Lovers in Essence

Sharon Krishek is an Associate Professor in the philosophy department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Kierkegaard on Faith and Love (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Love (in Hebrew, Dvir Press, 2011), as well as numerous articles in journals and book collections. She is co-editor with Jeffrey Hanson of Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Sharon Krishek has given us an unusual defense of Kierkegaard's concept of Christian love. It is unusual insofar as it is driven by her substantial criticism of Kierkegaard's tendency in his late writings to devalue and dismiss preferential love as essentially selfish and hence as inferior to the higher universally distributed selfless neighbor love that Christianity seems to demand. As Krishek argues, this reduction of neighbor love to a Kantian-like abstract universal moral principle runs counter not only to the spirit of Christianity but also to Kierkegaard's own concept of faith, since it reduces the concrete individual to a nameless nobody in particular. Sharon Krishek's book will change your mind about Kierkegaard's Works of Love." - Ronald Hall, Stetson University, and editor-in-chief of the International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion