KHÔRAL LOVE? KIERKEGAARD AND DERRIDA ON HOSPITALITY

KIERKEGAARD AND THE ASH‘ARITES ON REASON AND THEOLOGY

Neither the Ash‘arites nor Kierkegaard’s systems of theology are anti-rational, for Kierkegaard regards the contradiction present in the object of faith as absolute rather than logical, suggesting thereby the existential dialectics for understanding this contradiction instead of resolving it. The Ash‘arites also hold that one can understand the existence of God through absolute reason, or reaso...

Kierkegaard , Socrates and Existential Individuality

The 19 century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was a profoundly religious thinker. He is also regarded as the father of Existentialism, one of the most important philosophical movements of the 20 century. The term ‘existentialist’ is applied to those philosophers, like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who held that the foundation of all philosophical thought is to be found in the actual,...

Waiting for Justice: Benjamin and Derrida on Sovereignty and Immanence

WAITING BEFORE THE LAW IN KAFKA’S PARABLE “BEFORE THE LAW” WE SEE, quite famously, that the story’s protagonist (known only as “the man from the country”) is forced to wait before the gate of law for his whole life. The gatekeeper, whose only purpose seems to be to bar the man’s way, keeps him sitting on a stool just before the gate. As the man is dying from old age, he has this well-known exch...

Making Sense of Nonsense: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein

The aim of this paper is to make sense of cases of apparent nonsense in the writings of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. Against commentators such as Cora Diamond and James Conant, we argue that, in the case of Wittgenstein, recognising such a category of nonsense is necessary in order to understand the development of his thought. In the case of Kierkegaard, we argue against the view that the noti...

European Memories: Jan Patočka and Jacques Derrida on Responsibility