Kierkegaardian Philosophy In The Faith Of A Scholar
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
(Here is the first of Kierkengaard's important contributio...)
Here is the first of Kierkengaard's important contributions to Danish literature.
In these two volumes he has contrasted an ethical view of life with a purely aesthetic attitude.
The occasion for the production of this remarkable book lay in his unhappy engagement to Regina Olsen and its subsequent breach.
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In Philosophical Fragments the pseudonymous author Joha...)
In Philosophical Fragments the pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus explored the question: What is required in order to go beyond Socratic recollection of eternal ideas already possessed by the learner? Written as an afterword to this work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript is on one level a philosophical jest, yet on another it is Climacus's characterization of the subjective thinker's relation to the truth of Christianity. At once ironic, humorous, and polemical, this work takes on the "unscientific" form of a mimical-pathetical-dialectical compilation of ideas. Whereas the movement in the earlier pseudonymous writings is away from the aesthetic, the movement in Postscript is away from speculative thought. Kierkegaard intended Postscript to be his concluding work as an author. The subsequent "second authorship" after The Corsair Affair made Postscript the turning point in the entire authorship. Part One of the text volume examines the truth of Christianity as an objective issue, Part Two the subjective issue of what is involved for the individual in becoming a Christian, and the volume ends with an addendum in which Kierkegaard acknowledges and explains his relation to the pseudonymous authors and their writings. The second volume contains the scholarly apparatus, including a key to references and selected entries from Kierkegaard's journals and papers.
David Ferdinand Swenson was an American philosopher. He is known for his passionate dedication to life and writings of Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, whose philosophy he followed very closely.
Background
David Ferdinand Swenson was born on October 29, 1876 in Kristinehamn, Sweden and moved to Minnesota with his parents in 1882, when he was 6 years old. He was the eldest of eight children of Gustaf Ferdinand and Augusta Maria (Johanssen) Swenson. His father, a shoemaker and a lay preacher, came to America in 1881 and was joined a year later by his family.
His mother was deeply religious, and he early acquired much of her outlook on life. In later years, when he taught the psychology of religion, he used to say that he learned more about the subject at his mother's knee than from all the textbooks combined.
Education
When David's family settled in Minneapolis, he attended public school there, helping to support himself from the age of nine. At seventeen he taught in a country school. He was graduated from the University of Minnesota (B. S. ) in 1898.
In his choice of a career he had at first been attracted to engineering, and he began his college course in this field; but he soon found that he cared more for the logic of mathematics than for its applications, and through mathematics he gradually shifted to philosophy, the field of his major work as an undergraduate.
Career
Beginning as an assistant to Professor Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, with whom Swenson also took graduate courses, Swenson taught philosophy and psychology at the University of Minnesota from 1902 to 1917, when he became professor of philosophy. Save for a year of further study under Woodbridge and others at Columbia (1905 - 06) and a year as visiting professor at the College of the City of New York (1920 - 21), he remained at Minnesota throughout his career.
The real turning point in Swenson's life, however, came one evening in 1901 when, browsing in a library, he chanced upon a book by Kierkegaard, the book since known in English as Concluding Unscientific Postscript. He could read the original Danish, and the book enthralled him. He took it home, fairly devoured it, and thereafter read everything available by that author.
His insistence on precision slowed the process, and none of the translations was published during his lifetime, but after his death they were completed by others--the Concluding Unscientific Postscript by Walter Lowrie, the four-volume Edifying Discourses and several shorter works by Mrs. Swenson.
Meanwhile the translation project had so engrossed Swenson that he wrote comparatively little of his own, and much of that on Kierkegaard. Something About Kierkegaard appeared posthumously in 1941 and Kierkegaardian Philosophy in the Faith of a Scholar in 1949.
His studies in logic also, except for a few papers which appeared mainly in the Journal of Philosophy, remained unpublished at his death.
He died at Lake Wales, Florida, following a stroke. Interment was at Hillside Cemetery, Minneapolis.
Achievements
David Swenson became the pioneer American authority on the works of the Danish thinker and labored through forty years to translate them into English. He was also known for teaching a course on Great Thinkers of the Nineteenth Century in 1914 which, in the matter of fact, introduced Soren Kierkegaard to Swenson's audience.
Swenson's life work was so fused with his personality that both together may be described as permeated by two major impulses, one warmly religious, the other rigorously logical.
His views and more became evident in two phrases which were like two poles of his thinking and were continually on his lips - "moral passion" and "reflective depth. "
Swenson criticized the current symbolic logics for what he called their inadequate presuppositions resulting in empty formalisms. In particular he opposed the doctrine of implication advanced by A. N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, contending that implication must carry "identity of noetic quality. "
Quotations:
A face-to-face discussion of the matter between Swenson and Russell once ended by the latter's saying, "You have what you call logic, and I have what I call logic. "
Personality
His contemporaries remember Swenson as an impressive personality - tall, strong-featured, necessarily somewhat apart because of his patiently borne affliction of increasing deafness, the very embodiment of both moral passion and reflective depth, glowing with conviction and eager for discussion. It was not easy for those who happened to differ with him to criticize him.
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Swenson lived and taught as a Soren Aabye Kierkegaard, with moral passion, tempered by reflection, developing hunger for the eternal into faith in God.
His religious interest and his love of precise thinking alike made him react strongly to the work of Herbert Spencer, and this helped to turn him to the field of philosophy.
He was also markedly influenced by Edmund Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen; this work, with its logical and mathematical realism and introspective method, reinforced Swenson's tendency to develop precise distinctions in explorations of the inner workings of the mind and outreachings of the self.
Connections
In 1912 David Ferdinand Swenson married Lillian Bessie Marvin, a classmate at Minnesota. Lillian continued David's work with another Kierkegaard scholar, Walter Lowrie until her death in 1961. They were married in 1912 and she also graduated from The University of Minnesota, in 1898. They had no children.
Father:
Gustaf Ferdinand Swenson
Mother:
Augusta Maria (Johanssen) Swenson
Wife:
Lillian Bessie Marvin
colleague:
Frederick J. E. Woodbridge
Professor, teacher at various American universities.
