ABSTRACT
David F. Swenson, Walter Lowrie, and Alexander Dru had agreed to translate Soren Kierkegaard's authorship by dividing the titles between them, but Swenson died midway through this process. Kierkegaard, in Swenson's view, instead endorses a program of pragmatic reflection whereby individual learns to examine his or her own aims and beliefs in order to achieve self-awareness. While interpreting Kierkegaard as fundamentally religious writer, Swenson emphasizes that his true originality lies in his extensive philosophical knowledge and uncanny ability to demonstrate the strengths or limits of distinct world-views. One is to view the Concluding Unscientific Postscript as Kierkegaard's most important and all encompassing work, since it renders explicit the central philosophical problem, which all works had dealt with in circumspect or indirect ways. Swenson's attempts to position Kierkegaard relative to more recent thinkers strike modern reader as somewhat archaic. Ever mindful of his audience of American philosophers, Swenson contrasts Kierkegaard's thought with then influential philosophers such as William James and Henri Bergson.
