The idea for this volume of translations came as an offshoot of my research on Kierkegaard's relation to Hegel. In my investigation I was led back again and again to the Danish sources of Kierkegaard's Hegel interpretation. It struck me that Kierkegaard was in a critical discussion more often with Danish authors influenced by Hegel, such as Johan Ludvig Heiberg, than with Hegel himself. But yet most of the works on the issue in the secondary literature seemed wholly to neglect the movement of Danish Hegelianism and uncritically presuppose Kierkegaard's immediate relation to Hegel. One of the main reasons for this, it seemed to me, was the almost complete absence of translations of figures like Heiberg. Although Kierke­gaard has of course been translated into numerous languages, the international reader has been obliged to try to understand his works in a wholly text-immanent fashion since, without knowledge of Dan­ish, one has no possibility of comparing them with the contemporary Danish sources which they are in dialogue with. Thus, this volume of translations is conceived as one small initial step towards correcting this problem. For the first time ever the English reader will be able to follow a Danish debate about Hegel's philosophy and judge for him­- or herself what relation it has to Kierkegaard's thought.

- Jon Stewart