© 2025. All rights reserved.
Site created with
Hakyll.
Modified theme
lanyon-hakyll
based on
Lanyon.
© 2025. All rights reserved.
Site created with
Hakyll.
Modified theme
lanyon-hakyll
based on
Lanyon.
Transcriptions and English translations of Danish philosophical works, primarily from the nineteenth century. All source texts are in the public domain; scans are drawn from the Royal Danish Library (Det Kongelige Bibliotek). LaTeX sources are on GitHub.
Frederik Christian Sibbern, professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen 1813–1870 — one of the longest academic tenures in Danish history. Close friend and intellectual companion of Poul Martin Møller; Kierkegaard attended his lectures. A transitional figure who absorbed German Idealism (especially Schelling) while resisting the Hegelian campaign led by J.L. Heiberg in the 1830s, and who in his criticism of Hegel anticipated several of Kierkegaard’s central arguments. His critique of Hegel is rooted in a concern for the concrete existing individual and a suspicion that speculative systematic philosophy dissolves precisely the personal and existential dimensions of human life that philosophy ought to illuminate.
The most exhaustive critical analysis of Hegel’s philosophy to appear in the Danish language, and the text that most directly connects the pre-Kierkegaard generation to the post-Kierkegaard faith/knowledge debate. It began as a review of the first volume of Heiberg’s philosophical journal Perseus (1837), published in eight installments in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur; Sibbern collected the first four installments as an independent monograph in 1838. The central argument follows Møller in holding that Hegel’s systematic philosophy leads to a form of nihilism by absorbing the concrete individual into the abstract movement of the concept. In this critique Sibbern anticipates several of Kierkegaard’s arguments, and the text forms part of the intellectual context in which Nielsen’s later attempt to systematize Kierkegaard must be read: the uensartede størrelser thesis is in part a response to the same Hegelian challenge Sibbern addressed. English translation: Sibbern’s Remarks and Investigations Primarily Concerning Hegel’s Philosophy, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2018 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 7).
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work | to do |
Epistemological work; to be identified and described.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work | to do |
Sibbern’s early major work on the spiritual nature of the human being, influenced by Schelling. Establishes the philosophical anthropology underlying his later epistemological and critical work.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work | to do |
Poet, philosopher, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen from 1831 until his death. The most important philosophical figure in the generation immediately preceding Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard’s beloved teacher — The Concept of Anxiety (1844) is dedicated to his memory. Møller’s long treatise on proofs of immortality (1837) is the direct occasion for Kierkegaard’s discussion of immortality in the Postscript (already represented in this collection), where Climacus contrasts the objective-scholarly approach of Møller’s treatise with the existential claim that immortality is essentially a question of inwardness.
Published in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur 17 (1837), pp. 1–72 and 422–453. A systematic survey and critical examination of the philosophical arguments for human immortality, engaging the contemporary literature. The paper Kierkegaard explicitly invokes in the Postscript passage transcribed here: Climacus cites Møller as the exemplary case of someone who treated immortality as a learned question — a scholarly object — and uses that approach as the foil for his own subjective turn. Text after: Skrifter i Udvalg, ed. Hans Brix et al., Copenhagen, 1930, pp. 168–253 (seven sections). Translated into English by Jon Stewart in Poul Martin Møller and the Emergence of Danish Golden Age Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2022).
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete essay (pp. 168–253) | transcription · scan · translation (Jon Stewart, 2022) | in progress |
Møller’s prose novella, the most celebrated Danish prose fiction of the pre-Kierkegaard period and the work most directly cited by Niels Bohr in his philosophical self-accounts. The central character of the Licentiate — a man of immense learning and total paralysis of will, unable to act because he is perpetually reflecting on his own thinking — gave Bohr his most vivid illustration of the epistemological limits of self-description. Bohr invoked the Licentiate’s predicament repeatedly from the Como lecture (1927) onward: Bohr invoked the Licentiate’s predicament repeatedly from the Como lecture (1927) onward: »jeg tænker over, at jeg tænker derover, og deler mig selv i en uendelig tilbageskridende Rad af Jeg’er, der betragte hinanden« — “I think about the fact that I think about it, and divide myself into an infinitely regressing series of selves that observe one another.” The Licentiate’s insight that the observing self cannot be included in its own description without generating infinite regress was for Bohr the literary anticipation of complementarity: the observer and the observed cannot appear simultaneously in a single unambiguous account. The second philosophical episode — the Licentiate’s account of why he could never leave the inn (a chain of trivial obstacles each providing sufficient reason for postponement, together paralyzing action) — anticipates the asymmetry between deliberation and decision that runs through the entire tradition: Kierkegaard’s analysis of the leap as constitutively underdetermined by reasons, Høffding’s treatment of Beslutning (decision) as a qualitative break that deliberation (Overvejelse) can approach but never compel, and Bohr’s observation that the moment of measurement in quantum mechanics stands in the same relation to the superposition that precedes it. Text after: Efterladte Skrifter, bd. 3, red. F.C. Olsen, København: C.A. Reitzel, 1843. Full text available at Wikisource.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Licentiaten (the Licentiate episode) | transcription · translation | complete |
| Remainder of novella | Wikisource | to do |
Møller’s collection of aphorisms and short philosophical reflections, published posthumously in Efterladte Skrifter, bd. 3, ed. F.C. Olsen (C.A. Reitzel, 1843). Thematically heterogeneous but philosophically concentrated — the genre of the aphorism was for Møller a natural form: “Strøtanker, som Frugter af Øieblikkets klarere Anskuelse, ere poetiske ved deres aphoristiske Form, ikke videnskabelige. De ere Tænkningens Culminationspunkter.” Several clusters are directly relevant to the project. The Problemet Udødelighed section contains the compressed epistemological thesis “Viljen skal ei bestemme, hvad der er sandt” and an extended comic anecdote about a bookkeeper who perpetually postpones reading a treatise on immortality — a structural parallel to the Licentiate episode, applied now to the very problem of the immortality essay. The Eksistentialisme section contains observations about subjective truth, the limits of speculative philosophy, and the connection between philosophical depth and taciturnity (“den dybe Indsigt gjør ordknap”). The Dybdepsykologi section bears on the self-reflection problem dramatized in the Licentiate. Source: Efterladte Skrifter, bd. 3 (1843); digital text available (Lindhardt og Ringhof, 2018; thematic organization by modern editor). Hard-copy sources: Efterladte Skrifter af Poul Møller, 1855; Filosofiske Essays og Strøtanker, udvalg ved Børge Madsen.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Problemet »Udødelighed« | to do | |
| Eksistentialisme | to do | |
| Dybdepsykologi | to do |
The essential upstream figure for the entire Nielsen–Brøchner–Høffding debate. Nielsen systematized Kierkegaard’s insistence on the incommensurability of faith and knowledge; Brøchner and Høffding spent careers arguing against it. Kierkegaard himself rejected Nielsen’s systematization as a betrayal of the existential point.
Kierkegaard’s complete published and unpublished writings have been critically edited and published in full. Danish texts are available through the Royal Danish Library at kb.dk. Standard scholarly English translations are published by Princeton University Press as the Kierkegaard’s Writings series (26 vols., ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong). This collection therefore includes only the specific passages most directly relevant to the Nielsen–Brøchner–Høffding debate.
The central passage in which Climacus argues that immortality is essentially not a learned question but a question of inwardness. Includes the explicit reference to Poul Martin Møller and his treatise on proofs of immortality, and the key formulation: ``Do I become immortal, or am I immmortal?’’ The argument that immortality cannot be answered objectively because it cannot be put objectively is the direct predecessor of the subjective turn Kierkegaard’s successors had to come to terms with. Translated by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| pp. 153–158 | translation | complete |
Professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen 1841–1884. Began as a Hegelian, came under Kierkegaard’s influence in the 1840s, and developed the central position of the mid-century debate: that faith and knowledge spring from “absolutely heterogeneous principles” and can neither contradict nor support each other. The target of both Brøchner’s philosophical critique and Brandes’s cultural polemic.
Nielsen’s first sustained public engagement with the Postscript — Kierkegaard’s most fully developed epistemological text, published three years earlier under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. The pairing with Martensen’s Christian Dogmatics is pointed: where Martensen represented the speculative-theological tradition that sought to integrate faith and philosophical reason, Climacus had systematically dismantled every such synthesis. Nielsen reads the two together as representing opposed epistemological programmes, and the review marks the moment where he first commits to the Kierkegaardian side. It is the textual origin of the tro og viden er uensartede størrelser thesis — the claim that faith and knowledge are absolutely heterogeneous magnitudes — before Nielsen formalized it into a systematic position.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work | to do |
University program treating the concept of nature in theology, with special reference to Malebranche’s De la recherche de la vérité. Belongs to Nielsen’s transitional period between the Kierkegaardian religious writings (Evangelietroen og Theologien, 1850; Om Skjæbne og Forsyn, 1853) and the turn toward the natural sciences. The engagement with Malebranche’s occasionalism — in which God mediates all causal relations between mind and body — anticipates the question that would dominate Nielsen’s later work: how to conceive the relation between natural causation and divine action.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work | transcription · translation | skeleton |
Nielsen’s dramatic turn toward the natural sciences in the mid-1850s, arguing that philosophy must engage seriously with mathematics rather than subsuming it under speculative categories. Marks the beginning of the science-engaged phase of Nielsen’s career that would later produce the Grundideernes Logik and the Darwinism essays.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Selections | to do |
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Selections | to do |
Nielsen’s central systematic work and the text that triggered the entire controversy. Formalizes the Kierkegaardian insight into the Objektiveringslov (law of objectification): scientific reason essentially objectifies its subject matter, while faith essentially does not, making the two constitutively incommensurable.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Selections (vol. I, §§ on the Objektiveringslov) | KB scan | to do |
Nielsen’s most direct contribution to the philosophy of science and the key text for understanding how he tried to build a positive epistemology, not merely a defensive dualism. The title — “On Good Will as a Power in Science” — signals the argument: scientific cognition is not purely receptive or mechanical, but involves a volitional commitment that is constitutive of the knowing relation. This imports the Kierkegaardian voluntarist epistemology — where subjective appropriation is essential to genuine knowledge — into the domain of empirical inquiry itself. The implication is that uensartede størrelser is not a claim about two isolated compartments but about two different modes of volitional engagement with reality, both of which involve the will. Published in 1867, at the height of the Brøchner–Brandes controversy, this is Nielsen’s constructive answer to the charge that his dualism left science epistemologically groundless.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work | to do |
Lecture course for the university year 1867–68. Moves from a compact subjective logic through a transitional psychology into an extended treatment of the relation between psychology and biology, including teleology.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| I. Subjectiv Logik i Omrids (pp. 1–263) | transcription | skeleton |
| II. Psychologie (pp. 264–277) | transcription | skeleton |
| III. Psychologie og Biologie (pp. 277–477) | transcription | skeleton |
Lectures delivered in Christiania (Oslo) in 1868 — Nielsen’s most direct and mature response to Brøchner and Brandes during the height of the controversy.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Selections | KB scan · transcription | skeleton |
Nielsen’s most systematic work on religion itself — the constructive counterpart to the Grundideernes Logik, developing what faith actually is and how a philosophy of religion built on heterogeneous principles is possible. He calls it an “inverted science” (omvendt Videnskab).
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction (§§ 1–2) | transcription · translation | in progress |
| §§ 3 onward | to do |
The programmatic opening essay of Nielsen’s own journal, For Ide og Virkelighed (“For Idea and Reality”), published in the first issue (1869, vol. 1, pp. 1–39). As the founding manifesto of a journal he edited until 1873, this is Nielsen’s most public and accessible statement of the mature philosophical program. The title of the journal itself encodes the central duality: Ide (idea, spirit, the subjective pole) and Virkelighed (reality, the objective world as science investigates it), whose relation is precisely what the uensartede størrelser thesis is meant to illuminate. Journal available at tidsskrift.dk.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete essay (pp. 1–39) | journal | to do |
Nielsen defends Darwin against philosophical objections, arguing that Darwinism is a matter of empirical method and that the religious concept of creation is a concept of faith, not of knowledge.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete article | transcription · translation | complete |
Nielsen’s attempt at a natural philosophy compatible with physics, arguing that a science-compatible account of nature supports rather than undermines his theism. Written the same year as “Et Synspunkt for Darwinismen.”
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Selections (689 pp. total) | KB scan | to do |
Popular lecture on the conditions for a strong will. Connects Nielsen’s metaphysics of selfhood to practical psychology: if selfhood is constituted by a principle of unity, what determines the strength of the will? Predates Høffding’s treatment of deliberation, resolve, and decision in Psykologi i Omrids (1882) by eight years.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete | to do |
Six popular lectures. The title — “Old and New Prophets” — suggests a direct engagement with the science–religion question at the close of the controversy decade, likely contrasting religious and naturalist voices.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Selections | to do |
Nielsen’s contribution to the University of Copenhagen’s 400th anniversary Festskrift (1479–1879), 77 pages. A compressed popular presentation of the three perennial problems of philosophy — the problem of knowledge, the problem of reality, and the problem of freedom — concluded by a statement of the faith/ knowledge thesis. In each case Nielsen sketches the historical dialectic (Kant, Fichte, Hegel; Comte vs. Hegel) and then arrives at his own position via the Objektiveringslov. The concluding section is the most direct popular statement of the uensartede strrelser thesis in Nielsen’s work: ``Principerne for Tro og Viden ere absolut ueensartede’’ (p. 72), followed immediately by the claim that the dualistic separation is itself the condition for reaching a reconciling unity of faith and knowledge.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work (77 pp.) | transcription | skeleton |
Nielsen’s most systematic philosophy-of-science text and the clearest statement of his mature epistemology. Organized in three Dele: (I) Viden og Videnskab (§§1–10), treating the nature of knowledge, the Objectiveringsproblemet, and the classification of sciences; (II) Fagvidenskaber (§§11–20), working through the individual sciences from logic and mathematics through biology and psychology; (III) Aandsvidenskab (§§21–26), covering history, aesthetics, ethics, and religion. The Forord stakes the central claim: the question of whether the principle of science ultimately rests on Sandsning alone or also on the uendelige Videns Idee — and the text argues for the latter, defending the objective validity of teleological categories (Anlæg og Udvikling, Midler og Formaal) against purely mechanical reduction. The final §26 restates the uensartede størrelser position: the religious life ``vedblive at danne sig af sin egen Aand, efter sine egne Forbilleder, og gaae sin Gang uafhængigt af Videnskab og videnskabelige Indsigelser.’’ Source: Google Books scan (Andover-Harvard Theological Library copy), 302 pp.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work (§§1–26, 281 pp.) | transcription | skeleton |
University festival address, 8 April 1881. Nielsen’s most direct and final statement on the science–religion relationship: revelation-faith is essentially miracle-faith, and miracles as objects of faith are constitutively inaccessible to scientific cognition.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Section I | transcription · translation | complete |
| Sections II–IV | to do |
Pages 326–328: the earliest substantive philosophical engagement with Darwin in the Danish tradition, predating Jacobsen’s Danish translation by a decade.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Darwin excerpt (pp. 326–328) | transcription · translation | complete |
Published works, in chronological order.
Unpublished manuscripts at the Royal Library, Copenhagen.
Professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen 1857–1875. A post-Hegelian who moved toward a naturalistic, humanist position under the influence of Feuerbach and Strauss. His critical engagement with Kierkegaard and Nielsen makes him a crucial third voice in the mid-century debate. Høffding credited Brøchner’s lectures as the direct cause of his own conversion away from Nielsen’s position. Biographical note.
Published anonymously under the mark “-r” in Fædrelandet, 1 December 1855, written at the request of J.G. Giødeved. The earliest surviving account of Kierkegaard’s authorship as a coherent whole: the bio notes it showed “for samtiden sjælden forståelse af sigtet med forfatterskabet” — a rare understanding for the time of the intent behind the authorship. Written just weeks after Kierkegaard’s death, it predates by nearly a decade Nielsen’s full systematization of Kierkegaard’s epistemology in the Grundideernes Logik (1864), and represents Brøchner’s first public statement of a reading of Kierkegaard that would diverge increasingly from Nielsen’s. Brøchner also published a review with the same mark in Fædrelandet (20.12.1856) of J.C.M. Ørum’s pamphlet Sandhedsvidnestriden.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete article | to do |
Brøchner’s major scholarly work on Spinoza’s philosophy, described in the bio as “en fyldig og omhyggeligt udarbejdet fremstilling” (a thorough and carefully executed account). Intended as the first of eleven projected monographs on major philosophical systems that together would constitute a comprehensive history of philosophy; only the Spinoza volume and the later Philosophiens Historie i Grundrids (1873–74) were completed. The work serves as the methodological basis for Brøchner’s “ideelrealisme”: his reading of Spinoza’s double-attribute substance (thought and extension) as a proto-synthesis of idealism and realism that anticipates the third phase of philosophical development still to come. The preface contains his first statement of the philosophy of the history of philosophy that would receive its clearest systematic formulation in Bidrag (1869). The book qualified him for the extraordinary docentship in philosophy in February 1857.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work | to do |
A historical-critical treatise on the relation between faith and knowledge, arguing against both Nielsen’s “absolutely heterogeneous” principles and Martensen’s philosophizing theology, and proposing what Brøchner calls “the religiously reconciled humane consciousness.”
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work (226 pp.) | transcription · translation · KB scan | in progress |
Brøchner’s sharp reply to Nielsen’s counter-attack, completing the full polemical exchange of 1868: Brøchner (Problemet om Tro og Viden) → Nielsen (Herr Prof. Brøchners philosophiske Kritik gjennemset) → Brøchner (Et Svar). The immediate success of the response is indicated by the second edition in the same year. Where Problemet om Tro og Viden was a measured historical and philosophical treatise, the Svar is polemical in register, pressing the three main charges — performative self-refutation, arbitrariness, and the unity-of-consciousness argument — against Nielsen’s attempted defence. The text is essential for completing the documentary record of the 1868 controversy.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work | to do |
Autobiographical account of Brandes’s first encounter with Brøchner in September 1861 and the development of their teacher–student relationship. Brandes describes Brøchner’s physical presence, his pedagogical approach, and the gradual intellectual alignment that came only after Brandes had worked through Feuerbach independently. A primary source for Brøchner’s personality and his influence on the next generation.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Excerpt (pp. 129–132) | transcription · translation | complete |
The constructive positive supplement to the 1868 critique, in which Brøchner develops his own Hegelian alternative: religion understood as “the religious in its unity with the human.”
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work | KB scan | to do |
Short pamphlet giving the clearest statement of Brøchner’s Hegelian philosophy of the history of philosophy, sketched earlier in the preface to Spinoza (1857) and here developed as the theoretical framework for the Philosophiens Historie i Grundrids (1873–74). Three main phases: (I) Greek philosophy, in which spirit stands in immediate unity with nature, existence apprehended as a besouled artwork; (II) medieval philosophy, in which increasing reflection dissolves the unity into a sharp dualism of spirit and nature; (III) modern philosophy, in which the task of overcoming dualism is addressed, either by subordinating spirit to nature (the Enlightenment) or nature to spirit (Hegelian idealism), with a third synthetic phase still to be worked out. Four laws of historical development govern the process: a period’s basic thought can assert itself long before it reaches full unfolding; the prevailing perspective of an era can unconsciously act as a limiting power on individual thought while simultaneously, by hampering it, becoming an incitement to deeper development; and two contemporary parallel lines of development can unconsciously influence each other even when they stand in apparent opposition.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work | to do |
Brøchner’s personal recollections of Kierkegaard, written in 1871–72 and published posthumously by Høffding in Det nittende Aarhundrede (1877); later in book form edited by Steen Johansen (Copenhagen, 1953). Brøchner was among the small circle who knew Kierkegaard personally, and his account — written from a philosophical standpoint formed independently of Nielsen’s systematization — gives a distinctive picture of Kierkegaard’s personality, conversational dialectic, and the intent behind his authorship. Particularly valuable as a counterweight to Nielsen’s appropriation: where Nielsen read in Kierkegaard a systematic dualist epistemology, Brøchner’s recollections emphasize the personal, anti-systematic, and ironic dimensions of Kierkegaard’s method. The text was the direct occasion for Høffding’s first major publication on Kierkegaard, who contributed a preface.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work | to do |
Critic and intellectual, later the 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. The 1866 text marks his philosophical starting point.
Brandes’s polemical critique of Nielsen’s absolute separation of faith and knowledge, written the same year as Brøchner’s treatise. Together they form the essential three-way debate of the 1860s. The KB scan is an image PDF requiring OCR before transcription.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work (76 pp.) | KB scan | to do |
Autobiographical excerpts selected for their bearing on Brandes’s two philosophy professors. The Brøchner passages (chapters 4 and 6) document the teacher–student relationship from 1861 onward: Brøchner’s physical presence and pedagogical method, the slow intellectual alignment that came only after Brandes had worked through Feuerbach independently, the professorship question that haunted the next decade, and Brøchner’s characterization as representing an “ideal-realism” bridging speculative and empiricist philosophy. The Nielsen passages (chapters 3, 4, 6, and 7) cover the full arc: Nielsen as examiner giving an invented grade to a brilliantly improvising student; Hauch’s affectionate nickname for him (“en rigtig Rugbrødsnatur”); Brandes’s first personal visit in early 1864; the polemic Brandes launched on his return from France in 1867, in which he charged Nielsen with being “ikke mindre teologisk sindet end sine Modstandere”; and a sardonic aside, from Hamburg, about Nielsen’s school always claiming privileged access to “det Centrale” in existence. Source: georgbrandes.dk (Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab).
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Selected passages | transcription · translation | in progress |
Volume 13 of Brandes’s collected works gathers in one place his principal contributions to the Tro og Viden controversy of the 1860s. The two main pieces are Striden om Tro og Viden (pp. 1–42), a collection of polemical articles from the controversy, and Dualismen i vor nyeste Filosofi (pp. 43–84) — the revised collected-works version of the 1866 monograph. Also of direct relevance: R. Nielsens Lære om Tro og Viden (p. 106) and Gensvar til Dr. Heegaard (p. 28), the latter a direct response to a Nielsen disciple. A digital copy is being located. OCR text available at Project Runeberg.
| Section | Pages | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Striden om Tro og Viden (collected articles) | 1–42 | to do |
| Dualismen i vor nyeste Filosofi | 43–84 | to do |
| Om den gode Vilje som Magt i Videnskaben | 85–92 | to do |
| Nielsen og Grundtvig | 93–97 | to do |
| R. Nielsens Lære om Tro og Viden | 106–109 | to do |
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 published his first book explicitly defending Nielsen’s position, then within a year — under the influence of Brøchner’s lectures — changed his mind completely. He spent the next three decades working out what that conversion implied, arriving at the Religionsfilosofi (1901) as the systematic outcome.
Høffding’s handwritten notes from Nielsen’s university lectures on Grundideernes Logik — the very course that precipitated his intellectual crisis and eventual break with Nielsen’s position. A unique primary source for how Nielsen presented the Objektiveringslov in the classroom, and for the moment of reception that the Erindringer account describes from the inside. Transcription and translation forthcoming.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete manuscript | coming soon |
Høffding’s first book, written at 23 as Cand. theol. A comprehensive survey of the philosophy–theology controversy, concluding explicitly in Nielsen’s favor. The essential document for tracing Høffding’s intellectual development. Only 46 pages.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work (46 pp.) | KB scan | to do |
Subjects Darwinism to epistemological scrutiny while arguing that its significance for Verdensanskuelse (worldview) is separable from its empirical confirmation.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete article | transcription · translation | complete |
Høffding’s psychology textbook, widely used across Scandinavia and translated into German (1887), English (1891), French, Russian, Polish, and Japanese. Organized around the three-fold division of consciousness into cognition, feeling, and will. Chapter VII on the psychology of will — especially the sections on deliberation (Overvejelse), resolve (Forsæt), and decision (Beslutning), and on the concentration–expansion polarity — is the psychological foundation for the complementarity idea that Bohr later transposed into physics. Available in English as Outlines of Psychology (1891).
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work (421 pp.) | transcription · translation | in progress |
Delivered as a lecture at the Studentersamfund on 2 September 1882, published in revised form in 1884, and reprinted in Mindre Arbejder (1899). The essay develops a concept of realism as the principle of natural causes — the methodological core of modern science from Kant–Laplace through Darwin — and then applies it to the science–faith question. The key move is a distinction between science (which investigates the laws and inner coherence of existence) and faith (which concerns the ethical significance and value of existence). On this analysis, genuine faith and science do not conflict, because they address different questions. Høffding distinguishes “humane or philosophical faith,” which accepts that ideal values are realized entirely through natural causes and requires no supernatural interventions, from “theological faith,” which makes theoretical claims that compete with science and is therefore permanently in tension with it. The essay contains the first appearance of Høffding’s signature epigraph — alte dubitat qui altius credit — and anticipates the faith-as-value-conservation argument central to the Religionsfilosofi (1901). In the context of the Nielsen–Brøchner debate: Høffding’s separation of science from faith reaches Nielsen’s conclusion (no conflict) by a route that guts his intent, since it requires faith to surrender all supernatural theoretical content — effectively endorsing Brandes’s charge that Nielsen’s dualism was a covert theology. The “humane faith” Høffding puts in its place is the direct heir of Brøchner’s “religiously reconciled humane consciousness,” cast in a more empiricist idiom. Available on Wikisource.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete essay | transcription · translation · Wikisource | complete |
Revisits the 1866 historical survey from the other side of Høffding’s conversion. Contains the key formula: “the riddle of the world is equally great for faith and for science.”
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete essay | transcription · translation · Wikisource | in progress |
Høffding’s philosophical study of Kierkegaard, written 25 years after Høffding decided that he could not follow Kierkegaard’s path. H had been a student of Nielsen and Brøchner – the two primarily responsible for the preservation and transmission of Kierkegaard’s intellectual legacy.
The epistemology (erkendelsesteori) chapter (IV.A) is the most directly relevant to the faith–knowledge debate: Høffding reconstructs Kierkegaard’s doctrine that subjective passion is the only mode of access to essential truth, and subjects it to sustained critique.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Chapter IV.A: Erkendelsesteori (pp. 58–70) | transcription · translation | in progress |
The systematic culmination of three decades of thought. Epigraph: Alte dubitat, qui altius credit (“he doubts more deeply who believes more deeply”). The key constructive claim is the sætningen om værdiens bestaaen — the persistence of value. Translated into English as The Philosophy of Religion (1906).
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work | transcription · translation · KB scan | in progress |
Wide-ranging epistemological essays. English version with additions published as The Problems of Philosophy (1905) with a preface by William James. German version 1903.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Selections | to do |
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete essay | transcription · translation | in progress |
Høffding’s theory of analogical reasoning, developed from Hertz’s Principles of Mechanics and Kant’s theory of symbols. Published simultaneously in English as “On Analogy and its Philosophical Importance” in Mind (1905). A key text for the Høffding–Bohr connection: Bohr’s complementarity concept draws directly on Høffding’s account of analogy as a relation between structures rather than between individual elements.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete essay | to do |
Høffding’s epistemological masterwork and the most systematic statement of his philosophy. Covers the psychology of thought, the categories (including relation, totality, and analogy), the forms of knowledge, and the problems of philosophy. Available on Project Runeberg.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Selections (epistemological chapters) | Runeberg | to do |
Six lectures delivered at the University of Helsingfors (Helsinki) in spring 1911. Høffding develops the concept of personality (Personlighed) as the central organizing principle of his philosophy — the thread that links his work in psychology, ethics, and livsanskuelse into a coherent whole. The lectures argue that personality is both a presupposition and an object of scientific inquiry, that the personality principle is constitutive for ethics (the goal of ethical life is the full realization of personality), and that no purely theoretical proof of the principle is possible — it must be lived out in practice. The sixth and final lecture connects the personality principle directly to questions of religious and philosophical livsanskuelse, making this the most compact single statement of Høffding’s mature position.
Originally published in Swedish; first made available in Danish in a 2013 translation by Mogens Blegvad (1917–2001), with commentary and an afterword by Carl Henrik Koch. Published by Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab as Scientia Danica, Series H, Humanistica, 8, vol. 6 (ISBN 978-87-7304-370-7).
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work (Danish trans., 67 pp.) | Royal Academy PDF | to do |
Høffding’s epistemological investigation of totality as a fundamental category of thought. Influenced not only philosophical and psychological research but also Alf Ross’s development of legal concepts.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work | to do |
Høffding’s epistemological investigation of relation as a fundamental category of thought, forming a companion piece to Totalitet som Kategori (1917). Published in the Royal Danish Academy’s Filosofiske Meddelelser (I, 3). Notably contains Høffding’s engagement with the theory of relativity, which he interprets through his own epistemological framework — a rare instance of his direct response to the most radical development in contemporary physics. The Einstein section (§3b, pp. 72–77) traces a direct line from Neumann and Mach’s relational critique of the law of inertia to Einstein’s relativization of simultaneity, framing the whole development as epistemologically continuous: natural science arriving independently at the insight that the knowing subject and its standpoint cannot be abstracted from any account of measurement. Høffding’s conclusion — that if Einstein is right, one need not therefore philosophize in a new way — reflects his view that philosophy had already, via Kant and his own epistemology, absorbed the core insight. Together with Totalitet som Kategori and Begrebet Analogi (1923), it forms a late trilogy of category investigations that represent Høffding’s final epistemological synthesis.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| §3b: Den nye Relativitetsteori (pp. 72–77) | transcription · translation | in progress |
| Remainder of work | to do |
Høffding’s personal copy of the work, with his handwritten marginal notes. A rare opportunity to see the author’s own second thoughts, corrections, and elaborations alongside the printed text. Transcription and translation of the marginalia forthcoming.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Marginalia | coming soon |
Article in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 30, no. 2 (April–June 1923), pp. 221–246. Written in French for a French audience (hence more space given to Kierkegaard than to Pascal). A systematic comparison in four parts: temperament, intellectual background, the Christian problem, and the paths left open. Høffding argues that both thinkers, two centuries apart, pushed Christianity to its logical extreme by insisting on the incompatibility between primitive Christianity and modern culture, and that both broke with the Church as a result. In the concluding section he identifies three possibilities for anyone who has followed Pascal and Kierkegaard to the end: (1) a literal return to primitive Christianity, (2) acknowledging that modern Christianity is a different religion, or (3) resuming the Greek project of founding moral life on nature and human experience — and clearly favours the third. He criticises both thinkers for their sharp division between “essential” and “non-essential” knowledge, arguing that scientific thought can become decisive for personal conviction. References his own 1892 monograph Kierkegaard som Filosof and the 1901 Philosophie de la religion.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete article (26 pp.) | JSTOR | to do |
Høffding’s last major philosophical contribution: a full monograph expanding the 1905 essay on analogy into a comprehensive treatment. The culmination of two decades of work on the concept that most directly shaped Bohr’s philosophical vocabulary.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete work | to do |
Høffding’s autobiography, published in his 85th year. Eight dated chapters (I. 1843–1861 through VIII. 1922–1924) cover his full intellectual life from Copenhagen schoolboy to elder statesman of European philosophy. The book is a primary source for the entire Nielsen–Brøchner–Høffding narrative.
The central section for our purposes is II. 1861–1874 (pp. 38–93), which covers Høffding’s student years at the University of Copenhagen. Here he describes his first encounter with Rasmus Nielsen’s philosophy course — heavily saturated with Kierkegaard — and the intellectual and spiritual crisis it precipitated; his subsequent encounter with Brøchner’s lectures and the gradual reorientation they produced; and the moment of decisive break with Nielsen’s position, which Høffding locates in a letter he wrote to Nielsen in 1867. The account is indispensable for understanding how Kierkegaard’s influence was transmitted, resisted, and transformed across the generation that produced the mature tro-og-viden debate.
Also relevant: IV. 1883–1894 (pp. 121–174) contains Høffding’s reflections on his 1892 Kierkegaard som Filosof and on the installation of his own philosophical position; V. 1894–1904 (pp. 175–223) covers the Religionsfilosofi (1901) and the early Bohr connection; VI. 1904–1914 (pp. 224–265) includes the period of Niels Bohr’s intensive study with Høffding.
Available on Project Runeberg (Norwegian National Library scan; OCR not yet proofread). 325 pp.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| II. 1861–1874 (pp. 38–93) | Runeberg · transcription · translation | to do |
| IV. 1883–1894 (pp. 121–174) | Runeberg | to do |
| V. 1894–1904 (pp. 175–223) | Runeberg | to do |
| VI. 1904–1914 (pp. 224–265) | Runeberg | to do |
Handwritten letters exchanged between Høffding and Niels Bohr. The correspondence spans the period of Bohr’s intellectual formation and beyond, and bears directly on the question of how Høffding’s epistemological concepts — complementarity, analogy, the limits of objectification — were received and transformed in the context of quantum mechanics. A primary source of the first importance for the Høffding–Bohr connection. Transcription and translation forthcoming.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete correspondence | coming soon |
Émile Meyerson (1859–1933), Franco-Polish philosopher of science, is best known for Identité et Réalité (1908), which argues that scientific explanation characteristically seeks to identify cause with effect, and that the irreversibility of time represents an irrational residue that science cannot fully absorb. His work intersects with Høffding’s at several points: both were centrally concerned with the epistemological significance of causality, identity, and relation in modern physics; both engaged seriously with the implications of Einstein’s relativity; and Meyerson cited Høffding in his later work. The correspondence would be a primary source for Høffding’s late engagement with French philosophy of science and for the reception of his epistemological work in the Francophone context. Location of manuscripts to be established.
| Section | Links | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete correspondence | placeholder |