Clare Carlisle, Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and Positions,

Abstract

Clare Carlisle maintains that, for Soren Kierkegaard, “inwardness” is synonymous with movement, and so she devotes the book to showing what inwardness is, why inwardness is a kind of movement, and why becoming is inextricably bound up with becoming inward, with becoming a fully actualized self. To situate Carlisle’s book in the literature, it is the first full-length monograph in English devoted to an in-depth study of the theme of movement in Kierkegaard’s work. Her book is unique because it puts Kierkegaard into conversation with the history of philosophy—most notably with Aristotle and G.W.F. Hegel—and she shows how Kierkegaard’s view of movement is influenced by and a response to these philosophers’ theories of movement. She is one of the few scholars to treat Kierkegaard as a serious philosopher within the history of philosophy, while also showing his rather ambivalent attitude toward philosophy in general.