In Week 2 of our class, our main focus will be on one of the earliest thinkers in the Existentialist movement, the Danish author, Søren Kierkegaard. His works and thought were influential early on in Scandinavia, for example on the playwrights Auguste Stringberg and Henrik Ibsen, but also upon the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. As his works were translated into German, French, English and other languages, he came to be much better known, directly influencing, for example, Miguel de Unamuno, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Albert Camus includes him among the "existentialists" who he criticizes and distinguishes his own position against in the Myth of Sisyphus. Other thinkers like Gabriel Marcel and Lev Shestov, who encounter Kierkegaard's works later in their careers, find in him an early Existentialist fellow-traveller.

We will be discussing the following texts (which you'll find in the module "PDFs of Course Texts")

• The Crowd Is Untruth
• The Present Age
• Fear and Trembling (supplemental)

Some of the key ideas we will be examining together are

• Individuality and authenticity
• Existential anxiety or dread
• The Ccrwd and inauthenticity
• The modern process of "Levelling"
• Faith, God, and religion
• The absurd
• The relevance of emotion