TTEASK016U Søren Kierkegaard: Making of the Modern Self: Existential Thought

Focusing on thinkers from the Existentialist tradition such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Copenhagen’s own Søren Kierkegaard, this course traces the development of the conception of “selfhood.” Among other things, we will observe how ethical thinking has moved from the language of duty to that of personal answerability, and how the search for meaningful personal existence has increasingly become the responsibility of the individual.

The unique vocabulary of these authors appears not only in works of philosophy, theology, and psychology, but also literature and theatre, which illustrates that we understand ourselves via the stories we tell, and that these narratives are necessarily told in dialogue with “the Other,” our fellow human beings.