Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a great Danish thinker, whose impact on philosophy, theology and aesthetics was highly inspirational and challenging for future generations. As an original and radical thinker, he was mainly unappreciated in his life, but decades after his death his influence started to grow all over Europe. The “legacy” of his thinking is visible in modern Existentialism, in the Dialectical Theology and in post-modern philosophy of arts.
The “Socrates of Copenhagen” was a very important source for such different but very important European thinkers and writers, as Martin Heidegger, Lev Shestov, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre, Rainer Maria Rilke or Franz Kafka.
(The influence of Kierkegaard was
crucial for such different Hungarian thinkers and writers, as György
Lukács, Béla Hamvas and János Pilinszky. The situation
is much the same in the other countries of Central Europe.)