Talk:Leap of faith

Søren Kierkegaard and Leap of Faith

The Søren Kierkegaard article is peppered with attributions giving him credit for coining the term "leapoffaith". This article dismisses the claim. Can anyone reconcile these? --Talinus 02:20, 25 April 2006 (UTC) This article is erroneous. Camus coined the to describe Kierkegaard's reaction to the absurd. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.171.166.80 (talk) 06:19, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

We live forward but we understand backward

From Putnam's "A Reconsideration of Dewey Democracy": "James quotes [in Pragmatism, 105] an aphorism of Kierkegaard's (whom he could not have read, since Kierkegaard had not been translated into any language James read) to the effect that "We live forward but we understand backward."" Where, in Kierkegaard, do we find this aphorism? And how might James discovered it? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 168.167.178.32 (talk) 06:40, 3 April 2007 (UTC).

The aphorism comes from the Journals. William James found the aphorism in the works of Harald Høffding. Høffding incorporated some of the works of Kierkegaard into his survey of philosophy, and that's probably one of the few ways James, and other American philosophers pre-1920s, knows about Kierkegaard. Poor Yorick 02:43, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Moved from main article

2. Marcus Dahle [1337] (1402). Died by punishment for blasfemi. [Marcus stood for that the only god there was; should be mankind and no "holy power" never to be seen or heard from. The church could have that so they ordered that he should pay the price for blasfemi. Marcus used this sentence and said: "No god will ever smite me; They only one to serve punishments is the people. And it is exactly what happends. It isn't god that punish me; It is the priests and the church!"

Why is this on the article???? 82.17.136.199 (talk) 14:01, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Interpretation of Kierkegaard

I added a NPOV tag. The neo-orthodox interpretation of Kierkegaard is one among many (liberal, postmodern, existentialist). There are internationally respected scholars that would disagree with the content of this article, particularly the last paragraph.

189.146.2.183 (talk) 05:07, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

introduction

i haven't looked over the edit history of this article in detail, but somewhere along the line it appears that somebody simply cut the opening and pasted it further down in the body, without making any amendments. this meant that the new opening sentence read "The phrase is commonly attributed to . . . ", which is obviously not the way to open an article. i have tried to fix this by merely cutting the two sentences that were originally the FIRST two from the body and moving them back to the start. this may disrupt the flow of that part of the body somewhat, but at least the article now has an introduction at the start as opposed to 1/8 of the way down . . . — Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.245.107.17 (talk) 07:02, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

german language link way off

hi, someone who knows how to edit such links, please check the German language link to the article, as that deals with some odd special law term involving a move where trust comes first and then another law process action, it has nothing to do with the term being discussed philosophically and faith in particular neither. As it stands it has to be removed I think! 2A02:908:1A78:7A40:ECDC:FD04:9069:E833 (talk) 14:03, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

philosophical versus common meaning of phrase

I seriously doubt that most English speakers who use the phrase "leap of faith" have any clue about the philosophical positions described in this article. The very first reference in this article (at the time of my writing this) takes readers to the Collins English Dictionary. The Collins English Dictionary describes a leap faith in the following ways:

• "If you take a leap of faith, you do something even though you are not sure it is right or will succeed." (Example provided: "Take a leap of faith and trust them.")
• "A belief in something uncertain." (Example provided: "It requires a significant leap of faith to believe that we can succeed where so many others have failed.")

A leap of faith can simply mean you choose to engage in a project or action without being certain your choice is the right one and/or without being certain that you will succeed. Life does not always give us the information we need, or life gives us ambiguous information, which can make it hard to know what we should choose to do. We might be wrong. We know from life experiences that our abilities and capacities are limited. We might fail. Yet, we still need to take actions in order to continue living. Sometimes--perhaps more often for some than for others--we just have to take a leap of faith. A leap of faith can be more about ***hope*** than about philosophical rationality. A person can use the phrase "a leap of faith" in this way without knowing ***anything*** that was written in this article.

Undoing damage

Almost a decade ago this page was a very short but reasonably balanced article. Then, primarily one editor took it upon themselves to transform the article into the very one-sided compilation of Kierkegaard quotes that we see today, with quite a bit of obvious POV-pushing included. Even the section called "Kierkegaard, Goethe, Marx, and Tolstoy" is almost entirely about Kierkegaard. It's very tempting to revert back to the May 2012 version and then add in the few good parts of the current article, but giant reverts like that tend to be controversial (and should be), as they undo multiple editors' efforts. The other option would be to scrub away the bulk of all the sections after the Overview. I'd rather get some opinions beforehand instead of doing a big load of work and then getting reverted. -- Fyrael (talk) 15:56, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

Yes, good idea to raise this discussion. I'd advise a less adversarial section heading and pinging the editor who made the major changes immediately subsequent to the version you wish to revert to. I am in general agreement that this article not only goes well off topic but it is also overkill for an encyclopedia entry. The possibility that there's content here that may form a new article or which belongs elsewhere should be considered. It also seems that "leap of faith" is a bit more broad a concept than what one would surmise from this article, which makes it awfully Kiergegaard-specific, and which may have to do with the POV-pushing you mention. Teishin (talk) 16:30, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

There's also related content at Trust_(social_science)#Philosophy that may not belong there. Just brainstorming here, but maybe there should be Trust (philosophy) where some of what is in this article and the social science article should belong, and Leap of faith should then look closer to your proposal that it should be closer to what it was in 2012. Teishin (talk) 18:00, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

This article definitely needs a lot of work. But removing almost 9 years of edits seems quite radical. I would suggest trimming the problematic sections and summarizing where needed. I haven't had the time to read through it in detail but I get the impression that many sections go way too much into detail. The best place to start may be the quotes: they are too long and too frequent. Having a reliable source or two giving a good overview over the concept might helpful for deciding and justifying where to trim how much. Phlsph7 (talk) 16:48, 13 January 2021 (UTC)