We have seen copies in the original wrappers before, but never in this state. This is a truly amazing survival. In uncut state, the work is a lot larger than regular copies – more than a cm taller and also significantly wider.

By many, Philosophical Fragments is considered Kierkegaard’s actual religious-philosophical main work. It is the first book written under the important pseudonym Johannes Climacus, and it is here that Kierkegaard unfolds the tension between philosophy and religion in an attempt to find a historical onset for eternal consciousness, opposing the ideological thought inherited by Plato, Aristotle and Hegel.

Through Climacus, Kierkegaard contrasts the paradoxes of Christianity with Greek and modern philosophical thinking. He begins with Greek Platonic philosophy, exploring the implications of venturing beyond the Socratic understanding of truth acquired through recollection to the Christian experience of acquiring truth through grace.

It is in Philosophical Fragments that Kierkegaard’s polemic against the philosophy of Hegel becomes most obvious, portraying clearly for the first time how the salvation of man can only be found through the paradoxical inversion of the rational values of speculative philosophy and through the “leap of faith” in the crucified Christ.

It is here that we have the very root of Existentialism.

In his preface, Kierkegaard hints at a possible “sequel [to Philosophical Fragments] in 17 pieces”; this sequel was published in 1846, namely as the 600 pages long Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (which is 83 pages long…).

Only one single presentation-copy of Philosophical Fragments is known to exist.

Himmelstrup: 62.