The paper provides an analysis of Martin Buber’s intellectual conversion and shows how it facilitates a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of nationalism. Buber, who is today known mainly as a key representative of dialogical philosophy, was in the 1910s part of the double wave of German and Jewish nationalism which strongly affected the German-speaking Jewish public. Buber provided intellectual support for this wave of nationalism and interpreted World War I as a unique chance for the spiritual unification of European (...) Jewry. Consequent to his conflict with Gustav Landauer Buber underwent a complex intellectual and existential transformation. He abandoned key concepts of his pre-dialogical thought and laid the foundations of his dialogical thought. He rejected his endorsement of Geman nationalism and substantially reevaluated his political positions. The analysis of Buber’s intellectual development sheds light on some important aspects of the dynamics of nationalism. (shrink)

A complex approach to Martin Buber’s oeuvre requires a consideration of both his dialogical and pre-dialogical writings. The latter include in some cases emphases that differ substantially from the emphases promulgated in Ich und Du. I will focus on three essays from the final stage of Buber’s pre-dialogical period which contain reflections on the fighting individual. The comparison with Ernst Jünger’s reflections on the same motif will show the intellectual proximity between the two authors and will help us understand how (...) Buber’s thought was positioned shortly before his dialogical turn. While after this turn Buber and Jünger could be easily seen as polar opposites, this is not the case when we juxtapose their early reflections on the fighting individual in World War I. There are striking similarities which I denote as a homology, as there is no evidence of influence in either direction. The presented analysis provides an insight into Buber’s controversial pre-dialogical positions as well as into the more general processing of the World War I experience in Germanophone philosophy. (shrink)

The so‐called “Kierkegaard Renaissance,” which took place in Germany during the interwar period, was not merely the province of figures such as Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger. A number of Catholic thinkers were involved as well. Indeed, after the well‐known Kierkegaard scholar Theodor Haecker converted to Catholicism in 1921, Kierkegaard's thought became a popular topic among the group of Catholic intellectuals known as the Hochland Circle, which included the priest and author Romano Guardini. Such interest, in turn, prompted French theologian (...) Yves Congar to explore the use of Kierkegaard for the renewal of the modern church. Moreover, a trio of notable Jesuit thinkers also entered the discussion: Erich Przywara, Henri de Lubac, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. In short, as this chapter will demonstrate, Kierkegaard inspired and provoked Catholic thinkers in a variety of areas, from theological anthropology and Christology to ecclesiology and the question of modernity. (shrink)

In the article, I analyze the representation of Blaise Pascal’s thinking that was presented by the German philosopher and theologian Romano Guardini. This author explored Pascal’s philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s when Germany experienced a large wave of interest in Kierkegaard’s thinking, known as the “Kierkegaard Renaissance.” Guardini participated actively in this renaissance but was strongly opposed to using Kierkegaard’s philosophy as an interpretative key for reading Pascal. He was concerned that the fashionable philosophy of Kierkegaard would overshadow Pascal’s (...) intellectual originality. I will try to demonstrate that Guardini did not entirely succeed in resisting the temptation of following popular trends and himself used Kierkegaardian concepts and topics when discussing Pascal’s thought. Thus we encounter in his works a specific image of Pascal that reflects in great measure contemporary intellectual tendencies. (shrink)

In the article I first examine Ernst Jünger’s thematically structured memoir The Fight as Inner Experience in which he depicts the individual soldier as a committed knightly fighter who is willing to sacrifice his life for an idea. Subsequently I analyze Jünger’s treatise Total Mobilization in which a largely different picture of the fighting individual emerges: a conformist member of the working mass who performs unquestioningly tasks assigned to him by the collective. I explain the reasons for “the victory” of (...) the worker over the knight and highlight important shifts in Jünger’s thinking as well as its ambiguities. (shrink)

The mystical and spiritual authors of the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries provided rich inspiration for Kierkegaard's religious thought. Kierkegaard owned numerous works by these authors, who are associated with the spiritual traditions of Rheno‐Flemish mysticism, Devotio Moderna, post‐Tridentine and Baroque Catholicism, and Reformed Pietism. The accurate spiritual diagnostics and the apt methods of spiritual formation found in (Pseudo‐)Tauler, Theologia Deutsch, Abraham a Sancta Clara, and François Fénelon deeply impressed Kierkegaard. He adopted and further developed motifs from the mystical and spiritual (...) authors in a variety of his writings, and his journals contain abundant reflections on themes from Thomas à Kempis, Ludovicus Blosius, and Gerhard Tersteegen, such as the imitation of Christ, spiritual guidance, or divine pedagogy. The best testimony to the importance of spiritual literature for Kierkegaard is the fact that he sought counsel in it in a personal crisis when he was deciding on the future of his religious authorship. (shrink)

The long tradition of Kierkegaard studies has made it impossible for individual scholars to have a complete overview of the vast field of Kierkegaard research. The large and ever increasing number of publications on Kierkegaard in the languages of the world can be simply bewildering even for experienced scholars. The present work constitutes a systematic bibliography which aims to help students and researchers navigate the seemingly endless mass of publications. The volume is divided into two large sections. Part I, which (...) covers Tomes I-V, is dedicated to individual bibliographies organized according to specific language. This includes extensive bibliographies of works on Kierkegaard in some 41 different languages. Part II, which covers Tomes VI-VII, is dedicated to shorter, individual bibliographies organized according to specific figures who are in some way relevant for Kierkegaard. The goal has been to create the most exhaustive bibliography of Kierkegaard literature possible, and thus the bibliography is not limited to any specific time period but instead spans the entire history of Kierkegaard studies. (shrink)

There is increasing interest in how the pupil dynamics of the eye reflect underlying cognitive processes and brain states. Problematic, however, is that pupil changes can be due to non-cognitive factors, for example luminance changes in the environment, accommodation and movement. In this paper we consider how by modeling the response of the pupil in real-world environments we can capture the non-cognitive related changes and remove these to extract a residual signal which is a better index of cognition and performance. (...) Specifically, we utilize sequence measures such as fixation position, duration, saccades, and blink-related information as inputs to a deep recurrent neural network (RNN) model for predicting subsequent pupil diameter. We build and evaluate the model for a task where subjects are watching educational videos and subsequently asked questions based on the content. Compared to commonly-used models for this task, the RNN had the lowest errors rates in predicting subsequent pupil dilation given sequence data. Most importantly was how the model output related to subjects' cognitive performance as assessed by a post-viewing test. Consistent with our hypothesis that the model captures non-cognitive pupil dynamics, we found (1) the model's root-mean square error was less for lower performing subjects than for those having better performance on the post-viewing test, (2) the residuals of the RNN (LSTM) model had the highest correlation with subject post-viewing test scores and (3) the residuals had the highest discriminability (assessed via area under the ROC curve, AUC) for classifying high and low test performers, compared to the true pupil size or the RNN model predictions. This suggests that deep learning sequence models may be good for separating components of pupil responses that are linked to luminance and accommodation from those that are linked to cognition and arousal. (shrink)

Kierkegaard developed his concept of love in his pseudonym works as well as in works published under his own name. The works, in which love has been made a more explicit subject , were incessantly criticized. The criticism of M. Buber, T. W. Adorno and K E. L?gstrup focused on the social dimension of Kierkegaard s concept of love and on the phenomenon of the absence of the neighbour. They criticize Kierkegaard´s interpretation of Christian love, which they consider individualistic and (...) acosmic. In the same terms they criticize his concept of unboundness and inwardness. The paper examines the basic motives of this critique and sets forth several relevant counterarguments. (shrink)

The first half of the 19th century witnessed a wide-range debate concerning the relation between the speculative philosophy of religion and the theology of that time. Referring to a remark of Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, in which he depicted Protestant theology of that time as unphilosophical and unscien- tific, a philosophical-theological controversy started in which several prominent German and Danish intellectuals took part. Among the discussed issues were the relations between philosophy and theology, the legitimacy (...) of metaphysical inter- pretation of Christian dogmas, the limits of rationality, the issue of pantheism or the relatedness of modern philosophy of religion to medieval speculative mysticism. (shrink)

Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous work The Sickness unto Death is among his most popular and most commented works. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, numerous philosophers paid close attention to the theory of selfhood systematically expounded in this work. The study examines the critique of this theory formulated by Romano Guardini in a series of essays published in the 1920s. Guardini’s critique is an important contribution to the German mid-war debate on the nature of Kier- kegaard’s philosophy and continues to provoke scholarly (...) reactions even today. It is, therefore, relevant to study Guardini’s arguments in detail in order to see whether his definition of Kierkegaard’s theory as “dynamic personalism” is tenable. (shrink)

T. W. Adorno deals with Kierkegaard intellectual legacy in tens of his works, which were being published in the course of more than three decades. One of his main concerns is rather ambiguous: depicting Kierkegaard as a critique of the society of that time. Adorno examines Kierkegaard’s social and political sensibility, as well as his theory of inwardness, and his idea of non-purpose, inter-subjective relationships. He points out to the devastating effects of conforming Kierkegaard’s legacy to the principles of existentialist (...) philosophy. Kierkegaard’s views are also evaluated on the background of contemporary deficiencies of Western society, such as ethnocentrism or anti-Semitism. (shrink)