ABSTRACT

Stephen Mulhall book is different. It explores three major post-Kantian thinkers in one sweep, giving Soren Kierkegaard a key role in contemporary philosophy. Instead of arguing from a Kierkegaardian perspective right from the start, as others have done, it tries to get to Kierkegaard through a reading of the other two. This is its greatest strength, but also its Achilles heel. Mulhall begins the book itself by inviting to see philosophy as an act of reading—writing really. This is a clue to the book as a whole: the works of other philosophers, he suggests, are a kind of inheritance must learn to read carefully and reappropriate in own original way in own writing. Mulhall ends his book with a heady attempt to limit the bounds of human communication as a whole, hoping to establish Christianity as a primary, lifeorienting form of meaning and existence in this way.