A Kierkegaardian account of the subjective perspective as truth-conducive

• Main Author: Chua, Davina Jia Yun
• Other Authors: Dimitris Apostolopoulos
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Humanities::Philosophy
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/147345
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Søren Kierkegaard’s account of religious faith emphasises the role of the subject’s will and emotion in belief formation. His appeal to subjectivity is often criticised to be a disregard for objective notions of truth, which has resulted in the evaluation of his account as irrational. While Kierkegaard has acknowledged his view that faith is necessarily irrational, the sense of irrationality to which he refers is that of an appeal to the non-cognitive. In this paper, I hope to show that Kierkegaard’s appeal to the non-cognitive reliability of the subjective does not reject objective notions of truth, but serves as his argument for an expansion of existing notions of rationality to include alternative modes of truth, particularly that of the subjective perspective. Insofar as concerns pertaining to existential inquiry are those in which the subjective perspective is decisive, I offer an argument in support of Kierkegaard’s view by considering how the intentional perception of some object by a subject allows for a meaningful intelligibility of that object to her, and which informs her of something true about the object for her.