ABSTRACT
We need not “appeal to statistics,” Sophia Scopetea rightly notes, to show that “Kierkegaard makes his Socrates revolve around a very few recurring Platonic passages.”1 Though it is complex and revolutionary, Kierkegaard’s portrait of Socrates indeed centers on a tiny group of core citations from Plato. These texts include Socrates’ professions of ignorance in the Apology; his talk of recollection in the Meno, Phaedo, and Phaedrus; his praise of wonder, together with his selfdescription as a midwife, in the Theaetetus; and his confession, at Phaedrus 229e230a, that he cannot tell whether he is a simple being, gentle and divinely blessed, or “a complex creature...more puffed up with pride than Typhon.”2
