Kierkegaard, the aesthetic clerk

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James Clerk Maxwell's Scottish chair.

This account of Maxwell as professor of natural philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen, fills in many details that have been left out of Maxwell's biographies. It discusses the degree programme that Maxwell taught on, the nature of his colleagues, the type of student he had in his classes and the range of activities involved in his teaching. Evidence is cited that Maxwell was an enthusiastic...

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,...

The Fluid Dynamics of James Clerk Maxwell

We tend to think of Maxwell’s genius entirely in relation to his creation of electromagnetic theory (as summarised by Maxwell’s equations) on the one hand, and to his seminal development of the kinetic theory of gases (leading to the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, the derivation of transport coefficients like viscosity and thermal diffusivity for gases and associated validation of the continuu...

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...