In this paper, I offer a reading of Søren Kierkegaard's Climacean works (Fragments and Postscript) in which I focus on their specific dissimilarities, but also on the important dialectical relationship between them. My central claim is that when we consider Kierkegaard's larger project in his authorship to encourage believers to practice a Christian existence characterized by tension, we begin to see the crucial shared role these works play for Kierkegaard's purposes. To begin, I outline the theological and polemical background to Kierkegaard's account of Christian existence by focusing on one of the central existential dualities in his thought, namely that of grace and works. In order to avoid falling into one extreme or the other, Kierkegaard argues for an account of faith as restlessness, which I identify as crucial to the Christian life. With this framework, I turn to Fragments and Postscript to draw out their respective emphases on gift and task, and I follow this with a discussion of how the dialectical relation between these emphases fulfills and upholds the account of tension that we have developed.
This essay develops the argument that Kierkegaard’s attack upon Christendom in his late writings can be fruitfully understood as a monumental task in two senses: first, as attacking the monuments of Christendom, and particularly those associated with Jakob Peter Mynster and Hans Lassen Martensen, and second, as itself a monument to the existential demand of what Kierkegaard identifies as authentic New Testament Christianity. Towards this end, the notion of the monument is introduced and employed to illuminate the critical and constructive nature of Kierkegaard’s attack. The essay concludes by reflecting on what it would mean to preserve such a Kierkegaardian monument.
Of all the areas of research within philosophy, few have proven as broad in interdisciplinary reach as race theory. Unlike some more traditional branches in philosophy that tend not to venture too far beyond the walls of philosophy departments, race theory has from the beginning developed in conjunction with other disciplines as varied as biology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and economics. The outcome of this approach to research has been and continues to be a fruitful and enlightening discourse on the subtleties and complexities of race and racism. In this essay I would like to proceed in the same interdisciplinary spirit by drawing into a discussion of racism several insights from phenomenology as well as studies in robotic artificial intelligence (hereafter AI). Although a precedent has been set for use of the former in race discourse and thus such use has achieved a certain amount of respectability (see Gordon;Alcoff 179-194; Yancy 1-32), the latter has received little to no attention and therefore may strike the reader as either odd or irrelevant.1 Nevertheless, this dual emphasis is intended for a particular purpose, namely to help tease out in an interesting manner the deep and complex interrelation of racism, ontology, and learning.More specifically, this essay engages in large part with the question of whether robots can become racist in the manner humans can and what it would require for robots to do so. It is important to note that the emphasis here is not on whether or not robots can be racist. Clearly, robots can be racist in the same sense that artifacts such as books and bumper stickers or -58 -PhaenEx institutions such as universities and banks can be racist, that is, as products or projections of human dispositions, behaviors, and intentions. However, to talk about the more interesting question of robots becoming racist is to shift the discussion towards the classic topic of the possibility of learning. How one becomes racist is a function of how one learns racism as well as a function of the type of being which learns, 2 and as such we cannot talk about learning without also talking about ontology. Thus, counter to the views of certain scholars (see, e.g., Lycan), the question of robots learning racism in the manner of humans is not strictly empirical, but is also deeply philosophical. In addition, the phrase "in the manner of humans" is not insignificant, for regardless of what we may say concerning robots, humans do appear to experience and to pass on racism in a very real way. Therefore, I suggest that in order to better understand this complex human phenomenon a running comparison between robots and humans can prove useful. My thesis is fairly elaborate due to its interdisciplinary nature, but it can nevertheless be summarized in the following manner. With respect to the guiding question of the essay, I argue that robots cannot become racist insofar as their ontology does not allow for an adequate relation to the social world which is necessary for learning racism, where racism is...
In this essay I explore Kierkegaard’s description of the vision of the lover carrying out the work of love in forgiveness in “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins.” I do so by turning to the notion of anamorphosis with the associated movement, (dis)position, and eccentricity involved in reconstitution of an anamorphic image. My argument is not only that such a dynamic can be seen in Kierkegaard’s deliberation, but also that drawing the connection between anamorphosis and Kierkegaard’s account highlights the movement and disposition involved in forgiveness as well as the manner by which the forgiving lover becomes an eccentric.
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