NDPR: Review of “Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript: A Critical Guide” (Ed. Rick Anthony Furtak)

NDPR has published a review — written by Jeffrey Hanson (Boston College) — of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript: A Critical Guide, edited by Rick Anthony Furtak (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010). To read the whole review, please click here.

Here is how it begins:

One of the most noteworthy features of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript: A Critical Guide is that it lives up to its subtitle. This collection truly is a guide to the work as a whole. That it serves as such is no small achievement, and it is surely a credit to the editor, Rick Anthony Furtak, that he kept the contributors from niggling with details that could have only limited interest to the most specialized scholar of (Kierkegaard’s pseudonym) Johannes Climacus’ writings. The dozen essays collected here (none penned by a Dane, interestingly) speak to the largest themes of this notoriously difficult and overlong work and stay admirably focused on what the reader needs to keep in mind very generally to come to grips with the text. None of these essays is narrowly focused on any minor issue or local question; instead each one concerns a major point, generally one that has implications for understanding the Postscript as a whole or even more broadly, the Climacan authorship. In what follows I touch on some of the essays that resonated most powerfully on my reading, in part doubtless because they speak to my own interests in the text. Inability to address all of them does not imply any criticism of those that space demands I omit.