- Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was an astonishingly prolific writer whose work—almost all of which was written in the 1840s—is difficult to categorize, spanning philosophy, theology, religious and devotional writing, literary criticism, psychology and social critique. Kierkegaard’s mode of philosophizing opposes system-building and owes more in its approach to the ancients, particularly his hero Socrates, though his work also draws strongly and creatively on the Bible and other Christian sources. The opposition to system-building means that Kierkegaard has often been understood as an arch opponent of Hegel, but scholarship in recent decades has challenged and complicated this view, suggesting both that some of Kierkegaard’s central ideas are creative developments of Hegel’s ideas, and that the main target of his critique is certain Danish Hegelians influential in his day, rather than Hegel himself (see especially Stewart 2003 and section 4 below). Also often dubbed the “father of existentialism”, this label obscures at least as much as it reveals, especially to those who associate existentialism with atheistic figures such as Sartre. Kierkegaard’s thought has certainly influenced thinkers in the phenomenological and existential traditions (including Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, Marcel, and Lévinas), but also thinkers in very different philosophical traditions, such as Wittgenstein (who famously described him as a “saint” and “by far the most profound thinker” of the nineteenth century).
stanford encyclopedia of philosophy of