The term “existentialism” has traditionally been notoriously difficult to define due to the fact that the label has been attached to the work of so many different thinkers with such diverse agendas. However, there can be no doubt that most of the thinkers who are usually associated with the existentialist tradition, for whatever their actual doctrines, were in one way or another influenced by the writings of Kierkegaard.

This influence is so great that it can be fairly stated that the existentialist movement was in large part responsible for the major advance in Kierkegaard’s international reception that took place in the twentieth century. It was with existentialism that Kierkegaard first entered the standard canon of Western philosophy.

In Kierkegaard’s writings one can find a rich array of concepts such as anxiety, despair, freedom, sin, the crowd, and sickness that all came to be standard motifs in existentialist literature.

Jean-Paul Sartre played an important role in canonizing Kierkegaard as one of the forerunners of existentialism. However, recent scholarship has been attentive to his ideological use of Kierkegaard. Indeed, Sartre seemed to be exploiting Kierkegaard for his own purposes and not accurately representing the thought of the Dane in its original nineteenth-century philosophical milieu. For example, it has been common to point out that Kierkegaard would not even agree with Sartre’s own stated first principle of existentialism that existence precedes essence. Suspicions of misrepresentation and distortions have led recent commentators to go back and reexamine the complex relation between Kierkegaard and the existentialist thinkers.

The articles in the present volume feature figures from the French, German, Spanish and Russian traditions of existentialism. They examine the rich and varied use of Kierkegaard by these later thinkers, and, most importantly, they critically analyze his purported role in this famous intellectual movement.

Table of Contents

Simone de Beauvoir: A Founding Feminist’s Appreciation of Kierkegaard
Ronald M. Green and Mary Jean Green 

Nicholas Berdyaev: Kierkegaard amongst the Artists, Mystics and Solitary Thinkers
George Pattison

Martin Buber: “No-One Can so Refute Kierkegaard as Kierkegaard Himself”
Peter Šajda

Albert Camus: Walled within God
Leo Stan

Martin Heidegger: Kierkegaard’s Influence Hidden and In Full View
Vincent McCarthy

Michel Henry: The Goodness of Living Affectivity
Leo Stan

Karl Jaspers: A Great Awakener’s Way to Philosophy of Existence
István Czakó

Gabriel Marcel: The Silence of Truth
Jeanette B. L. Knox

Jacques Maritain: Kierkegaard as “Champion of the Singular”
Nathaniel Kramer