ABSTRACT
Kenneth Hamilton takes it for granted that Kierkegaard is first and foremost a Christian thinker and, as per Kierkegaard’s own explanation of the authorship in The Point of View , that the entirety of his “authorship was undertaken in the first place in order to convince people that Christianity was not irrelevant. ”It is largely in opposition to Hegel that Hamilton defines Kierkegaard’s philosophy. He begins this definition by contrasting notions of a “Socratic dialectic” and a “Hegelian dialectic,” the former of which he takes to describe Kierkegaard’s methodology. Though the study, for the most part, remains an accessible and well-written introduction to the works of Kierkegaard, it isn’t without moments of explicit anachronism. If one is prepared to bypass such arguments, however, then Hamilton’s short study may in some ways be useful.
