Where does half a year go?... Following the excellent 6th International Kierkegaard Conference at St Olaf (on the topic 'Why Kierkegaard Still Matters') we headed over to the UK, where I've now taken up my fellowship at the University of Hertfordshire. (I also popped back over to Denmark briefly for the 'Being and Becoming a Self' conference at SKC and recently gave a paper at the University of Essex's seminar series).

Check out Ed Mooney's review of Kierkegaard's Mirrors in the Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter 56 (November 2010); I understand there will also be a review in British Journal for the History of Philosophy early in the New Year.

A few papers are now out or shortly about to appear:

- "Fearful Asymmetry: Kierkegaard's Search for the Direction of Time" is available online early at Continental Philosophy Review

-  "Naked Subjectivity: Minimal vs. Narrative Selves in Kierkegaard" appeared in Inquiry 53:4 (August 2010) pp.356-82 

- "Uniting the Perspectival Subject: Two Approaches" is online early at Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 

- Doctor Who and Philosophy (which includes a chapter from me on regeneration and personal identity) will be released in December; you can pre-order it on Amazon.

In December 2005, a day or two after the "Kierkegaard and Asia" conference, Adam Buben and I hatched a plan over a plate of pork dumplings in Melbourne's Chinatown precinct: to edit a truly comprehensive volume on Kierkegaard and Death. Nearly five years, three continents, one conference on the topic and 15 chapters later, we are very pleased to announce that Indiana University Press will be publishing Kierkegaard and Death in the northern autumn of 2011.

Kierkegaard and Death explores a range of topics such as dying-to-the-world, despair and living death, theophany, narrativity, death and the meaningfulness of life, remembering the dead and the afterlife, as well as explorations of Kierkegaard's account of death in the works of Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida. The book features papers by (in alphabetical order) Jeremy Allen, Adam Buben, George Connell, John J. Davenport, Ian Duckles, Charles Guignon, Laura Llevadot, Gordon D. Marino, Tamara Monet Marks, Edward F. Mooney, Paul Muench, David D. Possen, Simon Podmore, Patrick Stokes and Marius Timann Mjaaland.

More details as they become available.

I'm pleased to say that three papers of mine have just been accepted in the last couple of months:

• "What's Missing in Episodic Selfhood? A Kierkegaardian Response to Galen Strawson" will appear in the next couple of months in Journal of Consciousness Studies.
• "Uniting the Perspectival Subject: Two Approaches" will has been accepted for Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
• "Naked Subjectivity: Minimal vs. Narrative Selves in Kierkegaard" has been accepted for Inquiry.

These represent some of the core results of my research project at Copenhagen; the first two papers are philosophical applications of Kierkegaard's concept of "contemporaneity," while the third explores whether an analogue of the modern distinction between the minimal (or core) self and the narrative (or autobiographical) self can be found in SK's work.

(By the way, my paper on contemporaneity which was accepted over two years ago for British Journal for the History of Philosophy will now appear there in April - so the timing actually works out pretty well!)

Like everyone associated with the Philosophy Department at Melbourne, I was deeply saddened to hear that Barry Taylor passed away last week. The first Philosophy lecture I ever had was Barry's Descartes course in 1996, and Barry summed up exactly what we all thought a philosophy lecturer should look like: an affable, bearded gent in a flat cap and braces, who used words like "chap" without a hint of self-consciousness. We all instantly thought he was wonderful.

He also had a ludicrously large laser pointer named "Roger." Like everything with Barry, Roger had an interesting story to it: it (he?) had once belonged to BHP and was apparently the very first laser pointer in Australia. Roger was hilariously big - an AV technician had once offered Barry a laser pointer to use, which Barry declined and proudly produced Roger. The bemused tech could only reply "Oh I see. Did you build it yourself?"

Barry was an outstanding teacher. He walked us through texts with care, precision and remarkable clarity. He had the gift of presenting an argument that had been picked over for hundreds of years with a sense of immediacy, as if it was being thought of for the very first time today. A few years later, in an Honours class, he even managed to make difficult material like Tarski and Davidson accessible, if never quite easy.

Barry was a fixture of the Department for over thirty years until his retirement in 2007 (and Head for much of my time there), but having also been a student at Melbourne his connection with the place went back much further. He was full of unforgettable anecdotes about the life of the Department across the decades - like the three-hour seminar with "Cammo" Jackson which was punctuated towards the end by a workman emerging from the cupboard! (Turns out this cupboard contained the only access door to the Old Arts clock tower - he'd been working on the clock. Jackson said nothing and just kept lecturing). During a period where Universities were becoming more business-like, and losing much of their institutional memory in the process, people like Barry kept alive a past that every year fades a little more from view.

Barry was a delightful, warm and very genuine person, an excellent philosopher, a wise and wry commentator on the life of the University and a wonderful old-style raconteur - a species that's all too rare nowadays. In that last regard in particular, I fear we'll never see his like again. I'm quite sure we won't see his equal.

Kierkegaard's Mirrors: Interest, Self, and Moral Vision was released on 18th November in the UK and is now available through the Palgrave MacMillan website; it'll be released on Amazon.com on the 22nd December.

So, what's it all about?

Well, in one word, interest. Kierkegaard often uses interesse in ways that seem to give it a distinct philosophical import, and yet Kierkegaard scholars have had little to say about it. As I argue, though, terms like "interest" and "concern" (bekymring) pick out something crucial in Kierkegaard's moral psychology. These aren't simply dispositional states or moods, but something more fundamental: a form of non-thematised reflexivity built into our thinking, apprehending and willing. It picks out a way of seeing our own moral involvement in the world, of seeing it as claiming us personally and directly, without thinking overtly about ourselves.

For Kierkegaard, this is both a structural feature of being conscious - hence Johannes Climacus' claim that consciousness is "interestedness" - and a central feature of successful moral cognition. On the structural level, this connects SK with later phenomenologists (who all, in one form or another, acknowledge some sort of non-thetic reflexivity in consciousness), but with the crucial difference that for Kierkegaard the attainment of interesse is a normatively-enjoined task, not a given fact of experience.

On the level of moral psychology, this plays out in the ways in which we can fail to genuinely identify with the selves we envision in our imagined possibilities. Successful moral imagination doesn't just involve positing possibilities for action, but genuinely seeing ourselves in those possibilities - and not just cognitively. One of Kierkegaard's greatest virtues as a moral psychologist is his sensitivity to the subtle and multifarious ways in which we evade responsibility, and one of these is acknowledging our possibilities for future action on a cognitive level but without a phenomenal sense that these possibilities pertains to us. Our apprehension of our mortality is a classic example: we all acknowledge that we'll die someday, but, as Tolstoy evokes so memorably in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, there is an enormous gulf between a merely intellectual apprehension that I will die someday and a subjective appropriation of the thought that I will die - yet in both cases the conceptual content of the thought ("I will die") is the same.

A key trope here is self-recognition, a quasi-metaphor that Kierkegaard returns to several times. I discuss several instances of this trope at some length - such as the joke about the hapless drunken peasant in The Sickness Unto Death, and David's failure to see himself in the parable told by Nathan as discussed in For Self-Examination and elsewhere - to illustrate the teleological character of Kierkegaardian moral psychology. Nowhere is the importance of this self-recognition clearer than in Kierkegaard's frequent use of mirrors as metaphors for a model of moral vision. Mirrors are a powerful analogy because they involve a self-referential (and more often than not immediately evaluative) exercise of vision and self-recognition. They present a model of what our moral attunement to the world should be: a (perhaps ultimately unachieveable) state in which vision, evaluation and volition are united into a single act of apprehension.

It also helps us understand how we can see others as moral exemplars or as loci of moral duty, and yet at the same time see them as distinctive individual others - another key feature of Kierkegaardian moral psychology. Finally, it helps explain how certain forms of scholarship - which by their nature seem to absorb scholars in abstract subjects that in no way connect with their concrete ethical lives - can nonetheless be ethically legitimate forms of pursuit even in Kierkegaard's rather strident, irreducibly first-personal sense of the ethical.

How? Well you'll just have to get your hands on a copy of the book to find out :) In the meantime you can download a sample chapter here.