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One of the most hotly contested debates in Kierkegaard studies concerns his sense of the relationship between faith and reason. Often caricatured as a proponent of irrational fideism, scholarship in recent decades has tried to present a more nuanced account of Kierkegaard's position. Two likely interpretive options have emerged: supra-rationalism and anti-rationalism. On the former view, Kierkegaard believes that while the achievement of faith is beyond the capabilities of reason, there are still ways that reason can aid the maintenance of faith once reason's limits are recognized. On the latter view, faith is a constant struggle against rationalizing justification, and thus, any attempt to use reason to assist in the maintenance of faith is a mistake. Interestingly, a comparison with Pascal can help one arbitrate between these two responses to the dubious irrationalist reading of Kierkegaard.In our time scholarly doubt grows stronger and stronger and takes away one book after another…. I could really be tempted to think that providence permits the scholarly, exegetical, and critical skepticism to get such a strong upper hand because providence is tired of the hypocrisy and all the mimicking which is carried on with the historical and historical proof and it wants to force men out into primitivity again. For primitivity, being obliged to be primitive, alone with God, without having others up front whom one mimics and appeals to-this men do not want at all (Kierkegaard 1967-1978.

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Nietzsche has become embroiled in two interesting twenty-first century debates about advancing technology and its impact on human life, especially its meaning/value. The first focuses on Nietzsche himself and is concerned with the extent to which his views align with those of transhumanism. The second involves the not so blatantly Nietzsche-centric question of whether or not immortality, or radical life-extension, is desirable. Given that the desire for immortality, or at least some more feasible (but not so permanent) approximation of it, is strongly associated with transhumanism, it seems that these two debates have some fairly significant overlap. Establishing what Nietzsche ultimately believes about such a core transhumanist issue will go a long way toward determining how sympathetic he would be to the transhumanist cause in general. I argue that while his views do not commit him to an all-encompassing disdain for immortality, his intolerance for immortality-seekers means that he might only be open to some of the more fringe understandings of transhumanism.Friedrich Nietzsche has become embroiled in two interesting twenty-first century debates that have to do with advancing technology and its impact Adam Buben is Universitair Docent 1 in philosophy at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His primary areas of research are nineteenth and twentieth century continental philosophy and the philosophy of death. He is a coeditor of The Kierkegaardian Mind (Routledge, 2019) and the author of Meaning and Mortality in Kierkegaard and Heidegger: Origins of the Existential Philosophy of Death (Northwestern University Press, 2016), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on death in various philosophical traditions.

Unamuno believes that longing for immortality is what motivates nearly all of human behavior. Unfortunately, in a world in which many people despair of ever achieving true personal immortality, we increasingly turn to what he calls mere “shadows of immortality” for comforting ideas about how our names, energy, or basic material substance will carry on in our absence. Unamuno advocates fighting against such despair, staying out of the shadows, and longing for personal immortality even when it seems impossible. Unamuno’s approach to this issue resembles, in a few significant ways, Kierkegaard’s struggle for the cultivation of subjective selfhood. At the same time, it also runs afoul of Nietzsche’s derisive claims about immortality-seekers. Whereas Nietzsche sees longing for immortality as a sign of being too weak to make the most of mortal life, the more Kierkegaardian Unamuno counters that it is a sign of strong appreciation for life to demand, without surrender, that there be more of it. Given the proper understanding of Nietzsche’s claims about the eternal recurrence, I think he and Unamuno might not be quite as far apart as it initially seems. However, exploring the latter’s critique of the former suggests an intriguing way of seeing the contemporary analytic debate about the desirability of immortality. Building on Unamuno’s position, one could argue that pessimism about the value of immortality is actually indicative of a flawed character and an impoverished relationship with life.