#14: Søren Kierkegaard
Anxiety, choice, faith, inward struggle: Søren Kierkegaard wrote as though philosophy ought to feel personal, not remote. He was born in Copenhagen in 1813, and much of his work reads like an effort to rescue the person from the abstraction of large systems. That alone made him distinctive. While many thinkers were trying to build sweeping explanations of history, reason, or society, Kierkegaard kept returning to the solitary human being standing before life’s deepest decisions.
