Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard

Clare Carlisle

Aug 2020 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Simon Vance

About this audiobook

Søren Kierkegaard is one of the most passionate and challenging of all modern philosophers, and is often regarded as the founder of existentialism. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen pursuing the question of existence-how to be a human being in the world?-while exploring the possibilities of Christianity and confronting the failures of its institutional manifestation around him. Much of his creativity sprang from his relationship with the young woman whom he promised to marry, then left to devote himself to writing, a relationship which remained decisive for the rest of his life. He deliberately lived in the swim of human life in Copenhagen, but alone, and died exhausted in 1855 at the age of forty-two, bequeathing his remarkable writings to his erstwhile fiancee. Clare Carlisle's innovative and moving biography writes Kierkegaard's life as far as possible from his own perspective, to convey what it was like actually being this Socrates of Christendom-as he put it, living life forwards yet only understanding it backwards.

About the author

Clare Carlisle is professor of philosophy at King's College London. She is the author of several books, including Spinoza's Religion, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard, and On Habit. She has also edited George Eliot's translation of Spinoza's Ethics.

Simon Vance, a former BBC Radio presenter and newsreader, is a full-time actor who has appeared on both stage and television. He has recorded over eight hundred audiobooks and has earned five coveted Audie Awards, and he has won fifty-seven Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine, which has named him a Golden Voice.