Miguel de Unamuno's Quest for Faith: A Kierkegaardian Understanding of Unamuno s Struggle to Believe

Miguel de Unamuno (1864 1936) was a extraordinary Spanish thinker, a philosopher, linguist, poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, professor, university administrator, and Spanish public intellectual. He had great intellectual integrity and moral courage. Unamuno is not an easy philosopher to read. He loved paradoxes and even (at times) contradictions. Various interpreters have called him an atheist, a sceptic, a Protestant, a pantheist, a Catholic modernist, and a good Catholic. Passages can be found in his writings that can be taken to support all of these interpretations. In the present book, Jan E. Evans does an incisive and thorough job of sorting through the Unamuno corpus and arriving at a definitive interpretation of his views. One great asset of Evans work is the insight she gains by comparing Unamuno s works with the philosophers whom he admired most and considered his fellow travellers in the tragic sense of life. These include Blaise Pascal (1623 1662), William James (1842 1910), and especially Søren Kierkegaard (1813 1855). This book examines the life and work of Unamuno through the lens of his faith. Those who are not familiar with Unamuno will find here a clear exposition of the most important themes in the thinker's work along with a framework through which one can profitably begin to read the primary texts.