Daniel Watts

This essay considers the critical response to Hegel's view of Socrates we find in Kierkegaard's dissertation, The Concept of Irony. I argue that this dispute turns on the question whether or not the examination of particular thinkers enters into Socrates’ most basic aims and interests. I go on to show how Kierkegaard's account, which relies on an affirmative answer to this question, enables him to provide a cogent defence of Socrates' philosophical practice against Hegel's criticisms.

According to Rudd, GMS leaves our prephilosophical beliefs in tact—for it bites only against second-order accounts of experience as a whole. It is not, however, to be confused with merely doubting that our ordinary beliefs satisfy certain ideal requirements, while conceding that they meet more relaxed, contextually sensitive standards. On the contrary, Rudd’s skeptic doubts that there is any compelling general theory of what counts as knowledge in any sense.