His work, which combines elements of phenomenology, ethics and theology, has exerted considerable influence in postwar Nordic thought.

More recently, his work has been discussed by prominent figures in anglophone philosophy and sociology such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Stern, Simon Critchley and Zygmunt Bauman.

He subsequently studied under a number of prominent teachers in Strasbourg (Jean Hering), Paris (Henri Bergson), Göttingen (Hans Lipps and Friedrich Gogarten), Freiburg im Breisgau (Martin Heidegger), Vienna (Moritz Schlick) and Tübingen.

[1] From the 1930s, Løgstrup was a member of Tidehverv, a strongly anti-pietist movement within the Danish Church which at the time espoused a dialectical theology heavily influenced by Kierkegaard.

However he drifted increasingly further from the group (and from its interpretation of Kierkegaard, particularly as espoused by Kristoffer Olesen Larsen) and broke with the movement in the early 1950s.

By our attitude to the other person we help to determine the scope and hue of his or her world; we make it large or small, bright or drab, rich or dull, threatening or secure.

He continued to insist that while virtues, character traits, and duties could usefully provide 'substitute' motives for moral action, these were always secondary: the ethical demand requires a spontaneous loving response to the other.

As an example, Løgstrup mentions Stephen Toulmin's example of an everyday situation: 'I have borrowed a book from John and the question is now, why should I give it back today as I promised him?'

'[9] One of the early criticisms of The Ethical Demand was that it endorsed a form of naturalist fallacy: it inferred a (normative) responsibility to act for the sake of the other from the (descriptive) fact that the other is in our power.