Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we have just contradicted ourselves.(Graham Priest)The ultimate can be reached only as limit. In the second part of the essay ( § § II and III), my aim is to work towards a better response to the threat of self-stultification, both in the case of Fragments and more generally with respect to Kierkegaard's view of the limits of thought. In my view, he crucially relies in this connection on a distinction between two kinds of thought and thinking: the aesthetic-intellectual and the ethico-religious. I shall argue that, on the basis of this distinction, we can explain both why Fragments draws attention to the threat of its own self-referential incoherence and how, from the logical point of view, this threat is nonetheless benign.It shall emerge that Kierkegaard holds a distinctive view of the limits of thought, not least against the background of the views of Kant and Hegel. Like Hegel, and expressly against 'the Kantians', Kierkegaard denies the coherence of any attempt to draw limits of thought by positing a division between two ontological realms, the thinkable and the unthinkable. But he equally rejects as illusory the purported Hegelian standpoint in which thought constitutively transcends its own limits, the standpoint of 'pure thought'. Instead, Kierkegaard thinks we need to take up the kind of thinking he calls 'existential' or 'ethico-religious' thinking. On the interpretation I shall develop, it is 3 constitutive of such thinking to mark the limits of the 'aesthetic-intellectual', where this rubric encompasses any object of thought that is apt to sustain an attitude of disinterested contemplation.It is constitutive of ethico-religious thinking, that is, to delimit the domain of the aestheticintellectual as such. We shall see that, for Kierkegaard, what lies beyond the limits of the aestheticintellectual is not a realm of unthinkables, but rather the possibilities for human agency he associates with an individual's 'ethical actuality'.

This essay reexamines Kierkegaard's view of Socrates. I consider the problem that arises from Kierkegaard's appeal to Socrates as an exemplar for irony. The problem is that he also appears to think that, as an exemplar for irony, Socrates cannot be represented. And part of the problem is the paradox of self-reference that immediately arises from trying to represent x as unrepresentable. On the solution I propose, Kierkegaard does not hold that, as an exemplar for irony, Socrates is in no way representable. Rather, he holds that, as an exemplar for irony, Socrates cannot be represented in a purely disinterested way. I show how, in The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard makes use of 'limiting cases' of representation in order to bring Socrates into view as one who defies purely disinterested representation. I also show how this approach to Socrates connects up with Kierkegaard's more general interest in the problem of ethical exemplarity, where the problem is how ethical exemplars can be given as such, that is, in such a way that purely disinterested contemplation is not the appropriate response to them. Socrates … this puzzling, uncategorizable, inexplicable phenomenon (Nietzsche) A plausible general hypothesis about Kierkegaard is that he modelled his work as an author on Socrates. This supposition helps to explain many features of his work: his selfwithdrawing and maieutic gestures, his focus on ethical self-knowledge, his eye for paradoxes, his animus against those he regarded as modern-day sophists, his professions of ignorance. 1 Further, 1 This hypothesis has long guided Kierkegaard studies, going back at least to David Swenson's way of introducing Kierkegaard to Anglophone readers, in the 1940s, as a "Danish Socrates" (1983 [1941]). Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal writes, "Kierkegaard's perception of Socrates was decisive for his thoughts and methodology alike" (2014, 259). Critical studies that develop this hypothesis also include Daise 1999; the hypothesis finds ample support in Kierkegaard's own self-assessments, not least a late text that invokes Socrates as the "only analogy" for his own life's work (KW XXIII, 341). 2 And his writings generally abound with references to Socrates, often via a metonym such as, "the simple wise man" (e.g. KW XVII, 241). A second well-attested hypothesis about Kierkegaard is that he understood Socrates, first and foremost, as an ironist. 3 This understanding of Socrates is worked out in detail already in Kierkegaard's magister dissertation, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates. Part One of this work purports to show that his being an ironist is not only a possible interpretation of Socrates but that he actually was so and even, in a world-historical perspective, had to be. Later, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the figure of Socrates as ironist will play a leading role as counterpoint to the Hegelian speculative philosophers who, allegedly lacking any sense of irony, confuse themselves with God. And another metonym by which Kierkegaard invokes Socrates ...

No abstract

How can a person forge a stable ethical identity over time? On one view, ethical constancy means reapplying the same moral rules. On a rival view, it means continually adapting to one's ethical context in a way that allows one to be recognized as the same practical agent. Focusing on his thinking about repetition, I show how Kierkegaard offers a critical perspective on both these views. From this perspective, neither view can do justice to our vulnerability to certain kinds of crisis, in which our ethical selfunderstanding is radically undermined.

This paper offers an appraisal of Phillip Pettit's approach to the problem how a merely finite set of examples can serve to represent a determinate rule, given that indefinitely many rules can be extrapolated from any such set. I argue that Pettit's so-called ethocentric theory of rule-following fails to deliver the solution to this problem he sets out to provide. More constructively, I consider what further provisions are needed in order to advance Pettit's general approach to the problem. I conclude that what is needed is an account that, whilst it affirms the view that agents' responses are constitutively involved in the exemplification of rules, does not allow such responses the pride of place they have in Pettit's theory.