Realism and antirealism in Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Kierkegaard on the Relationship Between Practical and Epistemic Reasons for Belief

“…Second, the permissivist interpretation is compatible with acknowledging that there is a good sense in which Kierkegaard is a skeptic: due to his infallibilist conception of knowledge in the strict sense , he denies the possibility of knowledge of contingent propositions about the external world. However, as Evans (1998b, p. 165) observes, Kierkegaard often speaks of knowledge in a looser sense, sometimes using the phrase ‘approximation‐knowledge’ (e.g., CUP, p. 81). Piety (2010a) thus argues that Kierkegaard distinguishes between two types of knowledge: knowledge in a strict sense – which requires certainty – and knowledge in a loose sense – which Piety claims consists in a ‘justified true mental representation,’ where a belief is justified just in case it is sufficiently probable given the evidence (p. 61).…”

From an Epistemology of Faith to Everyday Understanding

“…In the interest of linking this idiosyncratic and undeniably counterintuitive treatment of religious belief with questions of clinical credulity, it is worth considering C. Stephen Evans’s (1998) characterization of Kierkegaard’s (1844/1985) epistemology as a “a kind of metaphysical realism” (Evans, 1998, p. 166).…”

“…In the interest of linking this idiosyncratic and undeniably counterintuitive treatment of religious belief with questions of clinical credulity, it is worth considering C. Stephen Evans’s (1998) characterization of Kierkegaard’s (1844/1985) epistemology as a “a kind of metaphysical realism” (Evans, 1998, p. 166). In Philosophical Fragments , Evans observes, one encounters a Kierkegaard that transforms faith into the only honest vehicle for the construction of knowledge: “Kierkegaard’s view is not that human knowers can never make contact with an external world”—cannot, that is to say, ever confirm their assumptions or answer their questions by reference to lived experience—”but that all such contact involves faith or belief ” (Evans, 1998, p. 165).…”

“… 2. Since Philosophical Fragments is written in the style of a skeptical thought project, Evans’s (1998) verdict on the question of Kierkegaard’s skepticism is illuminating as well, if beyond the scope of this discussion: “That Kierkegaard has a genuine sympathy for skepticism cannon be denied. In the last analysis, however, he is not himself a skeptic” (p. 165). …”

The Normative Resources of Kierkegaard's Subjectivity Principle

“…While Kierkegaard does not believe propositions actually exist -they instead have a kind of thought-existence distinguished from existing in actuality 17 -he does believe that as ideal objects they are instantiated as acts or states of existing beings. 18 These propositions may express cognitive relationships to the objectively real world and are able to provide approximate, fallibilist knowledge (as possibility). Merold Westphal notes that in Climacus' theory of truth as subjectivity it is affirmed that there is objective truth of two kinds.…”