Kierkegaard’s Socrates Sources Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Danish Scholarship

The old saying that the history of philosophy “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato,”3 could perhaps be corrected somewhat since Plato himself was a devoted disciple of the well-known scurra Atticus,4 or as Kierkegaard liked to call him that great ironist. Therefore, one should probably rather regard the philosophical tradition as a series of footnotes to Socrates-who never wrote anything. Kierkegaard would certainly regard the matter in this way since if he was a passionate reader of Plato, it was nonetheless Socrates whom he sought in Plato’s dialogues.