ABSTRACT
For almost two and a half millennia, the figure of Socrates has fascinated practically every thinker who has investigated the relations between philosophy and religious conviction, between truth and subjectivity, and between philosophical teaching and the living pursuit of truth. In this Kierkegaard is no exception. As we will shortly see, Kierkegaard has his place amid a flood of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century reconstructions and approaches to Socrates. What makes Kierkegaard distinctive among the Socrates scholars of his period, however, is that he, more than most, took detailed account of the interpretations of Socrates that had preceded his own-and went on to influence modernity’s view of Socrates more than perhaps any other author since the Renaissance.1
