I am very pleased to report that Løgstrup has been chosen as their philosopher of the month by Oxford University Press! This is a good sign of the growing interest in his work. See the details here, including links to the various translations and publications being produced by OUP. There is also a blog associated with this page.
I am very pleased to announce that Oxford University Press have recently published translations of The Ethical Demand, Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s Analysis of Existence and its Relation to Proclamation, and Ethical Concepts and Problems. This is in a series of publications of translations of Løgstrup’s work, being co-edited by myself and Bjørn Rabjerg. You can find further details here.
A new translation of Løgstrup’s ‘Humanism and Christianity’ article has been published in the Journal for the History of Modern Theology, together with a paper on Løgstrup’s article by myself and Bjørn Rabjerg. See details here
The ABC Religion & Ethics website has recently posted a translation of Løgstrup’s ‘Humanism and Christianity’ article (1950) by Kees van Kooten Niekerk, Bjørn Rabjerg, and myself, together with an introduction to the article by Bjørn and I. It is an important article with interesting relations to Løgstrup’s later discussions in The Ethical Demand. See here for the link.
I have added a new item to the ‘resources’ page, which is a translation of Bjørn Rabjerg’s afterword to the Klim edition of Løgstrup’s Etiske Begreber og Problemer (a book which was first published in 1971). It is a very helpful and insightful piece on this important text from Løgstrup’s later period – see here.
Back from three weeks teaching Løgstrup at Tsinghua University in China, with Bjørn Rabjerg. It was a great experience.
Bjørn and I also got to work on our new translation of The Ethical Demand. The photo is us working on the translation in the wonderful gardens of the Summer Palace in Beijing.
I have posted a translation of Løgstrup’s paper ‘Phenomenology and Psychology’ (jointly translated with Hans Fink). It provides an interesting discussion of the differences Løgstrup sees between psychology and phenomenology as ways of viewing the world, and the kinds of insights they can offer. It also sheds light on his description of his own method as phenomenological in The Ethical Demand and elsewhere, and what he intended this to mean.
See the resources page to download the paper: here
I have added a new paper to the resources page: a translation of an excellent article by Kees van Kooten Niekerk on Løgstrup’s ‘road’ to The Ethical Demand, which traces his development from his early writings onwards, and brings out various crucial influences on his ideas, such as Gogarten and Bultmann. It is a very enlightening piece, and I hope others will find it helpful now that it is available in English.
Thanks to a tip-off from Brian Tee, I have come across this brief review by Deleuze of Løgstrup’s 1950 lectures on Kierkegaard and Heidegger (my translation). The review comes from fairly early in Deleuze’s career, and is one of several he contributed to the journal, so the fact he wrote it doesn’t suggest he engaged with Løgstrup particularly closely – but it is still interesting to see what he made of Løgstrup’s lectures, and he provides a pretty accurate summary of their main themes.
Gilles Deleuze, review of K. E. Løgstrup, Kierkegaards und Heideggers Existenzanalyse und ihr Verhältnis zur Verkündigung (Erich Blaschker Verlag, 128 pages)
in Revue philosophique de France et de l’étranger, 143 (1953), pp. 108-109
The author has published the lectures that were delivered in Berlin in 1950. The first five develop the ideas of Kierkegaard and Heidegger respectively, while indicating the differences between the two philosophers. The two philosophers both speak about life in the crowd, of life ‘within the crowd’. But for Kierkegaard, this life in the crowd is identical with metaphysical speculation: the latter dissolves the poles of the Good and the Bad into the necessary; the former, into the conventional. There is another difference [between the two philosophers]: for Heidegger, the human being puts his own existence into question in anxiety and in death, the self is recalled to being from out of the crowd in order to live face to face with its own death; but according to Kierkegaard, the human being puts his own existence into question in grasping that it is not simple cognition that will raise him up. Both recognize that there is a negativity at the basis of the becoming of existence; but, for Heidegger, it appears because individual existence is powerless in the face of anxiety and death, while for Kierkegaard it is because the human being lives outside the infinite and eternal, which, alone, constitutes me as an I, as spirit. At the end of this analysis, Løgstrup takes up his own position. The essential objection which he makes to Kierkegaard, and in which he sees the principal difficulty that is raised by a relation between philosophy and revelation, is that the infinite demand is without relation itself to the moral or juridical demand that its role is to ground.
Løgstrup's Ethical Demand 