SKC Project Seminar (please notice: this seminar has been transformed to a remote Zoom seminar)

The seminar will take place on the video conferencing platform Zoom. You can participate in the seminar via this link: https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/2188071867

Fernanda Winter

An Epistemologist of Existence: Knowledge as a Paradoxical Possibility in Søren Aabye Kierkegaard.

“Can the truth be learned? With this question we shall begin.” This question proposed by the kierkegaardian pseudonymous Johannes Climacus is representative of the epistemological concerns to be found throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship. Nevertheless, such concerns should not be fragmentarily regarded as a byproduct of his existential approach to that which is considered by the author his main problem, namely, to become a Christian. The possibility or impossibility of knowing the truth or to relate oneself to the truth was psychologically, ethically and theologically explored in different pseudonymous and non-pseudonymous writings, and although the terminologies applied vary according to the atmosphere intended in each work, there seems to be a common thread that weaves an original – though not new, as Climacus will argue in his Philosophical Fragments – epistemology. We are faced here with a rather challenging and slippery concept of knowledge and truth itself, for they are not aimed to be regarded the same way as any propositional knowledge, but rather as an essential kind of knowledge that pertains not only to the realm of thought, but is essentially, though only paradoxically, related to one’s own existence. Bearing this issue in mind, the main question we want to address is: which kind of epistemology is at stake when knowing the truth becomes an existential rather than a propositional concern? And further questions that might guide the discussion are: i) if not a propositional, theoretical truth, then which truth is the object of such epistemology? ii) why is this knowledge paradoxical? iii) how is this knowledge specifically related to the knower’s existence? iv) how can this knowledge be communicated, if it can be communicated at all?