title: Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport

text: On 8 December 2004, the airport received its first annual millionth passenger. Overall, the airport handled 1,721,355 passengers in 2019, representing a 5% drop in traffic figures compared to the previous year.


title: Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport

text: In 2007, the right-wing government proposed renaming the airport from "Aerodrom Ljubljana" to "Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport". Jože Pučnik was a Slovene right-wing public intellectual, dissident, politician, and leader of the Democratic Opposition of Slovenia (Demos) between 1989 and 1992.


title: Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport

text: Due to growing air traffic and Slovenia's EU entry, which requires the separation of traffic into Schengen and non-Schengen, Aerodrom Ljubljana Airport Authorities have prepared a redevelopment plan for the passenger terminal. The expansion was to be carried out in two phases. Works on the first phase began in early July 2007 to accommodate Slovenia's entry into the Schengen Area in December 2007. The terminal building (T1) was extended with a new upper level which added an additional to the departure lounge and four jetways have also been installed for easier passenger access to and from the terminal. In 2013, the second phase of terminal expansion which included a new terminal T2 was scrapped by the minority stakeholders.


title: Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport

text: In 2014, the Slovenian government initiated a privatisation process of the airport. The bid was won by Fraport which, in turn, acquired 75.5% stake in the airport. The remaining shares were acquired in the following months resulting in Fraport taking 100% ownership of the airport.


title: Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport

text: The airport has a paved runway which is equipped with ILS Cat IIIb on runway 30. NDB and VOR approach are also available. The runway of Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport was closed to air traffic in April 2010 during which time, the entire length of the asphalt surface of the runway was renovated, as well as the asphalt surface on some parts of the taxiways.


title: Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport

text: In April 2017 the airport operator Fraport Slovenia announced a plan to expand the existing passenger terminal. A modular solution was proposed which can be carried out in phases that are effectively and continuously adapted to traffic development needs.


title: Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport

text: The first phase of the terminal expansion was opened for traffic in July 2021. The capacity of the departures area was increased from 500 passengers per hour to 1,250 passengers per hour. A new extension was built to the west of the old terminal building. It includes a large duty-free shop, a new business lounge, one new air bridge, as well as renovated food & beverage and promotional areas. There are 22 check-in desks and 5 long security lines available. A new baggage sorting area was also added and the baggage reclaim area was expanded and equipped with two long carousels.


title: Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport

text: The existing passenger terminal, which covers , was partly renovated and functionally incorporated with the new building. The construction began in July 2019 and was completed in June 2021 in time for Slovenia's Presidency of the Council of the European Union. The entire renovated and expanded terminal complex covers a total of .


title: Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport

text: In 2017 Fraport Slovenija also published a revised Master Plan for the period 2010–2040. It includes a plan to construct a new cargo terminal to the east of the airport complex, expansion of passenger and aircraft maintenance aprons and a relocation of the general aviation apron to the west. To the north, a business and logistics center named Airport City is planned. It will include various business and logistic facilities as well as a new hotel, there are multiple subsidies as well as incentives for the potential investor. In January 2018 a new road from Kranj to Mengeš that will enable the development of the Airport City has been opened.


title: Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport

text: The following airlines operate regular scheduled and seasonal flights to and from Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport:


title: Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport

text: The airport is served by an exit off the A2 motorway and by bus services connecting it with the surrounding cities of Ljubljana, Kranj, Kamnik as well as Klagenfurt and its airport in Austria. Plans for a railway line connecting the airport with the city of Ljubljana and possibly also Kranj and Kamnik have been presented in the past, however the line most likely won't be built in the near future. The Airport is connected with many bigger Slovenian cities by bus and shuttle connections. Klagenfurt is connected by the Alpe Adria bus line. Other means of transportation to and from the airport are limited to the taxi services which are not controlled by the airport authority or Fraport Slovenija, and shared shuttle service with ticket sale point in the main arrival lobby. The price of a taxi will be considerably lower if you book online.


title: Superstar (2019 film)

text: Superstar is a 2019 Pakistani romantic, musical-drama film, starring Bilal Ashraf and Mahira Khan. It is directed by Mohammed Ehteshamuddin, produced by Momina & Duraid Films, and the music and screenplay are by Azaan Sami Khan.


title: Superstar (2019 film)

text: The story of the film follows Noori (played by Mahira Khan), who works in a theatre run by her uncle Agha Jan (played by Nadeem Baig), her entry in films and her romance and betrayal. The principal photography of the film began in March 2019. It was released on the occasion of Eid al-Adha on 12 August 2019 by Hum Films under Momina & Duraid Films.


title: Superstar (2019 film)

text: The story is about Noori, a struggling theatre artist who wants to work in films. She has been doing advertisements along with theatre. One day her advertisement is scheduled along with Sameer. The crew waits for him while Noori practices along with props and costumes backstage, Sameer sees her and gets attracted towards her. During the shoot, the director does not like Noori's acting and asks her to leave. Sameer is adamant that he will work only if Noori is taken back. Eventually they start going out together. Noori's life takes turn she has to choose between love and her career.


title: Superstar (2019 film)

text: The film was announced in August 2018 by producer Momina Duraid. She stated that her next film titled "Superstar", starring Mahira Khan and Bilal Ashraf, to be directed by Ehtishamuddin on screenplay of Azaan Sami Khan was under pre-production stage. In an interview she said that Azaan who has written the screenplay was behind the project. She added, "It’s a genre that hasn’t been made in Pakistan yet, very theatrical and something I had been wanting to do for a while.”


title: Superstar (2019 film)

text: Filming began in March 2019. The lead actress Mahira Khan shared pictures from the set on her Instagram account.


title: Superstar (2019 film)

text: The official trailer of the film was released by Hum TV on 15 July 2019. It garnered 4 million views since its release on YouTube. The official teaser of the song "Ghalat Fehmi" was launched by Hum TV on 25 July 2019. It garnered 6 million views since its release on YouTube.


title: Superstar (2019 film)

text: "Superstar" has been certified with a runtime of 135 mins by British Board of Film Classification and was released theatrically on Eid al-Adha, on 12 August 2019 by Hum Films under Momina & Duraid Films.


title: Superstar (2019 film)

text: The music of the film is composed by Azaan Sami Khan and Saad Sultan. While the lyrics are by Shakeel Sohail, the qawwali lyrics are by A. M. Turaz in the song "Ghalat Fehmi".


title: Superstar (2019 film)

text: The film grossed 2 crores in its opening day in Pakistan taking its total 2 days collection to 4 crores. The film collected a total of 6.3 crore at the domestic box office and a total of 5.1 crore from overseas markets. Its worldwide box office collection as of 14 August was 11.4 crore.


title: Superstar (2019 film)

text: After 7 days, the film had grossed 13.2 crore domestically. its worldwide gross stood at 21.15 crore. As of September 4, Superstar has collected 20.5 crores from Pakistan and 6.41 crores from overseas for a total of 26.91 crores. Superstar has become the highest grossing Pakistani film of 2019. The film since its premiere in August this year managed to cross PKR 300 Million on local and international box office both.


title: Superstar (2019 film)

text: Hassan Kazmi of Masala.com rated the film 4 out of 5 stars and stated, "Mahira Khan and Bilal Ashraf have blown away everyone with how good they are in this film with excellent music and screenplay from Azaan Sami Khan". He further mentioned, "it has some of the best acting performances, brilliant music, and remarkably executed storyline. Director Mohammed Ehtehshaamuddin deserves every bit of the praises for this wonderful jewel". Shahjehan Saleem of "Diva Magazine Pakistan" rating the film 4 out of 5 stars, praised it for its cinematography and overall acting skills and stated, "While both Bilal and Mahira in the past have received critique over their acting skills, Superstar will prove to be the turning point in their careers. Bilal especially has overshadowed everyone in the film." He further added, "Superstar is definitely not a typical Pakistani movie made these days. It has a soul in it. Kudos to the director Ehteshamuddin."


title: Superstar (2019 film)

text: Aamna Haider Isani of "Something Haute" rated 4/5 stars and remarked, "Superstar is like a well cut and perfectly polished diamond that sparkles from every angle". She further stated that, "This is Mahira at her phenomenally best, and this should put all naysayers and critics to rest". She also praised Bilal Ashraf and wrote, "Bilal Ashraf is the dark horse of the movie". She concluded by saying, "One can go on and on about the strengths of the film but conclusively, not wanting to give anything away, I do have to say that "Superstar" is one of the best Pakistani films I have ever seen".


title: Superstar (2019 film)

text: Yousuf Mehmood of "Pakistani Cinema.net" rated the film 3/5 and wrote, "Subtle nods to the film industry of yesterday, clever dialogues, charming details, an overall freshness to the script despite a formula we’ve seen a hundred times, and some great performances by Mahira Khan and Nadeem Baig, give the film the emotional weight it needs to resonate with the masses.". Mohammed Kamran Jawaid of "Dawn" gave a positive review by stating, ""With its emotion-raising climax, director Ehteshamuddin’s Superstar is an intelligently crafted film that has only a few snags""


title: Superstar (2019 film)

text: Shafiq-ul-Hassan of "The Express Tribune Blogs" rated 3.5/5 stars and praised the performances, direction and writing thoroughly and remarked, "It won’t be wrong to say that "Superstar" is one of Mahira’s best performances since "Humsafar"" and concluded by writing, "On the basis of content, performance, storytelling and music, "Superstar" is a brilliant entertainer". Asjad Khan of "Oye Yeah" heavily praised Mahira Khan's performance and wrote, "To surmise, Superstar is an uncomplicated but dreamy love story with excellent performances, and beautiful music". Omair Alavi of "Box Office Insights" rated 4/5 stars and wrote, "On the whole, Superstar is a film that is time to perfection for the audience". He further added, " The combo of Ehteshamuddin and Mustafa Afridi also guarantees quality writing and direction which is their specialty, and with Superstar they have entered filmdom, hopefully for good".


title: Superstar (2019 film)

text: Rafay Mehmood of "The Express Tribune" rated 2.5/5 stars and criticised it by writing, "Despite some very creative blocking choices by Ehtesham and relatable incidents within the context of Pakistan’s film industry, "Superstar", to repeat the same old story, is a film flawed on paper. Don’t confuse it for being a bad story, in fact, it has a semblance of a story which is a big deal by Pakistani standards. However, the film as a whole is unsure about what it wants to be and that is perhaps its curse." Sonia Ashraf of "Images Dawn" giving a mixed review stated, "Not only did it humanise the industry, it was a nice break from the desperate attempts at wacky plot twists aimed to shock the audience. "Superstar" is a simple love story and there's nothing wrong with that. Had the treatment been better, the script detailed, this would've been the film of the year".


title: Superstar (2019 film)

text: Omair Alavi further writing for "Hum Spotlight" remarked, "The verdict is out – Mahira Khan’s Superstar makes you fall in love again". Writing for "Brandsynario" he rated the film 4/5 stars and stated, "There are films that inspire and films that lead, and then there is "SUPERSTAR" that does both. Mahira Khan's latest is probably her best work so far, even better than "Raees"".


title: Squid (band)

text: Squid is an English post-punk band from Brighton, England. Consisting of lead singer and drummer Ollie Judge, guitarists Louis Borlase and Anton Pearson, bassist Laurie Nankivell and keyboardist Arthur Leadbetter, they are currently based in Bristol.


title: Squid (band)

text: Squid released their debut EP "Town Centre" in 2019 on Speedy Wunderground and have since released four singles on Warp Records. Their debut album, "Bright Green Field", was released by Warp Records on 7 May 2021. It received widespread critical acclaim and debuted at No. 4 on the UK Albums Chart.


title: Squid (band)

text: Squid formed in Brighton, England in 2016. They have cited Neu! and This Heat as influences. In 2019, they released their second EP, titled "Town Centre," to critical acclaim. "Town Centre" was produced by Dan Carey and released on Speedy Wunderground. In March 2020, Squid signed to Warp Records and have released five singles with them as of April 2021. They were planning on touring Europe throughout 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Squid (band)

text: Taking advantage of lockdown, the band spend most of 2020 recording what would be their debut full length album, "Bright Green Field", again working with producer Dan Carey. The album was released on 7 May 2021 and was promoted by three singles, "Narrator", "Paddling" and "Pamphlets". It was well received by critics.


title: Squid (band)

text: Squid appeared at the Glastonbury Festival in June 2022, and are due to appear at the Rock en Seine festival in August 2022.


title: Juanita Moore

text: Juanita Moore (October 19, 1914 – January 1, 2014) was an American film, television, and stage actress.


title: Juanita Moore

text: She was the fifth black actor to be nominated for an Academy Award in any category, and the third in the Supporting Actress category at a time when only one black actor, Hattie McDaniel in "Gone with the Wind" (1939), had won an Oscar.


title: Juanita Moore

text: Juanita Moore was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, the daughter of Ella (née Dunn) and Harrison Moore. She had seven siblings (six sisters and one brother). Her family moved in the Great Migration to Los Angeles, where she was raised. Moore first performed as a dancer, part of a chorus line at the Cotton Club before becoming a film extra while working in theater.


title: Juanita Moore

text: Moore was the vice president of the Original Cambridge Players, who took a Los Angeles production of "The Amen Corner" to Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in April 1965. She was friends with Marlon Brando and James Baldwin. It was Moore who asked Brando to lend the funds ($75) to Baldwin to write the play.


title: Juanita Moore

text: After making her film debut in "Double Deal" (1939), Moore had a number of bit parts and supporting roles in motion pictures through the late 1930s and 1950s.


title: Juanita Moore

text: Moore's performance in the remake of "Imitation of Life" (1959) as black housekeeper Annie Johnson, whose daughter Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) passes for white, won her a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She was also nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for the role. When the two versions of "Imitation of Life" were released together on DVD (the earlier film was released in 1934), one of the bonus features was a new interview with Moore.


title: Juanita Moore

text: Moore continued to act for film and TV, with a role in "Disney's The Kid" (2000), and guest-starring roles on "Dragnet", "Adam-12", "Marcus Welby, M.D.", "ER" and "Judging Amy".


title: Juanita Moore

text: On April 23, 2010, a new print of "Imitation of Life" (1959) was screened at the Turner Classic Movies Film Festival in Los Angeles. Both Moore and co-star Kohner attended. After the screening, the two women appeared on stage for a question-and-answer session hosted by TCM's Robert Osborne. Moore and Kohner received standing ovations.


title: Juanita Moore

text: Moore was married for 50 years to Charles Burris, who died in 2001. He was a Los Angeles bus driver and they met when she stepped out in front of his approaching bus. She and Burris married a few weeks later.


title: Juanita Moore

text: Her grandson is actor/producer Kirk E. Kelleykahn, who is CEO/President of "Cambridge Players – Next Generation", a theatre troupe whose founding members included Moore.


title: Juanita Moore

text: Moore died at her home in Los Angeles on January 1, 2014, at age 99 of natural causes. She is buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery.


title: George Washington's teeth

text: American President George Washington’s teeth began to fall out before he reached the age of thirty, and he eventually lost them all. During his life, he had at least four sets of dentures made to replace them.


title: George Washington's teeth

text: In 1756, when Washington was 24 years old, a dentist pulled his first tooth. According to his diary, he paid 5 shillings (£, ) to a "Doctor Watson" for the removal. His diary also regularly mentioned troubles such as aching teeth and lost teeth. John Adams said that Washington attributed the loss of his teeth to using them to crack walnuts, but modern historians have suggested that mercury(I) chloride (calomel), which Washington was given to treat smallpox, probably contributed to the loss.


title: George Washington's teeth

text: On April 30, 1789, the day of his first presidential inauguration, although he had mostly dentures, he had only one remaining natural tooth, a premolar. During that same year, he began wearing full dentures.


title: George Washington's teeth

text: During his life, Washington had four sets of dentures. He began wearing partial dentures by 1781. Despite many people believing they were made of wood, they contained no wood, and often would have been made of teeth extracted from slaves, as well as other materials such as hippopotamus ivory, brass and gold. The dentures had metal fasteners, springs to force them open, as well as bolts to keep them together.


title: George Washington's teeth

text: The poor in the Western world had been selling teeth as a means of making money since the Middle Ages, and these teeth would be sold as dentures or implants to those of financial means. During the Revolution, French dentist Jean Pierre Le Moyer provided services in tooth transplantation. In May of 1784, Washington paid several unnamed slaves 122 shillings (£, ) for a total of nine teeth to be implanted by a French doctor, who became a frequent guest on the plantation over the next few years. While it is unconfirmed that these purchased teeth were for Washington himself, his payment for them suggests that they were in fact for his use, as does a comment from a letter to his wartime clerk Richard Varick: "I confess I have been staggered in my belief in the efficacy of transplantion," he wrote. Washington used teeth sourced from slaves to improve his appearance, a subject of frequent discomfort to him. However, scholars of the Mount Vernon estate dispute this, stating, “If Washington had been purchasing the teeth for himself, there would have been no need for this information; the entries would have simply recorded the item and payment, as when Washington purchased poultry, wild game, fish, and garden produce from enslaved individuals.” As such, it remains unknown whether Washington personally used any teeth purchased from slaves or others.


title: George Washington's teeth

text: He took the oath of office while wearing a special set of dentures made from ivory, brass and gold built for him by dentist John Greenwood.


title: George Washington's teeth

text: According to his diaries, Washington's dentures disfigured his mouth and often caused him pain, for which he took laudanum. Washington once wrote that his lips would "bulge" in an unnatural way. This distortion is noticeable on his image on the one-dollar bill, an image taken from the Athenaeum Portrait, an unfinished painting from 1796 by Gilbert Stuart. He once wrote to his dentist, Greenwood, to avoid modifying the dentures "which will, in the least degree force the lips out more than now do, as it does this too much already." Apart from the disfiguration caused by the dentures, the distress may also be apparent in many of the portraits painted while he was still in office. He spent constant effort maintaining his dentures, and often had them shipped to Greenwood, for maintenance.


title: George Washington's teeth

text: The mistaken belief that Washington's dentures were wooden was widely accepted by 19th century historians and appeared as fact in school textbooks until well into the 20th century. The possible origin of this myth is that ivory teeth quickly became stained and may have had the appearance of wood to observers. A letter from Greenwood to Washington in 1798 advised more thorough cleaning since: "the sett you sent me from Philadelphia...was very black...Port wine being takes of[f] all the polish".


title: George Washington's teeth

text: The only existing complete set of Washington's dentures is owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, who own and operate George Washington's estate in Fairfax County, Virginia. There is another complete, original, lower jaw denture dated 1795 at the National Museum of Dentistry, Baltimore, Maryland.


title: George Washington's teeth

text: At least three of Washington's dentists are identified. His diary mentions "Doctor Watson", the dentist who pulled his first tooth. His personal dentist and friend was Jean-Pierre Le Mayeur. John Greenwood of New York City made and maintained his dentures.


title: Oil pulling

text: Oil pulling is an alternative medical practice in which an edible oil is swished around the mouth for a period of time and then spat out, similar to mouthwash. It originates from Ayurvedic medicine.


title: Oil pulling

text: Practitioners of oil pulling claim it is capable of improving oral and whole-body health. Its promoters claim it works by "pulling" out toxins, but there is no credible evidence to support this.


title: Oil pulling

text: Oil pulling stems from traditional Ayurvedic medicine, whose practitioners may use sunflower oil or other herbal oils instead of coconut oil.


title: Oil pulling

text: There is no high-quality research on oil pulling, no understanding of a possible mechanism explaining how it would work, and no evidence that it provides any benefit. The American Dental Association agrees that there are no reliable scientific studies supporting the practice of oil pulling for any benefit to oral hygiene or overall wellbeing.


title: Oil pulling

text: The Canadian Dental Association assessed the practice of oil pulling in 2014 stating: "We sense oil pulling won't do any harm, we're not convinced there are any particular benefits to it."


title: Urban design

text: Urban design is an approach to the design of buildings and the spaces between them that focuses on specific design processes and outcomes. In addition to designing and shaping the physical features of towns, cities, and regional spaces, urban design considers 'bigger picture' issues of economic, social and environmental value and social design. Scope of a project can range from a local street or public space to an entire city and surrounding areas. Urban designers connect the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning to better organize physical space and community environments.


title: Urban design

text: Some important focuses of urban design on this page include its historical impact, paradigm shifts, its interdisciplinary nature, and issues related to urban design.


title: Urban design

text: Urban design deals with the larger scale of groups of buildings, infrastructure, streets, and public spaces, entire neighbourhoods and districts, and entire cities, with the goal of making urban environments that are equitable, beautiful, performative, and sustainable.


title: Urban design

text: Urban design is an interdisciplinary field that utilizes the procedures and the elements of architecture and other related professions, including landscape design, urban planning, civil engineering, and municipal engineering. It borrows substantive and procedural knowledge from public administration, sociology, law, urban geography, urban economics and other related disciplines from the social and behavioral sciences, as well as from the natural sciences. In more recent times different sub-subfields of urban design have emerged such as strategic urban design, landscape urbanism, water-sensitive urban design, and sustainable urbanism. Urban design demands an understanding of a wide range of subjects from physical geography to social science, and an appreciation for disciplines, such as real estate development, urban economics, political economy, and social theory.


title: Urban design

text: Urban designers work to create inclusive cities that protect the commons, ensure equal access to and distribution of public goods, and meet the needs of all residents, particularly women, people of color, and other marginalized populations. Through design interventions, urban designers work to revolutionize the way we conceptualize our social, political, and spatial systems as strategies to produce and reproduce a more equitable and innovative future.


title: Urban design

text: Urban design is about making connections between people and places, movement and urban form, nature and the built fabric. Urban design draws together the many strands of place-making, environmental stewardship, social equity, and economic viability into the creation of places with distinct beauty and identity. Urban design draws these and other strands together, creating a vision for an area and then deploying the resources and skills needed to bring the vision to life.


title: Urban design

text: Urban design theory deals primarily with the design and management of public space (i.e. the 'public environment', 'public realm' or 'public domain'), and the way public places are used and experienced. Public space includes the totality of spaces used freely on a day-to-day basis by the general public, such as streets, plazas, parks, and public infrastructure. Some aspects of privately owned spaces, such as building facades or domestic gardens, also contribute to public space and are therefore also considered by urban design theory. Important writers on urban design theory include Christopher Alexander, Peter Calthorpe, Gordon Cullen, Andrés Duany, Jane Jacobs, Jan Gehl, Allan B. Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, Aldo Rossi, Colin Rowe, Robert Venturi, William H. Whyte, Camillo Sitte, Bill Hillier (space syntax), and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.


title: Urban design

text: Although contemporary professional use of the term 'urban design' dates from the mid-20th century, urban design as such has been practiced throughout history. Ancient examples of carefully planned and designed cities exist in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and are particularly well known within Classical Chinese, Roman, and Greek cultures. Specifically, Hippodamus of Miletus was a famous ancient Greek architect and urban planner, and all around academic that is often considered to be a "father of European urban planning", and the namesake of the "Hippodamian plan", also known as the grid plan of a city layout.


title: Urban design

text: European Medieval cities are often, and often erroneously, regarded as exemplars of undesigned or 'organic' city development. There are many examples of considered urban design in the Middle Ages. In England, many of the towns listed in the 9th-century Burghal Hidage were designed on a grid, examples including Southampton, Wareham, Dorset and Wallingford, Oxfordshire, having been rapidly created to provide a defensive network against Danish invaders. 12th century western Europe brought renewed focus on urbanisation as a means of stimulating economic growth and generating revenue. The burgage system dating from that time and its associated burgage plots brought a form of self-organising design to medieval towns. Rectangular grids were used in the bastides of 13th and 14th century Gascony, and the new towns of England created in the same period.


title: Urban design

text: Throughout history, the design of streets and deliberate configuration of public spaces with buildings have reflected contemporaneous social norms or philosophical and religious beliefs. Yet the link between designed urban space and the human mind appears to be bidirectional. Indeed, the reverse impact of urban structure upon human behaviour and upon thought is evidenced by both observational study and historical records. There are clear indications of impact through Renaissance urban design on the thought of Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei. Already René Descartes in his "Discourse on the Method" had attested to the impact Renaissance planned new towns had upon his own thought, and much evidence exists that the Renaissance streetscape was also the perceptual stimulus that had led to the development of coordinate geometry.


title: Urban design

text: The beginnings of modern urban design in Europe are associated with the Renaissance but, especially, with the Age of Enlightenment. Spanish colonial cities were often planned, as were some towns settled by other imperial cultures. These sometimes embodied utopian ambitions as well as aims for functionality and good governance, as with James Oglethorpe's plan for Savannah, Georgia. In the Baroque period the design approaches developed in French formal gardens such as Versailles were extended into urban development and redevelopment. In this period, when modern professional specializations did not exist, urban design was undertaken by people with skills in areas as diverse as sculpture, architecture, garden design, surveying, astronomy, and military engineering. In the 18th and 19th centuries, urban design was perhaps most closely linked with surveyors engineers and architects. The increase in urban populations brought with it problems of epidemic disease, the response to which was a focus on public health, the rise in the UK of municipal engineering and the inclusion in British legislation of provisions such as minimum widths of street in relation to heights of buildings in order to ensure adequate light and ventilation.


title: Urban design

text: Much of Frederick Law Olmsted's work was concerned with urban design, and the newly formed profession of landscape architecture also began to play a significant role in the late 19th century.


title: Urban design

text: In the 19th century, cities were industrializing and expanding at a tremendous rate. Private businesses largely dictated the pace and style of this development. The expansion created many hardships for the working poor and concern for public health increased. However, the laissez-faire style of government, in fashion for most of the Victorian era, was starting to give way to a New Liberalism. This gave more power to the public. The public wanted the government to provide citizens, especially factory workers, with healthier environments. Around 1900, modern urban design emerged from developing theories on how to mitigate the consequences of the industrial age.


title: Urban design

text: The first modern urban planning theorist was Sir Ebenezer Howard. His ideas, although utopian, were adopted around the world because they were highly practical. He initiated the garden city movement. in 1898.


title: Urban design

text: His garden cities were intended to be planned, self-contained communities surrounded by parks. Howard wanted the cities to be proportional with separate areas of residences, industry, and agriculture. Inspired by the Utopian novel "Looking Backward" and Henry George's work "Progress and Poverty", Howard published his book "Garden Cities of To-morrow" in 1898. His work is an important reference in the history of urban planning. He envisioned the self-sufficient garden city to house 32,000 people on a site of . He planned on a concentric pattern with open spaces, public parks, and six radial boulevards, wide, extending from the center. When it reached full population, Howard wanted another garden city to be developed nearby. He envisaged a cluster of several garden cities as satellites of a central city of 50,000 people, linked by road and rail. His model for a garden city was first created at Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire. Howard's movement was extended by Sir Frederic Osborn to regional planning.


title: Urban design

text: In the early 1900s, urban planning became professionalized. With input from utopian visionaries, civil engineers, and local councilors, new approaches to city design were developed for consideration by decision-makers such as elected officials. In 1899, the Town and Country Planning Association was founded. In 1909, the first academic course on urban planning was offered by the University of Liverpool. Urban planning was first officially embodied in the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909 Howard's 'garden city' compelled local authorities to introduce a system where all housing construction conformed to specific building standards. In the United Kingdom following this Act, surveyor, civil engineers, architects, and lawyers began working together within local authorities. In 1910, Thomas Adams became the first Town Planning Inspector at the Local Government Board and began meeting with practitioners. In 1914, The Town Planning Institute was established. The first urban planning course in America wasn't established until 1924 at Harvard University. Professionals developed schemes for the development of land, transforming town planning into a new area of expertise.


title: Urban design

text: In the 20th century, urban planning was changed by the automobile industry. Car-oriented design impacted the rise of 'urban design'. City layouts now revolved around roadways and traffic patterns.


title: Urban design

text: In June 1928, the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) was founded at the Chateau de la Sarraz in Switzerland, by a group of 28 European architects organized by Le Corbusier, Hélène de Mandrot, and Sigfried Giedion. The CIAM was one of many 20th century manifestos meant to advance the cause of "architecture as a social art".


title: Urban design

text: Team X was a group of architects and other invited participants who assembled starting in July 1953 at the 9th Congress of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) and created a schism within CIAM by challenging its doctrinaire approach to urbanism.


title: Urban design

text: In 1956, the term "Urban design" was first used at a series of conferences hosted by Harvard University. The event provided a platform for Harvard's Urban Design program. The program also utilized the writings of famous urban planning thinkers: Gordon Cullen, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, and Christopher Alexander.


title: Urban design

text: In 1961, Gordon Cullen published "The Concise Townscape". He examined the traditional artistic approach to city design of theorists including Camillo Sitte, Barry Parker, and Raymond Unwin. Cullen also created the concept of 'serial vision'. It defined the urban landscape as a series of related spaces.


title: Urban design

text: Also in 1961, Jane Jacobs published "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". She critiqued the modernism of CIAM (International Congresses of Modern Architecture). Jacobs also claimed crime rates in publicly owned spaces were rising because of the Modernist approach of 'city in the park'. She argued instead for an 'eyes on the street' approach to town planning through the resurrection of main public space precedents (e.g. streets, squares).


title: Urban design

text: In the same year, Kevin Lynch published "The Image of the City". He was seminal to urban design, particularly with regards to the concept of legibility. He reduced urban design theory to five basic elements: paths, districts, edges, nodes, landmarks. He also made the use of mental maps to understand the city popular, rather than the two-dimensional physical master plans of the previous 50 years.


title: Urban design

text: The popularity of these works resulted in terms that become everyday language in the field of urban planning. Aldo Rossi introduced 'historicism' and 'collective memory' to urban design. Rossi also proposed a 'collage metaphor' to understand the collection of new and old forms within the same urban space. Peter Calthorpe developed a manifesto for sustainable urban living via medium-density living. He also designed a manual for building new settlements in his concept of Transit Oriented Development (TOD). Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson introduced Space Syntax to predict how movement patterns in cities would contribute to urban vitality, anti-social behaviour, and economic success. 'Sustainability', 'livability', and 'high quality of urban components' also became commonplace in the field.


title: Urban design

text: Today, urban design seeks to create sustainable urban environments with long-lasting structures, buildings, and overall livability. Walkable urbanism is another approach to practice that is defined within the "Charter of New Urbanism". It aims to reduce environmental impacts by altering the built environment to create smart cities that support sustainable transport. Compact urban neighborhoods encourage residents to drive less. These neighborhoods have significantly lower environmental impacts when compared to sprawling suburbs. To prevent urban sprawl, Circular flow land use management was introduced in Europe to promote sustainable land use patterns.


title: Urban design

text: As a result of the recent New Classical Architecture movement, sustainable construction aims to develop smart growth, walkability, architectural tradition, and classical design. It contrasts with modernist and globally uniform architecture. In the 1980s, urban design began to oppose the increasing solitary housing estates and suburban sprawl.


title: Urban design

text: Managed Urbanisation with the view to making the urbanising process completely culturally and economically, and environmentally sustainable, and as a possible solution to the urban sprawl, Frank Reale has submitted an interesting concept of Expanding Nodular Development (E.N.D.) that integrates many urban designs and ecological principles, to design and build smaller rural hubs with high-grade connecting freeways, rather than adding more expensive infrastructure to existing big cities and the resulting congestion.


title: Urban design

text: Throughout the young existence of the Urban Design discipline, many paradigm shifts have occurred that have affected the trajectory of the field regarding theory and practice. These paradigm shifts cover multiple subject areas outside of the traditional design disciplines.


title: Urban design

text: New Urbanism is an approach that began in the 1980s as a place-making initiative to combat suburban sprawl. Its goal is to increase density by creating compact and complete towns and neighborhoods. The 10 principles of new urbanism are walkability, connectivity, mixed-use and diversity, mixed housing, quality architecture and urban design, traditional neighborhood structure, increased density, smart transportation, sustainability, and quality of life. New urbanism and the developments that it has created are sources of debates within the discipline, primarily with the landscape urbanist approach but also due to its reproduction of idyllic architectural tropes that do not respond to the context. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Peter Calthorpe, and Jeff Speck are all strongly associated with New Urbanism and its evolution over the years.


title: Urban design

text: Landscape Urbanism is a theory that first surfaced in the 1990s, arguing that the city is constructed of interconnected and ecologically rich horizontal field conditions, rather than the arrangement of objects and buildings. Charles Waldheim, Mohsen Mostafavi, James Corner, and Richard Weller are closely associated with this theory. Landscape urbanism theorises sites, territories, ecosystems, networks, and infrastructures through landscape practice according to Corner, while applying a dynamic concept to cities as ecosystems that grow, shrink or change phases of development according to Waldheim.


title: Urban design

text: Everyday Urbanism is a concept introduced by Margaret Crawford and influenced by Henry Lefebvre that describes the everyday lived experience shared by urban residents including commuting, working, relaxing, moving through city streets and sidewalks, shopping, buying, eating food, and running errands. Everyday urbanism is not concerned with aesthetic value. Instead, it introduces the idea of eliminating the distance between experts and ordinary users and forces designers and planners to contemplate a 'shift of power' and address social life from a direct and ordinary perspective.


title: Urban design

text: Tactical Urbanism (also known as DIY Urbanism, Planning-by-Doing, Urban Acupuncture, or Urban Prototyping) is a city, organizational, or citizen-led approach to neighborhood-building that uses short-term, low-cost, and scalable interventions and policies to catalyze long term change.


title: Urban design

text: Top-up Urbanism is the theory and implementation of two techniques in urban design: top-down and bottom-up. Top-down urbanism is when the design is implemented from the top of the hierarchy - normally the government or planning department. Bottom-up or grassroots urbanism begins with the people or the bottom of the hierarchy. Top-up means that both methods are used together to make a more participatory design, so it is sure to be comprehensive and well regarded in order to be as successful as possible.


title: Urban design

text: Infrastructural Urbanism is the study of how the major investments that go into making infrastructural systems can be leveraged to be more sustainable for communities. Instead of the systems being solely about efficiency in both cost and production, infrastructural urbanism strives to utilize these investments to be more equitable for social and environmental issues as well. Linda Samuels is a designer investigating how to accomplish this change in infrastructure in what she calls "next-generation infrastructure" which is "multifunctional; public; visible; socially productive; locally specific, flexible, and adaptable; sensitive to the eco-economy; composed of design prototypes or demonstration projects; symbiotic; technologically smart; and developed collaboratively across disciplines and agencies".


title: Urban design

text: Sustainable Urbanism is the study from the 1990s of how a community can be beneficial for the ecosystem, the people, and the economy for which it is associated. It is based on Scott Campbell's planner's triangle which tries to find the balance between economy, equity, and the environment. Its main concept is to try and make cities as self-sufficient as possible while not damaging the ecosystem around them, today with an increased focus on climate stability. A key designer working with sustainable urbanism is Douglas Farr.


title: Urban design

text: Feminist Urbanism is the study and critique of how the built environment affects genders differently because of patriarchal social and political structures in society. Typically, the people at the table making design decisions are men, so their conception about public space and the built environment relates to their life perspectives and experiences, which do not reflect the same experiences of women or children. Dolores Hayden is a scholar who has researched this topic from 1980 to the present day. Hayden's writing says, “when women, men, and children of all classes and races can identify the public domain as the place where they feel most comfortable as citizens, Americans will finally have homelike urban space.”


title: Urban design

text: Educational Urbanism is an emerging discipline, at the crossroads of urban planning, educational planning, and pedagogy. An approach that tackles the notion that economic activities, the need for new skills at the workplace, and the spatial configuration of the workplace rely on the spatial reorientation in the design of educational spaces and the urban dimension of educational planning.


title: Urban design

text: Black Urbanism is an approach in which black communities are active creators, innovators, and authors of the process of designing and creating the neighborhoods and spaces of the metropolitan areas they have done so much to help revive over the past half-century. The goal is not to build black cities for black people but to explore and develop the creative energy that exists in so-called black areas: that has the potential to contribute to the sustainable development of the whole city.


title: Urban design

text: Underlying the practice of urban design are the many theories about how to best design the city. Each theory makes a unique claim about how to effectively design thriving, sustainable urban environments. Debates over the efficacy of these approaches fill the urban design discourse. Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism are commonly debated as distinct approaches to addressing suburban sprawl. While Landscape Urbanism proposes landscape as the basic building block of the city and embraces horizontality, flexibility, and adaptability, New Urbanism offers the neighborhood as the basic building block of the city and argues for increased density, mixed uses, and walkability. Opponents of Landscape Urbanism point out that most of its projects are urban parks, and as such, its application is limited. Opponents of New Urbanism claim that its preoccupation with traditional neighborhood structures is nostalgic, unimaginative, and culturally problematic. Everyday Urbanism argues for grassroots neighborhood improvements rather than master-planned, top-down interventions. Each theory elevates the roles of certain professions in the urban design process, further fueling the debate. In practice, urban designers often apply principles from many urban design theories. Emerging from the conversation is a universal acknowledgement of the importance of increased interdisciplinary collaboration in designing the modern city.


title: Urban design

text: Urban designers work with architects, landscape architects, transportation engineers, urban planners, and industrial designers to reshape the city. Cooperation with public agencies, authorities and the interests of nearby property owners is necessary to manage public spaces. Users often compete over the spaces and negotiate across a variety of spheres. Input is frequently needed from a wide range of stakeholders. This can lead to different levels of participation as defined in Arnstein's Ladder of Citizen Participation.


title: Urban design

text: While there are some professionals who identify themselves specifically as urban designers, a majority have backgrounds in urban planning, architecture, or landscape architecture. Many collegiate programs incorporate urban design theory and design subjects into their curricula. There is an increasing number of university programs offering degrees in urban design at the post-graduate level.


title: Urban design

text: The original urban design was thought to be separated from architecture and urban planning. Urban Design has developed to a certain extent, and comes from the foundation of engineering. In Anglo-Saxon countries, it is often considered as a branch under the architecture, urban planning, and landscape architecture and limited as the construction of the urban physical environment. However Urban Design is more integrated into the social science-based, cultural, economic, political, and other aspects. Not only focus on space and architectural group, but also look at the whole city from a broader and more holistic perspective to shape a better living environment. Compared to architecture, the spatial and temporal scale of Urban Design processing is much larger. It deals with neighborhoods, communities, and even the entire city.


title: Urban design

text: The University of Liverpool's Department of Civic Design is the first urban design school in the world founded in 1909. Following the 1956 Urban Design conference, Harvard University established the first graduate program with urban design in its title, The Master of Architecture in Urban Design, although as a subject taught in universities its history in Europe is far older. Urban design programs explore the built environment from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and points of view. The pedagogically innovative combination of interdisciplinary studios, lecture courses, seminars, and independent study creates an intimate and engaging educational atmosphere in which students thrive and learn. Soon after in 1961, Washington University in St. Louis founded their Master of Urban Design program. Today, twenty urban design programs exist in the United States:


title: Urban design

text: In the United Kingdom, Master's programmes in Urban Design at Cardiff University or London South Bank University and City Design at the Royal College of Art or Queen's University Belfast are offered.


title: Urban design

text: The field of urban design holds enormous potential for helping us address today's biggest challenges: an expanding population, mass urbanization, rising inequality, and climate change. In its practice as well as its theories, urban design attempts to tackle these pressing issues. As climate change progresses, urban design can mitigate the results of flooding, temperature changes, and increasingly detrimental storm impacts through a mindset of sustainability and resilience. In doing so, the urban design discipline attempts to create environments that are constructed with longevity in mind, such as zero-carbon cities. Cities today must be designed to minimize resource consumption, waste generation, and pollution while also withstanding the unprecedented impacts of climate change. To be truly resilient, our cities need to be able to not just bounce back from a catastrophic climate event but to bounce forward to an improved state.


title: Urban design

text: Another issue in this field is that it is often assumed that there are no mothers of planning and urban design. However, this is not the case, many women have made proactive contributions to the field, including the work of Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, Florence Kelley, and Lillian Wald, to name a few of whom were prominent leaders in the City Social movement. The City Social was a movement that steamed between the commonly known City Practical and City Beautiful movements. It was a movement that’s main concerns lay with the economic and social equalities regarding urban issues.


title: Urban design

text: Justice is and will always be a key issue in urban design. As previously mentioned, past urban strategies have caused injustices within communities incapable of being remedied via simple means. As urban designers tackle the issue of justice, they often are required to look at the injustices of the past and must be careful not to overlook the nuances of race, place, and socioeconomic status in their design efforts. This includes ensuring reasonable access to basic services, transportation, and fighting against gentrification and the commodification of space for economic gain. Organizations such as the Divided Cities Initiatives at Washington University in St. Louis and the Just City Lab at Harvard work on promoting justice in urban design.


title: Urban design

text: Until the 1970s, the design of towns and cities took little account of the needs of people with disabilities. At that time, disabled people began to form movements demanding recognition of their potential contribution if social obstacles were removed. Disabled people challenged the 'medical model' of disability which saw physical and mental problems as an individual 'tragedy' and people with disabilities as 'brave' for enduring them. They proposed instead a 'social model' which said that barriers to disabled people result from the design of the built environment and attitudes of able-bodied people. 'Access Groups' were established composed of people with disabilities who audited their local areas, checked planning applications, and made representations for improvements. The new profession of 'access officer' was established around that time to produce guidelines based on the recommendations of access groups and to oversee adaptations to existing buildings as well as to check on the accessibility of new proposals. Many local authorities now employ access officers who are regulated by the Access Association. A new chapter of the Building Regulations (Part M) was introduced in 1992. Although it was beneficial to have legislation on this issue the requirements were fairly minimal but continue to be improved with ongoing amendments. The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 continues to raise awareness and enforce action on disability issues in the urban environment.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: The philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard has been a major influence in the development of 20th-century philosophy, especially existentialism and postmodernism. Søren Kierkegaard was a 19th-century Danish philosopher who has been labeled by many as the "Father of Existentialism", although there are some in the field who express doubt in labeling him an existentialist to begin with. His philosophy also influenced the development of existential psychology.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Kierkegaard criticized aspects of the philosophical systems that were brought on by philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel before him and the Danish Hegelians. He was also indirectly influenced by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. He measured himself against the model of philosophy which he found in Socrates, which aims to draw one's attention not to explanatory systems, but rather to the issue of how one exists.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: One of Kierkegaard's recurrent themes is the importance of subjectivity, which has to do with the way people relate themselves to (objective) truths. In "Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments", he argues that "subjectivity is truth" and "truth is subjectivity." Kierkegaard conveys that most essentially, truth is not just a matter of discovering objective facts. While objective facts are important, there is a second and more crucial element of truth, which involves how one relates oneself to those matters of fact. Since how one acts is, from the ethical perspective, more important than any matter of fact, truth is to be found in subjectivity rather than objectivity.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Many of Kierkegaard's earlier writings from 1843 to 1846 were written pseudonymously. In the non-pseudonymous "The Point of View of My Work as an Author", he explained that the pseudonymous works are written from perspectives which are not his own: while Kierkegaard himself was a religious author, the pseudonymous authors wrote from points of view that were aesthetic or speculative. One exception to this is "Anti-Climacus", a pseudonymous author developed after the writing of "The Point of View": Anti-Climacus is a religious author who writes from a Christian perspective so ideal that Kierkegaard did not wish it to be attributed to himself.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Because the pseudonymous authors write from perspectives which are not Kierkegaard's own, some of the philosophy mentioned in this article may not reflect Kierkegaard's own beliefs. Just as other philosophers bring up viewpoints in their essays to discuss and criticize them, Kierkegaard assigns pseudonyms to explore a particular viewpoint in-depth, which may take up a whole book or two in some instances, and Kierkegaard, or another pseudonym, critiques that position. For example, the author, "Johannes Climacus" is not a Christian and he argues from a non-Christian viewpoint. "Anti-Climacus", as mentioned earlier, is a Christian to a high degree and he argues from a devout Christian viewpoint. Kierkegaard places his beliefs in-between these two authors.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Most of Kierkegaard's later philosophical and religious writings from 1846 to 1855 were written and authored by himself, and he assigned no pseudonyms to these works. Subsequently, these works are considered by most scholars to reflect Kierkegaard's own beliefs. Where appropriate, this article will mention the respective author, pseudonymous or not.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Alienation is a term philosophers apply to a wide variety of phenomena, including any feeling of separation from, and discontent with, society; feeling that there is a moral breakdown in society; feelings of powerlessness in the face of the solidity of social institutions; the impersonal, dehumanised nature of large-scale and bureaucratic social organisations. Kierkegaard recognizes and accepts the notion of alienation, although he phrases it and understands it in his own distinctly original terms. For Kierkegaard, the present age is a reflective age—one that values objectivity and thought over action, lip-service to ideals rather than action, discussion over action, publicity and advertising over reality, and fantasy over the real world. For Kierkegaard, the meaning of values has been removed from life, by lack of finding any true and legitimate authority. Instead of falling into any claimed authority, any "literal" sacred book or any other great and lasting voice, self-aware humans must confront an existential uncertainty.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Humanity has lost meaning because the accepted criterion of reality and truth is ambiguous and subjective thought—that which cannot be proven with logic, historical research, or scientific analysis. Humans cannot think out choices in life, we must live them; and even those choices that we often think about become different once life itself enters into the picture. For Kierkegaard, the type of objectivity that a scientist or historian might use misses the point—humans are not motivated and do not find meaning in life through pure objectivity. Instead, they find it through passion, desire, and moral and religious commitment. These phenomena are not objectively provable—nor do they come about through any form of analysis of the external world; they come about through a direct relationship between one and the external world. Here Kierkegaard's emphasis is on relationship rather than analysis. This relationship is a way of looking at one's life that evades objective scrutiny.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Kierkegaard's analysis of the present age uses terms that resemble but are not exactly coincident with Hegel and Marx's theory of alienation. However Kierkegaard expressly means that human beings are alienated from God because they are living too much in the world. Individuals need to gain their souls from the world because it actually belongs to God. Kierkegaard has no interest in external battles as Karl Marx does. His concern is about the inner fight for faith.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Albert Camus wrote about the idea of being a stranger in the world but reversed Kierkegaard's meaning. A stranger for Camus was someone living in the world who is forced to exist in a Christian way even though the individual does not want to be a Christian. But Kierkegaard was discussing the Christian who wants to be a Christian living in a world that has abandoned Christianity. Both Camus and Kierkegaard had in common an equal distaste for a Christian Democracy where all are forced to take a positive part in Christianity because freedom of choice would be lacking and in a non-Christian Democracy where none are allowed to take an active part in Christianity. Kierkegaard was against voting about Christianity, for him, Christ was the only authority. Camus called the existential attitude "philosophical suicide." He put it in "The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Writings":


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Kierkegaard put it this way in "Three Edifying Discourses" 1843 and "Concluding Unscientific Postscript" (1846):


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: An element of Kierkegaard's critique of modernity in his socio-political work, "Two Ages", is the mention of money—which he calls an abstraction. An abstraction is something that only has a reality in an ersatz reality. It is not tangible, and only has meaning within an artificial context, which ultimately serves devious and deceptive purposes. It is a figment of thought that has no concrete reality, neither now nor in the future.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: How is money an abstraction? Money gives the illusion that it has a direct relationship to the work that is done. That is, the work one does is worth so much, equals so much money. In reality, however, the work one does is an expression of who one is as a person; it expresses one's goals in life and associated meaning. As a person, the work one performs is supposed to be an external realization of one's relationship to others and to the world. It is one's way of making the world a better place for oneself and for others. What reducing work to a monetary value does is to replace the concrete reality of one's everyday struggles with the world —to give it shape, form and meaning— with an abstraction. Kierkegaard lamented that "a young man today would scarcely envy another his capacities or skill or the love of a beautiful girl or his fame, no, but he would envy him his money. Give me money, the young man will say, and I will be all right." But Kierkegaard thinks this emphasis on money leads to a denial of the gifts of the spirit to those who are poor and in misery.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Below are three quotes concerning Kierkegaard's idea of abstraction which cannot be thought about without thinking about concretion. He moves from the world historical, the general, to the single individual, the specific. The first from the esthete and the second from the ethicist in "Either/Or" and the third from the book that explained all his previous works; "Concluding Unscientific Postscript".


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Death is inevitable and temporally unpredictable. Kierkegaard believed that individuals needed to sincerely and intensely come to realize the truth of that fact in order to live passionately. Kierkegaard accuses society of being in death-denial. Even though people see death all around them and grasp as an objective fact that everyone dies, few people truly understand, subjectively and inwardly, that they will die someday. For example, in "Concluding Unscientific Postscript", Kierkegaard notes that people never think to say, "I shall certainly attend your party, but I must make an exception for the contingency that a roof tile happens to blow down and kill me; for in that case, I cannot attend." This is jest as far as Kierkegaard is concerned. But there is also earnestness involved in the thought of death. Kierkegaard said the following about death in his Three Upbuilding Discourses, 1844:


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: For Kierkegaard's author, "Vigilius Haufniensis", anxiety/dread/angst (depending on the translation and context) is unfocused fear. Haufniensis uses the example of a man standing on the edge of a tall building or cliff. From this height he can see all the possibilities of life. He's reflecting on what he could become if he only threw himself into the power of his own choice. As long as he stands there he stands at the crossroads of life, unable to make a decision and live within its boundaries. The mere fact that one has the possibility and freedom to do something, even the most terrifying of possibilities, triggers immense feelings of dread. Haufniensis called this our "dizziness of freedom."


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: In "The Concept of Anxiety", Haufniensis focuses on the first anxiety experienced by man: Adam's choice to eat from God's forbidden tree of knowledge or not. Since the concepts of good and evil did not come into existence before Adam ate the fruit, which is now dubbed original sin, Adam had no concept of good and evil, and did not know that eating from the tree was evil. What he did know was that God told him not to eat from the tree. The anxiety comes from the fact that God's prohibition itself implies that Adam is free and that he could choose to obey God or not. After Adam ate from the tree, sin was born. So, according to Kierkegaard, anxiety precedes sin, and it is anxiety that leads Adam to sin. Haufniensis mentions that anxiety is the presupposition for hereditary sin.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: However, Haufniensis mentions that anxiety is a way for humanity to be saved as well. Anxiety informs us of our choices, our self-awareness and personal responsibility, and brings us from a state of un-self-conscious immediacy to self-conscious reflection. (Jean-Paul Sartre calls these terms pre-reflexive consciousness and reflexive consciousness.) An individual becomes truly aware of his or her potential through the experience of dread. So, anxiety may be a possibility for sin, but anxiety can also be a recognition or realization of one's true identity and freedoms.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Most emphatically in "The Sickness Unto Death", Kierkegaard's author argues that the human self is a composition of various aspects that must be brought into conscious balance: the finite, the infinite, a consciousness of the "relationship of the two to itself," and a consciousness of "the power that posited" the self. The finite (limitations such as those imposed by one's body or one's concrete circumstances) and the infinite (those capacities that free us from limitations such as imagination) always exist in a state of tension. That tension between two aspects of the "self" that must be brought into balance. When the self is out of balance, i.e., has the wrong understanding of who it is because it conceives itself too much in terms of its own limiting circumstances (and thus fails to recognize its own freedom to determine what it will be) or too much in terms of what it would like to be, (thus ignoring its own circumstances), the person is in a state of despair. Notably, Anti-Climacus says one can be in despair even if one feels perfectly happy. Despair is not just an emotion, in a deeper sense it is the loss of self, i.e., it describes the state when one has the wrong conception of oneself.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: In "Either/Or", "A" and "Judge William" each has one epistolary novel in two volumes. The "A" is an aesthete well aware that he can use the power of interpretation to define who he is and what he takes to be valuable. He knows he can shape and reshape his own self-identity. Nothing binds him to his relationships. Nothing binds him to his past actions. In the end though, he also knows he lacks a consistent understanding of who he is. He lacks a self that resists his own power of reinterpretation. His older friend "Judge William," argues that a deeper concept of selfhood is discovered as one commits to one's actions, and takes ownership of the past and present. A concept of oneself, as this particular human being, begins to take form in one's own consciousness.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Another perspective, one in which an individual can find some measure of freedom from despair, is available for the person with religious "faith." This attunes the individual so that he or she can recognize what has always been there: a self to be realized within the circumstances it finds itself right now, i.e., this inner attunement brings about a sort of synthesis between the infinite and the finite.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: In "Fear and Trembling", "Johannes de Silentio" argues that the choice of Abraham to obey the private, unethical, commandment of God to sacrifice his son reveals what faith entails: he directs his consciousness absolutely toward "the absolute" rather than the merely ethical, i.e., he practices an inner spirituality that seeks to be "before god" rather than seeking to understand himself as an ethically upright person. His God requires more than being good, he demands that he seek out an inner commitment to him. If Abraham were to blithely obey, his actions would have no meaning. It is only when he acts "with fear and trembling" that he demonstrates a full awareness that murdering a son is absolutely wrong, ethically speaking.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Despair has several specific levels that a person can find themselves, each one further in despair than the last as laid out in "The Sickness Unto Death".


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: The first level is "The despair that is ignorant of being despair or the despairing ignorance of having a self and an eternal self." Essentially this level is one which has the wrong conception of what a self is, i.e., is ignorant of how to realize the self one already potentially is. In this sense, the person does not recognize his own despair because he often measures the success of his life based on whether he himself judges himself to be happy. Regardless of whether you know you are in despair or not, Kierkegaard asserts, you can still be in that state. He notes that this is the most common in the world.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: The next level of despair is "The despair that is conscious of being despair and therefore is conscious of having a self in which there is something eternal and then either in despair does not will to be itself or in despair wills to be itself." This becomes further subdivided into three categories: the despair not to will or want to be oneself, the despair not to will to be a self, and lowest, the despair to wish for a new self. These three divisions are mostly the self-worth the person has and the amount to which they understand their own despair. The despair to not be oneself is pretty straightforward. A person sees themself as unworthy and as such does not see themself as worthy before something they do not understand. The despair not to be a self is deeper, because to not wish to be a self is to wish to not have a relation to God or at the very least see one's relation to God as unworthy, and thus shrink from it. The lowest form of this group, however, is the desire to be a new self. This is logically the deepest form as it assumes the deepest understanding of one's despair. Once in despair, without a complete relation to God one will always be in despair, so to be in this level one understands the permanence of the despair. The despair in this group arises from the nature of sensate things and physical desires. These three sub groups are also grouped under the heading "Despair over the earthly."


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: The second level of conscious despair under the heading "Despair over the eternal." Someone in this level views themself in light of their own weakness. Unlike in the upper level, this weakness is understood and as such, instead of turning to faith and humbling oneself before God, they despair in their own weakness and unworthiness. In this sense, they despair over the eternal and refuse to be comforted by the light of God.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: The last and lowest form of despair is the desire "In despair to will to be oneself." This last form of despair is also referred to by Kierkegaard as "demonic despair" (Note that the term demonic is used in the Classical Greek Sense, not the modern sense). In this form of despair, the individual finds him or herself in despair, understands they are in despair, seeks some way to alleviate it, and yet no help is forthcoming. As a result, the self becomes hardened against any form of help and "Even if God in heaven and all the angels offered him aid, he would not want it." At this level of despair the individual revels in their own despair and sees their own pain as lifting them up above the base nature of other humans who do not find themselves in this state. This is the least common form of despair and Kierkegaard claims it is mostly found in true poets. This despair can also be called the despair of defiance, as it is the despair that strikes out against all that is eternal. One last note is that as one travels further down the forms of despair, the number of people in each group becomes fewer.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Many philosophers who initially read Kierkegaard, especially Kierkegaard's (written under the pseudonym of "Johannes de Silentio") "Fear and Trembling", often come to the conclusion that Kierkegaard supports a divine command law of ethics. The divine command theory is a metaethical theory which claims moral values are whatever is commanded by a god or gods. However, Kierkegaard is not arguing that morality is created by God; instead, he would argue that a divine command from God "transcends" ethics. This distinction means that God does not necessarily create human morality: it is up to us as individuals to create our own morals and values. But any religious person must be prepared for the event of a divine command from God that would take precedence over all moral and rational obligations. Kierkegaard called this event the "teleological suspension of the ethical". Abraham, the knight of faith, chose to obey God unconditionally, and was rewarded with his son, his faith, and the title of "Father of Faith". Abraham transcended ethics and leaped into faith.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: But there is no valid logical argument one can make to claim that morality ought to be or can be suspended in any given circumstance, or ever. Thus, Silentio believes ethics and faith are separate stages of consciousness. The choice to obey God unconditionally is a true existential 'either/or' decision faced by the individual. Either one chooses to live in faith (the religious stage) or to live ethically (the ethical stage).


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: In "Either/Or", Kierkegaard insists that the single individual has ethical responsibility of his life. However, everyone wants to enjoy themselves and ethics gets in the way of a person's enjoyment of life if taken to extremes. This results in a battle between those who want to live for pleasure and those who demand an ethical existence. But Kierkegaard always points toward the religious goal, an "eternal happiness", or the salvation of the soul as the highest good. He says, be whatever you want, but remember that your soul belongs to God, not to the world.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: In "Works of Love" and "Purity of Heart", Kierkegaard skillfully examines Christian ethics and the maxim, "Love Thy Neighbour". Kierkegaard stressed that it was Christianity that "discovered the neighbor".


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: For Kierkegaard, true individuality is called selfhood. Becoming aware of our true self is our true task and endeavor in life—it is an ethical imperative, as well as preparatory to a true religious understanding. Individuals can exist at a level that is less than true selfhood. We can live, for example, simply in terms of our pleasures—our immediate satisfaction of desires, propensities, or distractions. In this way, we glide through life without direction or purpose. To have a direction, we must have a purpose that defines for us the meaning of our lives. Kierkegaard puts it this way in "Either/Or":


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: In "Sickness Unto Death" specifically Kierkegaard deals with the self as a product of relations. In this sense, a human results from a relation between the Infinite (Noumena, spirit, eternal) and Finite (Phenomena, body, temporal). This does not create a true self, as a human can live without a "self" as he defines it. Instead, the Self or ability for the self to be created from a relation to the Absolute or God (the Self can only be realized through a relation to God) arises as a relation between the relation of the Finite and Infinite relating back to the human. This would be a positive relation.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: An individual person, for Kierkegaard, is a particular that no abstract formula or definition can ever capture. Including the individual in "the public" (or "the crowd" or "the herd") or subsuming a human being as simply a member of a species is a reduction of the true meaning of life for individuals. What philosophy or politics try to do is to categorize and pigeonhole individuals by group characteristics, each with their own individual differences. In Four Upbuilding Discourses, 1843 Kierkegaard says the differences aren't important, the likeness with God is what brings equality.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Kierkegaard's critique of the modern age, therefore, is about the loss of what it means to be an individual. Modern society contributes to this dissolution of what it means to be an individual. Through its production of the false idol of "the public", it diverts attention away from individuals to a mass public that loses itself in abstractions, communal dreams, and fantasies. It is helped in this task by the media and the mass production of products to keep it distracted. Even the fight for temporal equality is a distraction. In "Works of Love" he writes:


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: For Kierkegaard, in order to apprehend the absolute, the mind must radically empty itself of objective content. What supports this radical emptying, however, is the desire for the absolute. Kierkegaard names this desire "Passion".


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: In line with this philosophy, some scholars have drawn similarities between the Stoics concept of Apatheia and Subjective Truth as the highest form of Wisdom. For the Stoics, Pathos (Passion) is a Perturbation which man has to overcome in a similar manner to Kierkegaard's concept of Objective Truth.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: According to Kierkegaard, the human self desires that which is beyond reason. Desire itself appears to be a desire for the infinite, as Plato once wrote. Even the desire to propagate, according to Plato, is a kind of desire for immortality—that is, we wish to live on in time through our children and their children. Erotic love itself appears as an example of this desire for something beyond the purely finite. It is a taste of what could be, if only it could continue beyond the boundaries of time and space. As the analogy implies, humans seek something beyond the here and now. The question remains, however, why is it that human pathos or passion is the most precious thing? In some ways, it might have to do with our status as existential beings. It is not thought that gets us through life—it is action; and what motivates and sustains action is passion, the desire to overcome hardships, pain, and suffering. It is also passion that enables us to die for ideals in the name of a higher reality. While a scientist might see this as plain emotion or simple animal desire, Kierkegaard sees it as that which binds to the source of life itself. For Kierkegaard all Christian action should have its ground in love, which is a passion.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: One can also look at this from the perspective of what the meaning of our existence is. Why suffer what humans have suffered, the pain and despair—what meaning can all of this have? For Kierkegaard, there is no meaning unless passion, the emotions and will of humans, has a divine source.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Passion is closely aligned with faith in Kierkegaard's thought. Faith as a passion is what drives humans to seek reality and truth in a transcendent world, even though everything we can know intellectually speaks against it. To live and die for a belief, to stake everything one has and is in the belief in something that has a higher meaning than anything in the world—this is belief and passion at their highest.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Kierkegaard wrote of the subjective thinker's task in his "Concluding Unscientific Postscript". Intellectual reason had been deified by Hegel in his theology and Kierkegaard felt this would lead to the objectification of religion.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: "Johannes Climacus", in "Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments", writes the following cryptic line: "Subjectivity is Truth". To understand Climacus's concept of the individual, it is important to look at what he says regarding subjectivity. What is subjectivity? In very rough terms, subjectivity refers to what is personal to the individual—what makes the individual "who they are in distinction from others". Another way to interpret subjectivity is the "unique" relationship between the subject and object.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Scientists and historians, for example, study the objective world, hoping to elicit the truth of nature—or perhaps the truth of history. In this way, they hope to predict how the future will unfold in accordance with these laws. In terms of history, by studying the past, the individual can perhaps elicit the laws that determine how events will unfold—in this way the individual can predict the future with more exactness and perhaps take control of events that in the past appeared to fall outside the control of humans.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: In most respects, Climacus did not have problems with science or the scientific endeavor. He would not disregard the importance of objective knowledge. Where the scientist or historian finds certainty, however, Climacus noted very accurately that results in science change as the tools of observation change. But Climacus's special interest was in history. His most vehement attacks came against those who believed that they had understood history and its laws—and by doing so could ascertain what a human's true self is. That is, the assumption is that by studying history someone can come to know who he really is as a person. Kierkegaard especially accused Hegel's philosophy of falling prey to this assumption. He explained this in "Concluding Unscientific Postscript":


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Hegel wanted to philosophize about Christianity but had no intention to ever become a Christian. For Climacus, the individual comes to know who he is by an intensely personal and passionate pursuit of what will give meaning to his life. As an existing individual, who must come to terms with everyday life, overcome its obstacles and setbacks, who must live and die, the single individual has a life that no one else will ever live. In dealing with what life brings his way, the individual must encounter them with all his psycho-physical resources.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Subjectivity is that which the individual—and no one else—has. But what does it mean to have something like this? It cannot be understood in the same way as having a car or a bank account. It means to be someone who is becoming someone—it means being a person with a past, a present, and a future. No one can have an individual's past, present or future. Different people experience these in various ways—these experiences are unique, not anyone else's. Having a past, present, and future means that a person is an existing individual—that a person can find meaning in time and by existing. Individuals do not think themselves into existence, they are born. But once born and past a certain age, the individual begins to make choices in life; now those choices can be his, his parents', society's, etc. The important point is that to exist, the individual must make choices—the individual must decide what to do the next moment and on into the future. What the individual chooses and how he chooses will define who and what he is—to himself and to others. Kierkegaard put it this way in "Works of Love", 1847:


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: The goal of life, according to Socrates, is to know thyself. Knowing oneself means being aware of who one is, what one can be and what one cannot be. Kierkegaard uses the same idea that Socrates used in his own writings. He asks the one who wants to be a single individual the following questions in his 1847 book, "Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits":


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Subjectivity comes with consciousness of myself as a self. It encompasses the emotional and intellectual resources that the individual is born with. Subjectivity is what the individual is as a human being. Now the problem of subjectivity is to decide how to choose—what rules or models is the individual going to use to make the right choices? What are the right choices? Who defines right? To be truly an individual, to be true to himself, his actions should in some way be expressed so that they describe who and what he is to himself and to others. The problem, according to Kierkegaard, is that we must choose who and what we will be based on subjective interests—the individual must make choices that will mean something to him as a reasoning, feeling being.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Kierkegaard decided to step up to the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil for himself, replacing Adam, and make his choice in the presence of God, where no one was there to accuse or judge him but his Creator. This is what he had Abraham do in "Fear and Trembling". This is how Kierkegaard thought learning about oneself takes place. Here is where the single individual learns about guilt and innocence. His book, "The Concept of Anxiety", makes clear that Adam did have knowledge when he made his choice and that was the knowledge of freedom. The prohibition was there but so was freedom and Eve and Adam decided to use it.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: In Kierkegaard's meaning, purely theological assertions are subjective truths and they cannot be either verified or invalidated by science, i.e. through objective knowledge. For him, choosing if one is for or against a certain subjective truth is a purely arbitrary choice. He calls the jump from objective knowledge to religious faith a leap of faith, since it means subjectively accepting statements which cannot be rationally justified. For him the Christian faith is the result of the trajectory initiated by such choices, which don't have and cannot have a rational ground (meaning that reason is neither for or against making such choices). Objectively regarded, purely theological assertions are neither true nor false.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Early American Kierkegaard scholars tried to reduce the complexity of Kierkegaard's authorship by focusing on three levels of individual existence, which are named in passing by one of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus, who wrote "Concluding Unscientific Postscript". Though the stages represent only one way of interpreting Kierkegaard's thought, it has become a popular way of introducing his authorship. In continental European circles, stage theory never took hold in the same way. This typifies what Kierkegaard was talking about throughout his writing career. "Early American scholars" and "European circles" denote partitions of thought concerning the writings of his works. He was against "reflecting oneself out of reality" and partitioning the "world of the spirit" because the world of the spirit cannot be objectively divided. Hegel wrote about his stages in his book, "Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion" and Kierkegaard replied in his Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments 1846:


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: In one popular interpretation of stage theory, each of the so-called levels of existence envelops those below it: an ethical person is still capable of aesthetic enjoyment, for example, and a religious person is still capable of aesthetic enjoyment and ethical duty. The difference between these ways of living are internal, not external, and thus there are no external signs one can point to determine at what level a person is living. This inner and outer relationship is commonly determined by an individual by looking to others to gauge one's action, Kierkegaard believed one should look to oneself and in that relationship look to Christ as the example instead of looking at others because the more you look at others the less you see of yourself. This makes it easier to degrade your neighbor instead of loving your neighbor. But one must love the person one sees not the person one wishes to see. Either love the person you see as that person is the person he is or stop talking about loving everyone.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Kierkegaard was interested in aesthetics, and is sometimes referred to as the "poet-philosopher" because of the passionate way in which he approached philosophy. But he is often said to be interested in showing the inadequacy of a life lived entirely in the aesthetic level. Aesthetic life is defined in numerous different ways in Kierkegaard's authorship, including a life defined by intellectual enjoyment, sensuous desire, and an inclination to interpret oneself as if one were "on stage." There are many degrees of this aesthetic existence and a single definition is thus difficult to offer. At bottom, one might see the purely unreflective lifestyle. At the top, we might find those lives which are lived in a reflective, independent, critical and socially apathetic way. But many interpreters of Kierkegaard believe that most people live in the least reflective sort of aesthetic stage, their lives and activities guided by everyday tasks and concerns. Fewer aesthetically guided people are the reflective sort. Whether such people know it or not, their lives will inevitably lead to complete despair. Kierkegaard's author "A" is an example of an individual living the aesthetic life.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: The second level of existence is the ethical. This is where an individual begins to take on a true direction in life, becoming aware of and personally responsible for good and evil and forming a commitment to oneself and others. One's actions at this level of existence have a consistency and coherence that they lacked in the previous sphere of existence. For many readers of Kierkegaard, the ethical is central. It calls each individual to take account of their lives and to scrutinize their actions in terms of absolute responsibility, which is what Kierkegaard calls repentance. If we compare Kierkegaard's idea of ethics with Vedic system of four aims of life, this Ethical system probably correlates most with Dharma—following this or that religion, set of rules, laws etc. (Hindus would call any religion as "dharma", though dharma is also a law).


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: "Judge Wilhelm," a pseudonymous author of "Either/Or" and the voice who defines the ethical consciousness, argues that the commitment to take responsibility for one's own choices must be made individually. To take responsibility for the various relationships in which an individual finds him- or herself is a possibility open to every human being, but it does not follow that every human being chooses to do so as a matter of course. The meaning of a person's life for Wilhelm depends on how he takes responsibility for his current and future choices, and how he takes ownership of those choices already made. For Wilhelm, the ethically governed person takes responsibility for past actions, some good and some bad, seeks consistency, and takes seriously the obligation to live in a passionate and devoted way.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: The ethical and the religious are intimately connected: a person can be ethically serious without being religious, but the religious stage includes the ethical. Whereas living in the ethical sphere involves a commitment to some moral absolute, living in the religious sphere involves a commitment and relation to the Christian God. Kierkegaard explained this in "Concluding Unscientific Postscript" like this:


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: The Kierkegaardian pseudonyms who speak of stage theory consider religion to be the highest stage in human existence. In one discussion of religious life, one of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus, distinguishes two types within this stage, which have been called "Religiousness A" and "Religiousness B". One type is symbolized by the Greek philosopher Socrates, whose passionate pursuit of the truth and individual conscience came into conflict with his society. Another type of religiousness is one characterized by the realization that the individual is sinful and is the source of untruth. In time, through revelation and in direct relationship with the paradox that is Jesus, the individual begins to see that his or her eternal salvation rests on a paradox—God, the transcendent, coming into time in human form to redeem human beings. For Kierkegaard, the very notion of this occurring was scandalous to human reason—indeed, it must be, and if it is not then one does not truly understand the Incarnation nor the meaning of human sinfulness. For Kierkegaard, the impulse towards an awareness of a transcendent power in the universe is what religion is. Religion has a social and an individual (not just personal) dimension. But it begins with the individual and his or her awareness of sinfulness. Here are several quotes from Kierkegaard's where he discusses his concept of sin.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Kierkegaard wrote much about Johann Gottlieb Fichte in his thesis "The Concept of Irony" as well as in his first book "De omnibus dubitandum est", written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, and his Journals. Fichte wrote the book "The Vocation of Man" (1800) which called for a progression in the life of the human being from doubt to knowledge and then to faith. "De omnibus dubitandum est" is from Descartes and means everything must be doubted. Both Kierkegaard and Fichte were interested in this idea of beginning with doubt as well as subjectivity. Kierkegaard wrote: "In Fichte, subjectivity became free, infinite, negative. But in order for subjectivity to get out of this movement of emptiness in which it moved in infinite abstraction, it had to be negated; in order for thought to become actual, it had to become concrete."


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Many philosophers think that one of Kierkegaard's greatest contributions to philosophy is his critique of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Indeed, many of Kierkegaard's works are written in response to or as a critique of Hegel. Although Kierkegaard strongly criticized some aspects of Hegelian philosophy, his work also shows that he was also positively influenced by Hegel, and had respect for Hegel himself.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: While Kierkegaard was a student of theology at the University of Copenhagen, Hegelianism had become increasingly popular. Johan Ludvig Heiberg and Hans Lassen Martensen were key figures in Danish Hegelianism. Kierkegaard remarked in his journal on 17 May 1843 that Heiberg's writings were "borrowed" from Hegel, implying Heiberg would have been a nobody without Hegel.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: Kierkegaard objected to Hegel's claim that he had devised a system of thought that could explain the whole of reality, with a dialectical analysis of history leading the way to this whole. Hegel claimed that the doctrines and history of Christianity could be explained as a part of the rational unfolding and development of our understanding of the natural world and our place within it. Kierkegaard considered Hegel's explanation of Christianity as a necessary part of world history to be a distortion of the Christian message and a misunderstanding of the limits of human reason. He attempted to refute this aspect of Hegel's thought by suggesting that many doctrines of Christianity—including the doctrine of Incarnation, a God who is also human—cannot be explained rationally but remain a logical paradox. However, he was in favor of youthful striving after truth.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: To refute Hegel's claim that Christianity should be understood as a part of the necessary evolution of thought, or in Hegelians terms, Spirit, in "Fear and Trembling", Kierkegaard attempts to use the story of Abraham to show that there is a goal higher than that of ethics (questioning the Hegelian claim that doing one's ethical duty is the highest that can be said of a human being) and that faith cannot be explained by Hegelian ethics, (disproving Hegel's claim that Christianity can be rationally explained by philosophy). Either way, this work can be read as a challenge to the Hegelian notion that a human being's ultimate purpose is to fulfill ethical demands.


title: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

text: By doing this, Hegelian critics accuse Kierkegaard of using the dialectic to disprove the dialectic, which seems somewhat contradictory and hypocritical. However, Kierkegaard would not claim the dialectic itself is bad, only the Hegelian premise that the dialectic "would lead to a harmonious reconciliation of everything", which Hegel called the Absolute. Kierkegaard stated this most clearly in his book "The Concept of Anxiety":