G.W.F. Hegel's so-called speculative logic was revolutionary since it attacked the basic laws of Aristotelian logic - the laws of contradiction and excluded middle - which stood as the foundation for the field for well over a millennium. Hegel replaced these laws with the principle of mediation, which he used to redefine all the key terms of the discipline. In the 1830s, this highly controversial theory was attacked by a number of philosophers in Germany and Prussia. These debates spilled over into Denmark in the late 1830s and early 1840s and represent one of the signal episodes in the Danish Hegel reception. The present volume includes the main texts in this controversy. The debate proper was initiated by the article Rationalism, Supernaturalism by the theologian Jakob Peter Mynster, who attacked Hegel's criticism of the law of excluded middle. The poet Johan Ludvig Heiberg, and the young theologian Hans Lassen Martensen, then came to Hegel's defense with articles which responded to

The present volume features articles that employ source-work research in order to explore the individual Danish sources of Kierkegaard's thought. The volume is divided into three tomes in order to cover the different fields of influence.Tome II is dedicated to the host of Danish theologians who played a greater or lesser role in shaping Kierkegaard's thought. In his day there were a number of competing theological trends both within the church and at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen, and not least of all in the blossoming free church movements. These included rationalism, Grundtvigianism and Hegelianism. In this quite dynamic period in Danish ecclesial history, Kierkegaard was also exercised by a number of leading personalities in the church as they attempted to come to terms with key issues such as baptism, civil marriage, the revision of the traditional psalm book, and the relation of church and state.

Existentialist Thought in African American Literature Before 1940 is the first collection of its kind to break new ground in arguing that long before its classification by Jean-Paul Sartre, African American literature embodied existentialist thought. To make its case, this daring book dissects eight notable texts: Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I A Woman (1861), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl (1861), Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). It explores and addresses a wide range of complex philosophical concepts such as: authenticity, potentiality-for-authentic living, bad faith, and existentialism from the Christian point of view. The use of interdisciplinary studies such as gender studies, queer studies, Christian ethics, mixed-race studies, and existentialism, allows the authors within this book to lend unique perspectives in examining selected African American literary works.

Although he has long been known primarily as the object of Søren Kierkegaard’s disdain, Hans Lassen Martensen (1808-84) was a celebrated figure in his own time. Recognized as a brilliant scholar and highly successful churchman, Martensen worked in a number of different areas of theology and philosophy, producing an impressive literary corpus over a period of several decades. His authorship is remarkably varied, including philosophical treatises, theological tracts, sermons, eulogies, book and theater reviews, as well as polemical and occasional pieces. During his lifetime, he saw his works translated into German, Swedish, English, French, Hungarian and Dutch. These works were widely read and frequently reprinted in numerous editions throughout the second half of the century. It is unfortunate that to international research he was known for many years only as a central figure in Kierkegaard’s attack on the Danish State Church.

In the past few decades there has, however, been a renewed appreciation for Martensen as an important thinker in his own right. The present anthology attempts to bring together the works of the leading Danish and international scholars responsible for this recent surge of interest.

In order to capture the different aspects of Martensen’s thought, the volume has been organized into three main rubrics: I. Theology, II. Philosophy, and III. Politics and Social Theory. Collectively, the articles featured here treat Martensen’s main works from his dissertation, On the Autonomy of Human Self-Consciousness in 1837 to his monumental, three-volume Christian Ethics from the 1870s. The authors demonstrate that the problems critically addressed by Martensen in the Danish Golden Age are still very much with us today in the twenty-first century.

Jon Stewart is Associate Research Professor at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen.

This is the second volume in a three-volume work dedicated to exploring the influence of G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophical thinking in Golden Age Denmark. The work demonstrates that the largely overlooked tradition of Danish Hegelianism played a profound and indeed constitutive role in many spheres of the Golden Age culture. This second tome treats the most intensive period in the history of the Danish Hegel reception, namely, the years from 1837 to 1841. The main figure in this period is the theologian Hans Martensen who made Hegel’s philosophy a sensation among the students at the University of Copenhagen in the late 1830s. This period also includes the publication of Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s Hegelian journal, Perseus, and Frederik Christian Sibbern’s monumental review of it, which represented the most extensive treatment of Hegel’s philosophy in the Danish language at the time. During this period Hegel’s philosophy flourished in unlikely genres such as drama and lyric poetry. During these years Hegelianism enjoyed an unprecedented success in Denmark until it gradually began to be perceived as a dangerous trend.

This book situates Kierkegaard in the nineteenth-century debates which influenced him and discusses his relevance to contemporary Christian theology.

The present volume is the first anthology devoted to the Icelandic theologian and religious author Magnús Eiríksson (1806-81), a forgotten contemporary of Søren Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark. With his remarkably modern views, thoughts and ideas of society, politics, and religion, Eiríksson has taken on the role of a widely unknown pioneer in various contexts. As early as in his debut book, On Baptists and Infant Baptism (1844), Eiríksson made a name for himself as a devoted advocate of tolerance and freedom of thought and conscience in matters of religion. Although Eiríksson's numerous and multifaceted writings provoked a wide spectrum of reactions by members of the Danish society, the central figures at that time constantly took care to avoid engaging Eiríksson or his ideas in public debate and instead met him with "lofty silence." The present volume aims to end this silence, which has continued after Eiríksson's death, and it marks the beginning of a serious discussion of Eiríksson's works and ideas. The articles featured in this anthology are written by international scholars from different fields. With its strategic organization the collection covers the key topics of Eiríksson's writings and provides insights into his historical-cultural background. Understanding Eiríksson's polemics with his Copenhagen contemporaries - such as Hans Lassen Martensen, Henrik Nicolai Clausen, N.F.S. Grundtvig and Søren Kierkegaard - on some of the main theological issues of the day sheds light on the period as a whole and provides a new perspective on the complex and diverse discussions concerning religion in the Golden Age.

The Danish Golden Age of the first half of the nineteenth century endured in the midst of a number of different kinds of crisis — political, economic, and cultural. The many changes of the period made it a dynamic time, one in which artists, poets, philosophers, and religious thinkers were constantly reassessing their place in society. This book traces the different aspects of the cultural crisis of the period through a series of case studies of key figures, including Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Hans Lassen Martensen, and Søren Kierkegaard. Far from just a historical analysis, however, the book shows that many of the key questions that Danish society wrestled with during the Golden Age remain strikingly familiar today. Jon Stewart is associate professor at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen.

The period of Kierkegaard's life corresponds to Denmark's "Golden Age," which is conventionally used to refer to the period covering roughly the first half of the nineteenth century, when Denmark's most important writers, philosophers, theologians, poets, actors and artists flourished. Kierkegaard was often in dialogue with his fellow Danes on key issues of the day. His authorship would be unthinkable without reference to the Danish State Church, the Royal Theater, the University of Copenhagen or the various Danish newspapers and journals, such as The Corsair, Fædrelandet, and Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, which played an undeniable role in shaping his development. The present volume features articles that employ source-work research in order to explore the individual Danish sources of Kierkegaard's thought. The volume is divided into three tomes in order to cover the different fields of influence. Tome II is dedicated to the host of Danish theologians who played a greater or lesser role in shaping Kierkegaard's thought. In his day there were a number of competing theological trends both within the church and at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen, and not least of all in the blossoming free church movements. These included rationalism, Grundtvigianism and Hegelianism. In this quite dynamic period in Danish ecclesial history, Kierkegaard was also exercised by a number of leading personalities in the church as they attempted to come to terms with key issues such as baptism, civil marriage, the revision of the traditional psalm book, and the relation of church and state.

Kierkegaard’s Concepts is a comprehensive, multi-volume survey of the key concepts and categories that inform Kierkegaard’s writings. Each article is a substantial, original piece of scholarship, which discusses the etymology and lexical meaning of the relevant Danish term, traces the development of the concept over the course of the authorship, and explains how it functions in the wider context of Kierkegaard’s thought. Concepts have been selected on the basis of their importance for Kierkegaard’s contributions to philosophy, theology, the social sciences, literature and aesthetics, thereby making this volume an ideal reference work for students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines.