Soren Kierkegaard: Literary Influences

I contributed the following article to the Biographical Dictionary of Literary Influences: The Nineteenth Century, 1800-1914. edited by John Powell (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001).

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KIERKEGAARD, SOREN AABYE (1813-1855). Soren Kierkegaard, Danish writer, was born in Copenhagen in 1813 and educated at the University of Copenhagen (1830-1840) and at Berlin (1841-1842).

Kierkegaard has been subject to much psychological speculation–and rightfully so since Read more

Faith and Reason - Select Quotes

Reason is a light that God has kindled in the soul.
~ Aristotle

Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith; they keep faith alive and moving.
~ Frederick Buechner

A comprehended God is no God.
~ Dio Chrysostom

Read more

What Is Happiness?

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend at a Thai restaurant. He mentioned that he has family members who have been serving as missionaries in Hungary. It made me think of a poem I had read in Carl Sandburg’s Harvest Poems: 1910-1960. I shared the poem with him and he said he might agree if he could change the accordion for an acoustical guitar. Here it is for your consideration:

Happiness

 

I asked professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool them.
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river.
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.

So I guess happiness is having women, children, beer and an accordion (or an acoustical guitar).

The Value Of Analytic Philosophy

Philosophers have become some of Christianity’s best apologists. William Lane Craig, Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California, addresses this issue and the value of analytic philosophy.
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Books By William Lane Craig

Rene Descartes

The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellencies, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations.
~ in Discourse On Method Read more

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Select Quotes

The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant’s shoulder to mount on.
~ in The Friend (1828)

Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises. The truth depends on, and is only arrived at, by a legitimate deduction from all the facts which are truly material.

The man’s desire is for the woman; but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.

I believe Plato and Socrates. I believe in Jesus Christ.

He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all.
~ in Moral and Religious Aphorisms

Diairesis and Prohairesis

Diogenes Laertius has handed down to us some fascinating source material in his work Lives of Eminent Philosophers. The historical background he provides for Paul’s address on Mars Hill is extremely enlightening, and yet it seems to be completely ignored by most expositors of the book of Acts. Read more

Marcus Tullius Cicero - Select Quotes

Of all the gifts of the gods to the human race, philosophy is the richest, the most beautiful, the most exalted.
~ in De Legibus

Philosophy is the best medicine for the mind.

History, the evidence of time, the light of truth, the life of memory, the directress of life, the herald of antiquity, committed to immortality.
~ in De Oratore Read more

Thomas Carlyle - Select Quotes

Speech is great, but silence is greater.
~ in Past and Present

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires,
~ in”The Opera”, Necessity and Free Will

In books lies the soul of the whole past time; the articulate, audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it. Read more

George Santayana - Select Quotes

To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other’s looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions. To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.

Fanaticism consist in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
~ in The Life of Reason

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
~ in The Life of Reason

History is alway written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
~ in The Life of Reason

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

Love makes us poets and the approach of death should make us philosophers.