Books

First edition of Soren Kierkegaard's best-known work, Either/Or. Octavo. Two volumes bound in contemporary half-calf over marbled boards; bound without the half-titles. Text in Danish. Very Good rubbing and wear to bindings, neatly rebacked with old spines preserved. Former owner names to preliminary blanks and owner's rubber stamp to title pages. Contents tanned, sporadically foxed and occasionally lightly stained. A lovely set. Either/Or, Danish philosopher Søren Aabye Kierkegaard's groundbreaking first published work. Only 525 copies of this edition were published in 1843 under an editorial pseudonym ("Victor Emerita") at the author's own expense. It was mostly written during his stay in Berlin, where he took notes on Schelling's Philosophy of Revelation. It includes essays of literary and music criticism and a set of romantic-like-aphorisms, as part of his larger theme of examining the reflective and philosophical structure of faith. He is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. "As a thinker, Kierkegaard had to wait for the twentieth century to find his audience; he is now generally considered to be, however eccentric, one of the most important Christian philosophers," write Carter and Muir in Printing and the Mind of Man.

Either/Or is a philosophical work by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, written in two volumes published in 1843, exploring the aesthetic and ethical modes of life.