Comparing Kierkegaard's From The Hellenic Sky To The God-Man

Provisional Title: 'From the Hellenic Sky to the God-Man: Kierkegaard's critical reading of the Phaedo in respect of the immortality of the soul, with reference to the concept of irony, and his doctoral dissertation published under the same title'

Introduction/Goal of Study: the purpose of this paper is that of analyzing a portion of Kierkegaard's early work and doctoral dissertation The Concept of Irony. In close dialogue with the figure of Socrates and with Plato's thought, Kierkegaard sets out to discuss the concept of irony and how the practice of irony marked Socrates' figure. Following Hegel, Kierkegaard's reads Socrates as someone imperfectly Christ, and Platonism as opening the way for the advent of Christianity.1 In this regard, one of the many aspects in which Socrates prefigures Christianity is by holding a belief in the immortality of the soul. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard holds that Socrates holds a defective conception of the soul, of its relationship to the body, and of the immortality of the former.

In a nutshell, Kierkegaard objects to Socrates his incapacity of thinking beyond the opposition between the soul and the body. Unable to achieve the Christian speculative union between the body and the soul – crystallized by the the Christian teachings of bodily

As regards the secondary sources I will make mainly reference to the series Kierkegaard Research and Kierkegaard International Commentary, respectively published by Routledge and Mercer University Press. Rather than testing Kierkegaard's reading of Plato in the light of contemporary scholarship, my method will be that of taking Kierkegaard's positions at face value. I find this justified insofar as my intention is that of exploring what is Kierkegaard's concept of immortality, rather than checking the correctness of his interpretation of