Influence and reception of Søren Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher whose influence and reception varied widely and may be roughly divided into various chronological periods.

However, Kierkegaard's attack upon Christendom, represented by the Danish National Church near the end of his life, did not endear him to many in the clergy and theological circles.

Many 20th-century philosophers, both theistic and atheistic, drew concepts from Kierkegaard, including the notions of angst, despair, and the importance of the individual.

His fame as a philosopher grew tremendously in the 1930s, in large part because the ascendant existentialist movement pointed to him as a precursor, although later writers celebrated him as a highly significant and influential thinker in his own right.

Philosophers and theologians influenced by Kierkegaard include Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Barth, Simone de Beauvoir, Niels Bohr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Emil Brunner, Martin Buber, Rudolf Bultmann, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Reinhold Niebuhr, Franz Rosenzweig, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, Joseph Soloveitchik, Paul Tillich, Malcolm Muggeridge, Thomas Merton, Miguel de Unamuno.

[4] Paul Feyerabend's epistemological anarchism in the philosophy of science was inspired by Kierkegaard's idea of subjectivity as truth.

[7] Existentialist (often called "humanistic") psychologists and therapists include Ludwig Binswanger, Viktor Frankl, Erich Fromm, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May.

[8] Ernest Becker based his 1974 Pulitzer Prize book, The Denial of Death, on the writings of Kierkegaard, Freud and Otto Rank.

[10] Finally the celebrated Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) closely studied key concepts such as anxiety, and this influence is notable in some of his iconic paintings such as The Scream.

[11] Other figures deeply influenced by his work include W. H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Don DeLillo, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka,[12] David Lodge, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Rainer Maria Rilke, J.D.

[13] Kierkegaard's work The Diary of a Seducer has been re-published several times, including Princeton University Press' translation with John Updike's foreword and Penguin Books' series Great Loves.

Kierkegaard's influence on continental philosophy increased dramatically after the First and Second World Wars, especially among the German existenz thinkers and French existentialists.

[18] She states that from these examples it is clear that Kierkegaard (or at least Johannes de Silentio) did hold great respect for women.

Kierkegaard responded to Beck's criticisms in a footnote published in the followup to the Fragments, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

[20] In 1856, the Bavarian-born conservative politician and historian Joseph Edmund Jörg wrote an article discussing religious movements and events in Scandinavian history.