Kierkegaard's Mirrors: Interest, Self, and Moral Vision

Kierkegaard's Mirrors explores Kierkegaard's unique and challenging answers to these questions. Beginning with the structural account of consciousness offered in Johannes Climacus, this book develops a new phenomenological interpretation of what Kierkegaard calls 'interest': a self-reflexive mode of thought, vision, and imagination that plays a central role in moral experience. Tracing this concept across Kierkegaard's work takes us through topics such as consciousness, the ontology of selfhood, ethical imagination, admiration and imitation, seeing the other, metaphors of self-recognition and mirroring, our need for transcendent meaning, and the relationship between scholarship and subjective knowledge.

Patrick Stokes is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Soren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and an Honorary Fellow in the School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, University of Melbourne, Australia.