Philosophical Fragments
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"As long as I keep my hold on the proof, i.e., continue to demonstrate, the existence does not come out, if for no other reason than that I am engaged in proving it; but when I let the proof go, the existence is there." (...) "unless we hold fast to the Socratic doctrine of Recollection, and to his principle that every individual man is Man, Sextus Empiricus stands ready to make the transition involved in "teaching" not only difficult but impossible; and Protagoras will begin where Sextus Empiricus leaves off, maintaining that man is the measure of all things, in the sense that the individual man is the measure for others, but by no means in the Socratic sense that each man is his own measure, neither more nor less. Philosophical Fragments |
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Philosophical Fragments (Danish title: Philosophiske Smuler eller En Smule Philosophi) is a Christian philosophic work written by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in 1844. It was the first of three works written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, the other two were De omnibus dubitandum est, 1841 and Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, 1846.
Kierkegaardian scholars D. Anthony Storm and Walter Lowrie believe Kierkegaard could be referring to Johannes Climacus, a 7th-century Christian monk, who believed that an individual is converted to Christianity by way of a ladder, one rung (virtue) at a time. Kierkegaard believes the individual comes to an understanding with Christ by a leap.
Kierkegaard scholar and translator David F. Swenson was the first to translate the book into English in 1936. He called it "Philosophical Chips" in an earlier biography of Kierkegaard published in 1921 and another early translator, Lee Milton Hollander, called it "Philosophic Trifles" in his early translation of portions of Kierkegaard's works in 1923.
Kierkegaard hinted that he might write a "sequel in 17 pieces" in his preface. By February 22, 1846 he published a 600-page sequel to his 83-page Fragments. He devoted over 200 pages of Concluding Unscientific Postscript to an explanation of what he meant by Philosophical Fragments.
He referred to a quote by Plato in his Postscript to Philosophical Fragments: "But I must ask you Socrates, what do you suppose is the upshot of all this? As I said a little while ago, it is the scrapings and shavings of argument, cut up into little bits." – Greater Hippias, 304a. He could have been thinking about this quote when he wrote this book. Plato was asking "What is beauty?" Kierkegaard asks, "What is Truth?" Kierkegaard had already asked about truth 9 days earlier when he published Three Upbuilding Discourses. A mere 4 days from the publication of Philosophical Fragments he published The Concept of Anxiety.
Kierkegaard wrote his books in reaction to both Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel as well as the philosophic-historical use of speculation in regard to Christianity. Schlegel published a book bearing the same title as Kierkegaard's, Philosophical Fragments in 1799.
