198: Kierkegaard Within Your Grasp by Shellet O’Hara

by Gerard

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198.9: O’Hara, Shelley. Kierkegaard Within Your Grasp: The First Step to Understanding Kierkegaard. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004. 75 pp. ISBN 0-7645-5974-5.

Dewey Breakdown:

  • 100: Philosophy and Psychology
  • 190: Modern Western and other non-Eastern philosophy
  • 198: Scandinavia and Finland
  • 198.9: Denmark

This book is simple is its aim and execution: to help the reader into the writings of Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. In less than a hundred pages, we are introduced to Kierkegaard’s life, works, and thinking. The author goes through each major work well and legitimately synthesizes the salient theses into the thinking of the period. In many variations, Kierkegaardian philosophy struggles with choice, faith, and the individual, trying to make sense of both the existence of the self and the existence of God. This is indeed a good introduction to Kierkegaard’s work, but it is just a first step.