Danish Philosophical Texts

Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754)

Bergen-born, Copenhagen-based playwright, historian, essayist and professor — the founder of modern Danish-Norwegian literature and, for Høffding, the founder of independent philosophical reflection in Denmark: »Danske Filosofer« (1909) opens with him. Holberg is no system-builder but a skeptic and empiricist in the Montaigne–Bayle vein, hostile to dogma and speculative systems, insisting that "man må først lære at tvivle førend man må lære at tro" (one must first learn to doubt before one can learn to believe). His relevance to the line running toward Bohr's "epistemological lesson" is one of disposition rather than doctrine: epistemic humility, the testing of received norms against sound reason, and — especially in »Niels Klim« — a sustained play with the relativity of standpoint, the recognition that how things appear depends on the observer's position. This anti-dogmatic, perspective-conscious temper is the seedbed of the critical Danish tradition that Høffding inherits and transmits. Further works not listed below include »Introduction til Naturens og Folke-Rettens Kundskab« (1716), the »Moralske Fabler« (1751), and the Latin autobiographical epistles (1728–1743).

Niels Treschow (1751–1833)

Norwegian-born philosopher; professor of philosophy at Copenhagen 1803–1813, then the first professor of philosophy at the new Frederik University in Christiania (Oslo) from 1813. A Spinoza- and Leibniz-influenced monist and self-described Neoplatonist whose late "Identitets-system" treats the mental and the bodily — and, more broadly, the ideal and the real, subject and object — as two sides of one reality. His insistence that "in the real world only individuals exist" (universals being mere "Hjælpemidler til Oversyn," aids to survey, not knowledge of things in themselves) makes him an early source of the emphasis on concrete individuality that runs through nineteenth-century Danish philosophy. The relevance to the Bohr line is direct: Harald Høffding — Bohr's philosophical mentor, and himself in this catalog — discussed Treschow at length in »Danske Filosofer« (1909) and reprinted his essay on individuality in »Udvalgte Stykker af dansk filosofisk Litteratur« (1910). Treschow is thus the earliest figure on the Danish subject–object / individuality tradition that reaches Bohr's "epistemological lesson." The philosophical books are all listed below. Further items not catalogued here are the pre-1794 juvenilia and occasional pieces (»Om Veltalenheds Nytte« 1776, »Om offentlig Underviisning i Videnskaber« 1785, the 1790 dissertation »De anthropomorphismo«), the 1807 »Anatomisk-physiologiske Forelæsninger for Anthropologer«, the 1816 prize essay on rights and moral law, the 1817 »Politisk Catechismus«, and the 1830 verse »Skabelsen, Mennesket og Messias«. All are digitised and public-domain at nb.no.

Modern editions

Secondary literature

Thomasine Gyllembourg (1773–1856)

Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, born Buntzen into a Copenhagen merchant family, married the radical writer P.A. Heiberg in 1790 and, after his exile, divorced him in 1801 to marry C.F. Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd. She made her debut at fifty-three, in 1827, in her son J.L. Heiberg's »Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post«, and published anonymously for the rest of her life as "the author of »En Hverdags-Historie«", with Heiberg as editor of record; her name first appeared on her collected works in 1866–67. Her novellas take the modern family as their object — marriage, the private feeling of women, and the distance between public propriety and inner life. She belongs in this catalog because of »To Tidsaldre« (1845). Kierkegaard's »En literair Anmeldelse« (1846) is formally a review of it, and the diagnosis of "the present age" for which that review is known is worked out through her contrast between the age of revolution and the present one.

Hans Christian Ørsted (1777–1851)

Physicist, chemist and natural philosopher; professor at Copenhagen from 1806 and founder of the Polytekniske Læreanstalt (1829). In 1820 he discovered electromagnetism — that an electric current deflects a magnetic needle — and in 1825 was the first to isolate metallic aluminium. But Ørsted was as much a philosopher of nature as an experimenter: a student of Kant and of the German Naturphilosophie, he held that the same reason the mind finds in itself is objectively at work in nature, so that the laws of thought and the laws of nature ultimately coincide. This dynamical monism — opposed forces as convertible expressions of one underlying activity — is the thesis of his late essay-collection »Aanden i Naturen« (1850), "the spirit (reason) in nature," and it is why he belongs in this catalog: it is a Danish source of the unity-of-nature theme running toward Bohr. Ørsted also gave physics the term »Tankeeksperiment« (thought experiment) and coined much of the modern Danish scientific vocabulary; Høffding treated him among the »Danske Filosofer«. Two English editions cover most of his important work: »The Soul in Nature« (trans. L. & J. B. Horner, London: Bohn, 1852) for the philosophy of nature, and the 83-item »Selected Scientific Works of Hans Christian Ørsted« (trans. Jelved, Jackson & Knudsen, Princeton, 1998) for the scientific and aesthetic essays — the source of most of the translation links below. Further works not listed below include »Videnskaben om Naturens almindelige Love« (1809), »Naturlærens mechaniske Deel« (1844), and the poem »Luftskibet« (1836).

F.C. Sibbern (1785–1872)

Frederik Christian Sibbern, professor of philosophy at Copenhagen 1813–1870. Close friend of Poul Martin Møller; Kierkegaard attended his lectures and called him a lovable and distinctive thinker. A transitional figure who resisted the Hegelian campaign of the 1830s and anticipated several of Kierkegaard's central arguments. What he set against Hegel was personality as the highest value: where the individual is subordinated to the universal and subjective truth to objective, so that the well-ordered state becomes the end of Dannelse, Sibbern held that a truth is not appropriated until it has been personally lived and undergone, and is possessed only »som personliggjort i os« — turned by the will into an actual life. Kim Minke's chapter in Dansk litteraturs historie, catalogued under secondary literature below, makes this personality-philosophy the built-in premise of Møller, of Kierkegaard's ethicist, and of the Danish Bildungsroman, and the ground of the critique of Hegel that »baner vej for Kierkegaards«. For the life — the parentage, the walking tour to Hegel and Goethe, Sophie Ørsted, the fifty-seven years in the chair — see the essay »The Doctor's Son Called Gabrielis«.

Secondary literature

J.L. Heiberg (1791–1860)

Johan Ludvig Heiberg — poet, vaudeville dramatist, critic, editor, and from 1849 director of the Royal Theatre — made Hegel a Danish subject, and almost every philosophical quarrel in this catalog is one he started. He heard Hegel lecture in Berlin in 1824, underwent what he later called a philosophical conversion, and the same year published »Om den menneskelige Frihed«, the first Hegelian work in Danish. Until the early 1840s he campaigned — through his journals »Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post« (1827–37), »Perseus« (1837–38) and »Intelligensblade« (1842–44), through his logic lectures at the Royal Military College, and through a public lecture series — to persuade Golden Age Denmark that Hegel's system was the cure for an age in crisis. Martensen carried the program into theology and became the target of both Kierkegaard and Nielsen. Sibbern's »Bemærkninger og Undersøgelser, fornemmelig betreffende Hegels Philosophie« (1838) — transcribed and translated in full under Sibbern — is formally a review of the first volume of »Perseus«, and remains the most thorough Danish critique of Hegel ever written. Poul Martin Møller's late turn against "the modern atheism" is a turn against the same speculative fashion, and Heiberg's »Tidens Fordring« is what Kierkegaard spends the pseudonymous authorship mocking. Heiberg is thus the positive term that Sibbern, Møller and Kierkegaard are all negating, and the source from which the faith-and-knowledge controversy running through Nielsen and Brøchner ultimately flows. Jon Stewart has translated the whole philosophical corpus, so the useful work here is Danish transcription. Not listed below: the essays on contingency (1825) and Nemesis (1827), the theater writings, »Urania« (1844–46), and the verse, above all »En Sjæl efter Døden« (1841).

Secondary literature

Poul Martin Møller (1794–1838)

Poet, philosopher, and Professor of Philosophy at Copenhagen 1831–1838. The most important philosophical figure in the generation immediately preceding Kierkegaard; the Concept of Anxiety is dedicated to his memory. A digital scholarly edition of Møller's collected writings — with textual-critical apparatus and commentary — is in preparation at Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab (DSL) and available in prototype at http://pmm.dsl.dk; the transcriptions below are independent of it.

Secondary literature

Hans Lassen Martensen (1808–1884)

Theologian: Privatdocent and from 1840 professor of theology at Copenhagen, court preacher from 1845, and Mynster's successor as Bishop of Zealand from 1854. Usually classified as a theologian rather than a philosopher, but a necessary part of this catalog's story, because he is the man both Kierkegaard and Nielsen wrote against. His lectures on speculative dogmatics from the late 1830s made Hegelian theology the reigning fashion in Copenhagen — the mediation of faith and knowledge, and the ambition to »gaae videre«, to go further than Descartes' doubt and Hegel's system — and it is these commonplaces that Kierkegaard's unfinished »Johannes Climacus eller De omnibus dubitandum est« and the polemic against speculation in the »Efterskrift« (1846) satirise: the Climacus pseudonym is aimed at a Martensenian target. When the »Christelige Dogmatik« finally appeared in 1849, Nielsen's »undersøgende Anmeldelse« of it (the »johannesclimacos« entry below) opened the faith/knowledge controversy that runs through this catalog from Nielsen to Brøchner to Høffding; Martensen answered once, in the »Dogmatiske Oplysninger« (1850), and thereafter left the defence to others (whence Nielsen's »scharling-apologie« pamphlet). And it was Martensen who triggered the last act of Kierkegaard's authorship: his February 1854 memorial sermon placed Mynster as »et tjenende Led« in »den hellige Kjæde af Sandhedsvidner« — compressed by Kierkegaard into the »Sandhedsvidne« charge of his Fædrelandet attack (December 1854) and the »Øieblikket« campaign of 1855. Only the four controversy documents are catalogued below; the larger corpus — »Mester Eckart« (1840), »Grundrids til Moralphilosophiens System« (1841), »Den christelige Daab« (1843), »Den christelige Ethik« (1871–78), the memoirs »Af mit Levnet« (1882–83) — is left for later.

Modern editions

Secondary literature

Rasmus Nielsen (1809–1884)

Professor of philosophy at Copenhagen 1841–1884. Developed the central position of the mid-century debate: that faith and knowledge spring from absolutely heterogeneous principles. Target of both Brøchner's philosophical critique and Brandes's cultural polemic.

Secondary literature

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)

The essential upstream figure for the entire Nielsen–Brøchner–Høffding debate. This collection includes only passages most directly relevant to that debate; complete texts are available through the Royal Danish Library and in the Princeton University Press Kierkegaard's Writings series.

Modern editions

Secondary literature

Ludvig August Colding (1815–1888)

Engineer and physicist, born in Holbæk; one of the independent discoverers of the conservation of energy, alongside Mayer and Joule. Ørsted, a family friend, arranged his apprenticeship, sent him to the Polytekniske Læreanstalt (graduated 1841), employed him on experiments in 1839, and sponsored his later research through Videnskabernes Selskab. In 1843 he laid his theses on the imperishability of the "forces of nature" before the Academy; the friction experiments and the general statement followed in the Academy's Skrifter in 1850–51. His working life was spent as a Copenhagen civil engineer (inspector of roads and bridges from 1845, city engineer from 1857). Kragh (2009, p. 6) documents a religious motive: the forces of nature must be related to the spiritual in nature. He belongs in this catalog for his place in the Danish philosophical reception of the conservation principle: Rasmus Nielsen quotes the 1851 paper in a note on cause and force (»Philosophisk Propædeutik«, 1862, p. 166, quoting pp. 169–170), and Høffding names Mayer, Colding and Joule in his treatment of causality (»Den menneskelige Tanke«, 1910, pp. 213–214). C. Christiansen's »Lærebog i Fysik« (1892–94) gave Colding more space than Mayer (Kragh 2009, p. 21). English: Per F. Dahl (ed. and trans.), »Ludvig Colding and the Conservation of Energy Principle: Experimental and Philosophical Contributions« (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1972), seven papers, six newly translated. Further works not listed below include "Undersøgelse over Vanddampene og deres bevægende Kraft i Dampmaskinen" (Skrifter, 1852).

Modern editions

Secondary literature

Magdalene Thoresen (1819–1903)

Magdalene Thoresen, born Kragh in Fredericia, the daughter of a ship's carpenter, trained as a teacher in Copenhagen and in 1842 went to Norway as governess to the children of the provost Hans Conrad Thoresen, whom she married the following year. Their home in Bergen was a meeting place for the city's literary life; Bjørnson was a friend, and Ibsen married her stepdaughter Suzannah. Widowed, she returned to Copenhagen in the early 1860s, where, according to Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, Rasmus Nielsen drew her particularly, and she lived for some years in Christiania later in the decade. Her literary reputation rests on the Norwegian travel and folk-life sketches of the 1870s and 1880s. She belongs in this catalog chiefly as a correspondent. Her letters to the young Georg Brandes (1865–99) take up the faith-and-knowledge controversy of 1866–67 from the other side: writing from Christiania on 29 January 1867, she tells him she wishes a Christian philosophy well and finds his charges against Rasmus Nielsen and Sophus Heegaard in part absurd, in part unclear. Nielsen was himself among her correspondents. Jorunn Hareide has edited the Brandes exchange (2002) and the letters as a whole (2009).

Modern editions

Secondary literature

Hans Brøchner (1820–1875)

Professor of philosophy at Copenhagen 1857–1875. Post-Hegelian, moved toward a naturalistic humanism under the influence of Feuerbach and Strauss. With Rasmus Nielsen he is one of the two men who carried Kierkegaard into the Danish university in the decade after 1855: the authorship reached the next generation largely as these two professors taught and disputed it — Nielsen annexing it to his dualism of faith and knowledge, Brøchner reading it as a psychological and ethical achievement whose theology he rejected. He was also its first serious expositor. »Om Søren Kierkegaards Virksomhed som religieus Forfatter« appeared in Fædrelandet three weeks after the death, and the »Erindringer« of 1871–72 remain a primary source for the man. The exchange with Nielsen in 1868 (»Problemet om Tro og Viden« and the »Svar«) is accordingly a quarrel between two custodians of the same inheritance, not an attack from outside it. What he transmitted he transmitted mainly by teaching: Brandes and Høffding both sat in his lecture room, and Høffding credited Brøchner's lectures as the direct cause of his own conversion away from Nielsen's position.

Secondary literature

Mathilde Fibiger (1830–1872)

Born in Copenhagen, the daughter of an army officer, Mathilde Fibiger was teaching on an estate near Sakskøbing, not yet twenty, when she wrote the twelve letters that Heiberg brought out, under the pseudonym he suggested and with his preface, as »Clara Raphael« (1850, title page 1851). The letters demand for women an emancipation of the spirit rather than of material circumstance, on idealist ground that owes much to Poul Martin Møller. The book set off the Clara Raphael feud of 1851, a public debate on the position of women conducted in eleven pamphlets and more than twenty-five newspaper and journal articles, with Goldschmidt among the opponents and Grundtvig, Pauline Worm and Athalia Schwartz among those who took her side. Her own reply, »Et Besøg« (1851), retreats from the ideal of renunciation the first book had drawn. She wrote »En Skizze efter det virkelige Liv« (1853) and »Minona« (1854), and from 1863 until her death worked as a telegraphist in the Danish state telegraph service.

Secondary literature

Sophus Heegaard (1835–1884)

Poul Sophus Vilhelm Heegaard took his theology degree in 1858 and the doctorate in philosophy in 1860, with a dissertation on Herbart, and lectured as a Privatdozent from that year. He began as a disciple of Rasmus Nielsen: his »Indledning til den rationelle Ethik« (1866) works within Nielsen's position, and Brandes reviewed it as a book with no standpoint of its own. In the summer of 1866 a short notice in Berlingske Tidende, saying that further study might oblige him to change direction, offended Nielsen, and an exchange followed. Martensen, who thought it well that Heegaard be at a distance from Nielsen for a time, arranged support for a study journey through France, Italy and Germany (1866–67), and on his return Heegaard published »Professor R. Nielsens Lære om Tro og Viden« (1867), a critique of the doctrine from within, by its former adherent. He became extraordinary docent in 1870 and, on Brøchner's death in 1875, professor — the chair Kristian Kroman later took over. Dansk Biografisk Leksikon notes the influence of F. A. Lange on his later thought. He is in this collection as the disciple who turned Nielsen's doctrine against itself in 1867, a year before Brøchner's »Problemet om Tro og Viden«.

Georg Brandes (1842–1927)

Critic and intellectual, later principal organizer of the Modern Breakthrough. As a young philosophy student under Sibbern and Nielsen, he wrote his first major work as a direct attack on Nielsen's dualism.

Secondary literature

Harald Høffding (1843–1931)

Nielsen's student and eventual successor as the dominant figure in Danish philosophy. His intellectual development is the key to the whole debate: in 1866 he explicitly defended Nielsen's position, then within a year — under Brøchner's influence — changed his mind completely, spending the next three decades working out what that conversion implied.

Kirstine Frederiksen (1845–1903)

Elisabeth Kirstine Frederiksen was born at Fuglsang on Lolland and came to formal education at thirty-three, after her family's fortune collapsed. She qualified in 1878 as Denmark's first woman stenographer, took her teaching certificate at N. Zahle's school in 1879, and taught in the Copenhagen schools until 1895. At the university, open to women since 1875, she studied philosophy under Høffding, whom she valued as a humanistically minded ethicist, and in 1891 the university awarded her its gold medal for a treatise on the general laws of education that can be derived from the new psychology and ethics. The treatise was never published. Her books carry the program into practice: education should begin from the child's own sensory world, and childhood is a stage of life with its own validity. She chaired Dansk Kvindesamfund from 1887 to 1894 and wrote on the Danish women's movement for English and German readers. She belongs in this catalog as Høffding's student, whose prize treatise brought the psychology and ethics he taught to bear on education.

Kristian Kroman (1846–1925)

Professor of philosophy at Copenhagen 1884–1922, in the chair he took over from Sophus Heegaard, and one of the three professors who between them ran the filosofikum for a generation — Høffding and Claudius Wilkens were the other two. He came to philosophy sideways: a schoolteacher's training at Jonstrup in 1865, then artium read on his own in 1869, and a turn to philosophy that Dansk Biografisk Leksikon credits to Kierkegaard's writings and to personal acquaintance with Hans Brøchner. His specialism was what we would call philosophy of science. »Vor Naturerkjendelse« (1883), which took the Academy's gold medal and was translated into German the same year, divides the sciences into formal and real, and grounds the certainty of the formal ones in a claim about what we can picture: »Al Tankenødvendighed beror til syvende og sidst paa Anskuelsesnødvendighed«. That premise is what put him at odds with the mathematics of his century — DBL names it as the reason for his polemical stance toward both the non-Euclidean geometries and Einstein's relativity theory. He is in this collection for the second of those quarrels. His 1915 attack on special relativity in Fysisk Tidsskrift set off the only sustained critical discussion the theory received in Denmark, and Høffding answered him by name in »Relation som Kategori« (1921), which we carry in both Danish and English. He also taught Bohr filosofikum. Kroman is otherwise best remembered outside philosophy altogether, as a school reformer and as the author of the gymnastics handbook that put a modified Swedish system into Danish schools.

Secondary literature

Niels Bohr (1885–1962)

Niels Henrik David Bohr — physicist, and the figure toward whom this whole collection points. His 1913 quantum model of the atom and the principle of complementarity (Como, 1927) reshaped physics; the 1922 Nobel Prize recognized the former. But Bohr was also a philosopher of knowledge in the Danish tradition gathered here: raised in the circle around Harald Høffding — his father's friend and his own philosophical mentor — and a lifelong reader of Poul Martin Møller's »En dansk Students Eventyr«, whose licentiate, dizzy with the self that thinks about itself, Bohr loved to quote. From quantum theory he drew what he called an "epistemological lesson": that the conditions of observation enter irreducibly into what is observed, so that subject and object cannot be cleanly separated — the theme this catalog traces back through Høffding, Sibbern, Treschow and beyond. The collection's capstone is an edition of his philosophical writings in eight volumes — the four Danish »Filosofiske Skrifter« and the four English »Philosophical Writings« — listed separately below, since for the supplementary volume the Danish and English are independent selections rather than translations of one another. Its distinguishing feature is dual marginal pagination: each essay carries the page numbers of its original printing in a journal, congress volume or Festschrift alongside those of the collected volume scholars usually cite, so a passage can be located either way. Every piece links to its first printing, by DOI where one exists.

Secondary literature