Søren Kierkegaard

and so we seek to find meaning, if not in ourselves, then -through others. We all have to deal with the problem of existential reality. Gatsby chose to find that meaning in Daisy. She was the one he chose to love. We all have to make choices. Soren Kierkegaard directly explains it when he said, “When it is a duty in loving to love the people we see, then in loving the actual individual person it is important that one does not substitute an imaginary idea of how we think or could wish that this…

while preventing ‘evil' from prevailing. Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill provide the pillars for what constitutes the discussion of Ethics in philosophy. However, since I am dealing with a case within a realm of science, I am using Søren Kierkegaard's application of Ethics in The Concept of Dread (1844). The method he used renders Ethics as "an ideal science" 1(p15) that ultimately "withstand temptations"1 (p16). Ethics for him is the "binding power" which—unlike the moral base of…

As a young lad growing up, I was raised in a Christian home and taught the ways of the bible. When I moved to Germany, I was exposed to several new religions that I had never encountered before, and these contradicted my prior knowledge of religion. JW von Goethe once said, “we know with confidence only when we know little; with knowledge doubt increases”. Exposure increased my knowledge of other faiths, but this increase also meant more doubts, more questions. For example, how can there be this…

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true” (Kierkegaard). This quote by Soren Kierkegaard accurately expresses the essence of the government in most dystopian societies: It leads the people to believe that everything that they stand for is true, and the majority of people then refuse to believe what is true once they are brainwashed. In 1984 by George Orwell, the civilization of Oceania is brainwashed into believing that…

Conflict resolution is a hard enough concept to grasp without throwing religion into the mix. Rabbi Amy Eilberg was not fazed by conquering both in her book From Enemy To Friend: Jewish Wisdom and the Pursuit of Peace. Rabbi Eilberg first decided to write her book on conflicts between faiths when she noticed her synagogue fighting ferociously about the events going on between Israel and Palestine, both in person and on a listserve. Horrified at how her peers were discussing the tragedy, she…

destruction. (Kronfeld 1935, 378) Angst can not be reduced to a merely objectless form of fear, Glas continues (p. 46-48), for it implies that objectless emotions would be accepted in the domain of the intentionality. The self is, in the words of Kierkegaard, a relating to itself. This relating to itself, that constitutes the selfness, and gives the definition of the person meaning, exists in “that it relates to itself, because it relates to an other”. (...) From this principle, the full…

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once said that “life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” It is almost every athlete 's dream to get to play at the collegiate level, but only 6% of high school athletes who play basketball are given scholarships, giving some of them the opportunity to choose where they want to attend school; all of them are given all four years of their college paid in full. In men’s and women 's basketball there are roughly 345 D1 schools. 28…

There are five philosophies of education that focus on teachers and students; essentialism, perennialism, progressivism, social reconstructionism, and existentialism. Essentialism is what is used in today’s classrooms and was helped by William Bagley in the 1930s. Perennialism is close to essentialism with the same idea of sharpening student’s minds and focusing on Great Books. Progessivism, social reconstructionism, and existentialism focus more on the wants and need of the students. Many…

There are two opposing sides to the argument of faith and the existence of God, evidentialism and non-evidentialism. Evidentialism is believing that it immoral to either form a new belief without sufficient evidence, or to sustain an existing belief by deliberately ignoring doubts and avoiding honest investigation. Non-evidentialism allows for more personal evidence to justify one’s belief. When contrasting the two views my personally beliefs align more with non-evidentialism. British…

Lev Shestov is an early 20th century Russian philosopher who has made massive contributions to the development of the philosophical aspect of existentialism. Shestov has contributed to existentialism through his fascinating critique of philosophy and his surprising connection between philosophical existentialism and religion. He is also one of the first Russian philosophers to find an audience in Europe. Existentialism is a philosophy, popularized in the 20th century, that analyzes an…