Jon Stewart, PhD "Kierkegaard and Hegel on Faith and Knowledge"

October 21, 2009

Dr. Jon Stewart is Associate Research Professor at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen, Denmark and a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. He earned his Doctor Philosophiae in Philosophy & Theology from the University of Copenhagen in 2007 and 2003. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego in 1992.

One of Kierkegaard's main objections to Hegel's philosophy is that it misunderstands the nature of religion by placing it on a par with various forms of scholarship and knowing. Through his pseudonymous authors, Kierkegaard stubbornly insists that faith is fundamentally different from knowledge. How would Hegel respond to Kierkegaard's objection? I wish to argue that Hegel would find Kierkegaard's conception of faith to be a pure formalism with no determinate content.For this reason, it cannot be properly designated as Christian faith since it has no content by which it can be distinguished from the faith of other religions.