Soren Kierkegaard and the very idea of advance beyond Socrates

This dissertation, a study of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), offers a new assessment of Kierkegaard's view of the relation between religion and philosophy. Kierkegaard is conventionally thought to have championed religious faith as an intellectual and existential "advance beyond" the practice of zetetic philosophy. More specifically, Kierkegaard is thought to have argued that Christian faith marks an advance beyond the thought and life of Socrates. As I show, however, this impression of Kierkegaard is a false one. Kierkegaard's argumentative goal was in fact to demonstrate the compatibility of zetetic philosophy and religious faith. To this end, Kierkegaard mounted a vigorous campaign to rehabilitate Socrates in Lutheran Denmark, not only as an intellectual model and ethical exemplar, but also---in certain key respects---as a religious paradigm.;The Kierkegaard who emerges from my dissertation is a thinker of relevance to both Socrates scholarship and the philosophy of religion. In his interpretation of Plato, Kierkegaard anticipates the efforts of many recent scholars to take Socrates' disavowals of knowledge seriously. As Kierkegaard saw it, the irony of Socrates is no mere conversational technique. It is a coherent if uncanny way of life marked by the continual activity of acknowledging ignorance earnestly.;In his study of religious faith, meanwhile, Kierkegaard responded to Lutheranism's call for unceasing "resort to Grace" by developing a parallel portrait of Christian religiousness as a way of life similarly marked by the continual acknowledgment of ignorance. Kierkegaard thus portrays religious faith as compatible with (and closely related to) the philosophical search for truth. Such an account would be remarkable in any age; but it is of special value in a time of culture wars and rising fundamentalisms. For in rehabilitating Socrates as a figure of religious interest---and, simultaneously, in setting Socrates to work as a powerful critic of religious triumphalism---Kierkegaard proudly defies the view that the philosophical search for truth has no place in, or has no place for, a profoundly religious life.