Four Edifying Discourses (1843): A Dimensional Analysis

Abstract

The third volume of Kierkegaard's aesthetic work published in 1843 gathers four discourses that form the subject matter of these analysis. Here it is intended to present a picture of Kierkegaard's religious thought, to show the thematic dimensions of these third volume, and, simultaneously, to clarify the interrelations of the discourses and to offer a tool that underlines the main ideas through a list of vocabulary with a high rate of occurrences. The main questions attended in these paper are: What are the top sixty main words used in the third volume of the discourses of 1843? What are the three main textual dimensions of these volume? And what is the core or the focus of these volume? The method employed in these analysis consist in the construction of a version of the discourses that is machine-readible and from which computational analysis techniques are applied to a list of sixty abnormaly frequent words in the four discourses of the third volume that generates a matrix that shows percentages and statistics which are helpful to the researcher in order to reconstruct the core of the analysed work as well as to identify the main arguments and the commonalities that the mapping shows in the comparison of the parts of the text.