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Lecture: Kierkegaard on Imitation, Imagination and Individuality

The Faculty of Humanities and the Society for Philosophical Anthropology cordially invite you to a lecture "Kierkegaard on Imitation, Imagination and Individuality" presented by Wojciech Kaftanski.

Wojciech Kaftanski (PhD) is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Husserl Archives: Centre For Phenomenology and Continental Philosophy, the Institute of Philosophy at KU Leuven, Belgium. He is currently working on the project “The Modern Man and Imitation: A Study in Selfhood and Morality.” He is a former House Foundation Fellow at the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf

College, USA, and a Visiting Fellow at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at Copenhagen University in Denmark. His work on Kierkegaard appeared in Kierkegaard Yearbook Studies, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, Heythrop Journal, and Tekstualia. For more on Wojciech’s work see: https://kuleuven.academia.edu/WojciechKaftanski

The aim of the lecture is to both investigate how the concepts of imitation, imagination and individuality interrelate in Kierkegaard’s authorship as well as to see what we can learn today with respect to Kierkegaard’s engagement of these concepts. A selection of texts from Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous and signed writings will be considered together with a number of his journal entries. The lecture has three parts. First, we will pay attention to the various guises under which the concept of imitation appears in Kierkegaard's work, such as repetition, reduplication, redoubling, and the prototype. Second, we will examine the extent to which imitation is problematic for human individuality in Kierkegaard. To that end, we will look at Kierkegaard’s engagement of imagination as a mitigating strategy with respect to the problém of human inauthenticity caused by imitation. Lastly, taking the case of human exemplarity, we will ponder the relevance of Kierkegaard’s engagement of imitation, imagination and individuality for today’s philosophical and non-philosophical dilemmas.