Kierkegaards Mirrors: Interest, Self, and Moral Vision [Paperback]

What is it to see the world, other people, and imagined situations as making personal moral demands of us? What is it to experience stories as speaking to us personally and directly? Kierkegaard's Mirrors explores Kierkegaard's answers to these questions, with a new phenomenological interpretation of Kierkegaardian 'interest'.Acknowledgements Sigla Introduction PART I: STRUCTURES OF SUBJECTIVITY The Interesting and the Interested: Stages on a Concept's Way The Structure of Consciousness Consciousness as Interest The Ontology of the Self PART II: MORAL VISION Imagination and Agency Self-Recognition Mirrors Seeing the Other PART III: KNOWLEDGE AND MEANING Concern, Misfortune and Despair Interest in the Postscript: The Telos of Knowing Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

'In a wonderful exhibit of archival retrieval, Patrick Stokes has written a fine account of an underappreciated theme, interesse, as it crops up here and there through the course of the Kierkegaardian oeuvre, its systematic implications heretofore largely unnoticed. This careful and creative tracking allows us to see anew the familiar philosophical motifs that become the bread and butter of so much Kierkegaard commentary subjectivity, selfhood, passion, love, imagination, and so forth. It is no small achievement to have opened the door to a reassessment or reconfiguration of this presumably familiar territory. But I found in working slowly through the successive chapters of this book that Stokes was accomplishing just that. He's found a powerful new prism through which to cast the beams of the enigmatic texts that concern us.' Kierkegaard Newsletter

'...Stokes's book is, without doubt, one of the, if not the, best account of Kierkegaard as a philosopher and moral psychologist ever written. Kierkegaard's Mirrors is essential reading for anyone interested in Kierkegaard, and the continuing debate about how his work and thought is to be understood.' Jamie Turnbull, British Journalc2