic Christian life?", the book explores the answer given by both authors, which is that one should rid oneself of selfish inclinations and strive for a life of faith that revolves around the virtues of humility and non-preferential love. However, as we learn from Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, becoming an authentic individual is no easy task, and the book goes on to examine the obstacles that lie in the path of individual existential self-development. The book then examines the ways in which the various characters and pseudonymous authors who populate Dostoevsky's and Kierkegaard's books struggle in their attempts to become authentic ethical and religious individuals. The examination of this struggle, termed existential entrapment and defined as the inability to progress on the path of one's existential self-development, forms the core of the book and helps to map out the ethical-religious landscape of Dostoevsky’s and Kierkegaard’s thought.

This book is an attempt to write about Kierkegaard’s philosophy in the style of Kierkegaard’s philosophy: energetic, playful, free spirited, surprising, and joyous. It is a deliberately crumby book in the sense that it seeks out the fragments, scraps, and crumbs of philosophical arguments that are generally ignored or swept away, like so much rubbish, but that are actually the most interesting parts of the meal. The Anti-Assistant-Professor Method that this book follows adopts Kierkegaard’s many excellent jokes about assistant professors as a guide to how not to write about Kierkegaard’s philosophy; specifically: • Don’t cease to be human. • Don’t be a parasite, merely feeding off other people’s creations and never creating anything new. • Don’t reduce or simplify or systematize Kierkegaard’s ideas in order to make life easier for everyone (because that was never the point). • Don’t kill Kierkegaard’s philosophy by lecturing on it, thereby turning it into a collection of dead ideas for nonhumans rather than subjective truths that need to be lived. Following these guidelines, the book attempts to extend and amplify some of Kierkegaard’s most important ideas in a way that combats the persistent problem of nihilism—a disease that even Kierkegaard succumbed to at the end of his life.

This collection of essays strikes new ground in our understanding of Kierkegaard's Either/Or and his authorship as a whole.