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Hello, in 1840 a young Danish girl called Regine Olson got engaged to her sweetheart,

a difficult and brilliant young man called Soren Kirkegaard.

The two were much in love, but soon KirGard began to have doubts. He worried that he couldn't love Regine and stay true to himself and his philosophy.

It was a dilemma and Kirca-Gard broke off the engagement, a decision from which neither he nor his

fainse, fully recovered. This unhappy episode has become emblematic of the life and

thought of Sore and Kirkeagard, a philosopher who confronted the painful choices in life in the light of his philosophy

and endured dark times perhaps as a consequence.

Yet Kikagard is much more than the gloomy Lutheran dane of reputation. A thinker of wit and

elegance, his ability to live with paradox, his admiration for both Socrates and

Christ, his hatred of Hegel, and his desire to think about individuals as free, have given him great purchase in the modern world and is known as the father of existentialism.

With me to discuss Soren Kircagard, a John Lippett, professor of ethics and philosophy of religion at the University of Hertfordshire,

Cla Carlisle, lecturer in philosophy at the University of Liverpool, and Jonathan Ray visiting professor

at Rompan University and at the Royal College of Art.

Jonathan Wright, as a young man at the University of Copenhagen,

Kircagard was a devote of Socrates.

What did he admire about Socrates?

He was a student, I think, for about 10 years in the 1830s. about as a huge narrative that begins really with Socrates. Socrates as the father of

philosophy. Socrates is the first person who tried to use logical argument as a

route to truth. And then the idea was that once that had been started in fifth century

BC Athens it was carried forward by Plato and Aristotle and it grew into a great

...