ABSTRACT
Antoni Szwed defended his doctoral thesis, Between Freedom and the Truth of Existence: A Study of S. Kierkegaard's Thought, at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin in 1988. First, in 1991 there were few Polish translations of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works and not a single complete translation of any of Kierkegaard's signed works. Szwed's pioneering work appeared unexpectedly as a systematic and analytic study that delves extensively into Kierkegaard's concept of truth; it is founded on a thorough explication of Kierkegaard's main concepts. Szwed sees Kierkegaard as a philosopher who is more than a theologian, a novelist, a poet, or just a thinker. Szwed distinguishes two facets of the correspondence theory: empirical truth is the correspondence between thinking and being, and ideal truth is the correspondence between being and thinking. Although it is hard to see Kierkegaard yearning for it, Szwed re-establishes Kierkegaard's position as more than a merely local thinker, but instead as a philosopher and a metaphysician.
