Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Søren Kierkegaard was by far the greatest thinker of the nineteenth century... a saint". His work has inspired philosophers, theologians, novelists, poets, playwrights and psychologists. He is one of the great maverick thinkers, along with Socrates, Hamann, Lessing, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. He is known as the father of existentialism and as a trenchant critic of Hegel. More importantly he is one of the most astute observers and critics of emerging modernism, who contributed more than almost any other thinker of his era to the development of modernism as a self-conscious reflection on the present age.