ABSTRACT
The group of books that forms the series—including volumes on Plato, Sartre, Russell, Marx, and Kant, among others—are explicitly intended to be accounts of “the great and the influential philosophers” from an analytic perspective. Alastair Hannay’s staging of a debate between Kant and Kierkegaard is perhaps more unexpected and refreshing. Marx holds that, in order for human fulfillment to be achieved, the structures of labor in society must be changed in such a way that an individual’s work is no longer alienated by the market. The transformation must therefore begin on the individual level, precisely by the single individual’s appropriation of eternity into finite life, accomplished in such a way that selfishness itself is eliminated. With considerable erudition in regard both to Kierkegaard and other major thinkers, Hannay accomplishes his goal of earning Kierkegaard a spot in serious philosophical discussion.
