Life lessons from Kierkegaard

Description

Soren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author. Born in 1813 in Copenhagen, his philosophical work addressed living as a single individual and the importance of personal choice and commitment. A famously fierce critic of the idealist thinkers of his time, he is regarded as the first existentialist philosopher. Here you will find extracts from his greatest works. The Life Lessons series from The School of Life takes a great thinker and highlights those ideas most relevant to ordinary everyday dilemmas. These books emphasise ways in which wise voices from the past have urgently important and inspiring things to tell us. This book is introduced and edited by Robert Ferguson, author of the Viking history The Hammer and the Cross and two Danish novels. He is a novelist, biographer, dramatist and historian.

Robert Ferguson was born in the UK in 1948 and left school in 1966. He worked at a number of jobs including postman, hospital porter and deckhand on a trawler before enrolling at UCL, London in 1976 and taking a course in Scandinavian Studies. In 1983 he emigrated to Norway and began his literary career as a radio dramatist, translating and adapting for radio works by Knut Hamsun and Henrik Ibsen for the BBC. He has also written eleven original radio plays and twice won the BBC Methuen Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Drama, in 1984 and 1986. His first literary biography was Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun, which was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Best Biography Award in 1987. It also won the University of London J.G.Robertson Award. In 1996 Enigma was dramatized as a six-part television series by NRK (Norwegian State Television). As well as literary biographies and a history of the Vikings, Ferguson has written two novels, published only in Norwegian.

thoroughly welcoming and approachable ... [Robert Ferguson] communicates strongly his enthusiams, indeed his love, for this Manichean of the north, and writes of him beautifully ... If the six books in the Life Lessons series can teach even a few readers to pay passionate heed to the world - to notice things - they will have been an unquestionable success -- John Banville Prospect there is a good deal to be learned from these little primers Observer A new series of books from Alain de Botton's School of Life does for Hobbes, Freud, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Byron and Bergson what de Botton's books have done for classical philosophers and Proust. They are short, snappy reads, reminiscent of Maria Popova's Brain Pickings blog - aphoristic digests from history's great minds New Statesman