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1. The influence of Søren Kierkegaard 's writings on the course of philosophical debate in the last two decades has been predictably less than the burgeoning literature on this profound and complex thinker would ordinarily suggest. Those acquainted with Kierkegaard's writings appreciate the reasons - not least the complexity of the thought, the difficulty of "reducing' it to a systematic, or at any rate consistent, locutionary series, or even to a string of clearly defined and independently contestable claims. There is also the apparently insoluble problem of the "illocutionary' force to be attributed to the various works them­selves, individually or in their appointed categories ("aesthetic', "dialectical', "religious') - the difficulty among others, that the works in the two former categories may not be intended to ex­ press Kierkegaard's own claims, or even to claim assent at all but, as Louis Mackey proposes [1], to address the reader's intelligence in some less direct way. There is also (to what is for the most part a studiously agnostic professional public) the apparent parochiality of what Kierkegaard says is the principal theme of his work, "how to become a Christian' - or in fact even more narrowly, "how to become a Christian in Christendom'.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-6932-2_7

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