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    STUDIA THEOLOGIA%20REFORMATA%20TRANSYLVANICA - Issue no. 1-2 / 2008  
         
  Article:   WAS KIERKEGAARD A PHILOSOPHER OR A THEOLOGIAN? / FILOZÓFUS VOLT-E KIERKEGAARD VAGY TEOLÓGUS?.

Authors:  PÜSÖK SAROLTA.
 
       
         
  Abstract:   Who is Kierkegaard? To find the right answer beyond his own works we must examine also the context of his life and work.
Readings are very important factors of his personal development. The research identified a lot of book titles from his own and also from public libraries. He had a very large, lexical knowledge about whole world history of philosophy and theology.
The study trip in 1841 has an important contribution in forming Kierkegaard. In Berlin he visits the lectures of old Schelling. The old “enemy” of Hegelian absolute philosophy stressed that the reality has two sides, both the concept about the content (quid sit/ hvad det er), and the real existence (quod sit / at det er). Schellings ontology confirm Kierkegaards existential thoughts.
How is Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel? Until 2003 in Kierkegaard research was very popular the view that between two thinkers is no connection because Kierkegaard rejects Hegel. Jon Stewart in his book Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel reconsidered, (Cambridge, University Press, 2003) made a profound and critically analyzing, and discovered both a lot of common themes and terminologies and the main points of Kierkegaard’s real critique. Steward distinguished three periods in Kierkegaard’s work, and about the second period he wrote: “Therefore, this period can perhaps be best characterized by Kierkegaard’s use of Hegel for polemical purposes. While he engages in a polemic with the Danish Hegelians, that polemic is often hidden beneath what appears at face value to be a critique of Hegel. It is Hegel’s name, and hot that of Heiberg, Martensen, or Adler, that appears in the text.” […] „Kierkegaard and Hegel are engaged in fundamentally different kinds of projects: … Kierkegaard is primarily interested in the religious life of the individual [. . . ]„… whatever it was that Kierkegaard was doing, he was not a philosopher in the nineteenth-century sense of the term and had no pretensions of being one. Whereas Hegel, following the tradition of German idealism, understands philosophy as the analysis of abstract concepts and thus gives to epistemology a central position. Kierkegaard rejects this project as irrelevant and even obtuse. For this reason much of what has been understoodas the Hegel-Kierkegaard debate is at cross-purposes.” – (J. Stewart, 610, 633, 640–41. )
Kierkegaards most important argument against Danish Hegelian theologians is that in the theology is never allowed to speak about faith as a mode of cognition, and to give a philosophical account. The faith first of all must be a living form, an existential reality, not a general form of cognition.

Keywords: Kierkegaard, Schelling, Danish Hegelians, epistemology, subjectivity.
 
         
     
         
         
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