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K. Brian Soderquist. The Isolated Self: Truth and Untruth in Soren Kierkegaard's On the Concept of Irony.

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K. Brian Soderquist. The Isolated Self: Truth and Untruth in Soren Kierkegaard's On the Concept of Irony. Danish Golden Age Studies L Copenhagen: Soren Kierkegaard Research Centre and C.A. Reitzel, 2007. Pp. 239.

Among Kierkegaard's works--those written under his own name as well as those attributed to pseudonyms--his thesis Om begrebet ironi has probably loomed larger as an important biographical turning point than as a foundational aspect of his thinking and as a remarkable introduction to numerous topics that would be worked out in considerably more detail in later works. The fact that he needed special permission from no less than the king of Denmark to write the thesis in Danish rather than in Latin, a language in which he was entirely proficient, is, perhaps, a fact better remembered than the subtlety and breadth of the argumentation. Scholarship concerning the work is by no means lacking but is not as extensive and often not as probing as studies devoted to other works. Too often, moreover, it becomes entangled to a significant extent with questions primarily concerning irony as a rhetorical figure rather than a philosophical point of view and is consequently read in terms of irony's much-debated communicative capacity.

The title The Isolated Self immediately makes abundantly clear that the study situates Kierkegaard's academic treatise squarely within the framework of the question that continued to command Kierkegaard's attention through the rest of his life: how does one live life as a fully authentic self? Far from being something of an abstruse scholarly exercise that has...

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