Kierkegaard's Concept of Despair

Description

The literature on Kierkegaard is often content to paraphrase. By contrast, Michael Theunissen articulates one of Kierkegaard's central ideas, his theory of despair, in a detailed and comprehensible manner and confronts it with alternatives. Understanding what Kierkegaard wrote on despair is vital not only because it illuminates his thought as a who

Michael Theunissen is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Freie Universitat Berlin. He is the author of many books, including Vorentwurfe von Moderne: Antike Melancholie und die Acedia des Mitterlalter and Negative Theologie der Zeit.

"This is the first book to undertake a sustained, straightforward, analytically rigorous reconstruction of a central pillar of Kierkegaard's thought, his understanding of despair. It provides an extremely useful framework for future analytic work on Kierkegaard. What Theunissen seeks to do is precisely the kind of project Kierkegaard scholars ought to be undertaking. The book will be of great interest to philosophers, theologians, and intellectual historians who are interested in existentialism, Christian thought, and ethical theory more generally."-Frederick Neuhouser, Barnard College, Columbia University, author of Actualizing Freedom: Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory