ABSTRACT
According to one of the epithets in Søren Kierkegaard’s dedication to The Concept of Anxiety, Poul Martin Møller was “the confidant of Socrates.” With the title of the present article, I wish to imply not only that Møller, of course, knew Plato as well as other Socratic sources by heart-he even considered Plato’s dialogues as a topic for a dissertation1-but more importantly that as a Socratic figure himself, by his very personality, he had a special maieutic impact on the young Kierkegaard; their relationship is, however, also surrounded by several undocumented assumptions or myths which I will try to sort out. The article is divided into three principal sections: (I) an overview of the life and works of Poul Martin Møller; (II) a discussion of the testimonies concerning Møller’s and Søren Kierkegaard’s personal relation; and (III) a discussion of the references and possible allusions to Møller’s writings in the Kierkegaardian corpus. Finally, in a brief concluding section (IV), I will focus on some relevant aspects of Møller’s portrait of Socrates.
