Summary

Kierkegaard’s Johannes de Silentio opens the text by comparing the world of philosophical thought and ideas to a business arena where everything is up for sale at a bargain price. Every popular speculative personality and each philosophical individual appears to have taken the “preliminary movement” of doubting everything and, in turn, seeking some incontrovertible foundation (5). Yet, the author worries that the disingenuous application of this fashionable method of skepticism has led certain individuals to forget or forgo questions regarding how one is to act in applying this method.

De Silentio cites Rene Descartes, the founder of modern philosophical skepticism, and suggests that even Descartes carved out a place in his thought for God, submitting the faculty of reason to the final arbiter of divine authority, refusing to elevate his method to the status of universal applicability. But today, all this is taken for...