Soren Kierkegaard, widely regarded as the founder of existentialism, is among the most passionate and compelling of all modern philosophers. For more than a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, he pursued with great urgency the fundamental question of existence: How to be a human being in the world? Seeking new answers to this oldest of challenges, he explored the spiritual possibilities of Christianity, confronted the failures of institutional religion, and unflinchingly interrogated the nature of faith and his own longing for God. Much of Kierkegaard's creativity sprang from his relationship with Regine Olsen, the young woman whom he promised to marry, then left to devote himself to writing. His extraordinary works touch on the deepest, most unsettling questions of existence-and continue to shape our understanding of the modern world. Philosopher of the Heart, Clare Carlisle's innovative, moving biography, inhabits Kierkegaard's story, seeking the inward meaning of his life and conveying what it was like actually being this Socrates of Christendom, as he put it, living life forwards yet only understanding it backwards. Book jacket.