Irony in the History of Philosophy

With a certain amount of self-conscious practice, students of the history of philosophy may develop a sensitivity to the ironies of their subject matter. The temporal passage of thinkers and schools, problems and arguments, ideas and systems offers a prototypical arena where later proposals and developments qualify, counter and undercut what preceded. Yet what follows is not inevitably ironic when contrasted with what precedes, even when they are opposed and even when that opposition is as intentionally and self-consciously fabricated as a later philosophy. Interpreters of philosophic history should be cautious in assessing relationships between philosophies as ironic. But they should be prodigal in the attempt to discover ironic connections between earlier and later as well as between contemporaneous philosophic ideas. Whether there is an ironic relation between philosophies may then stand as a heuristic possibility to be established or discarded insofar as it does justice to the ideas under investigation. I will use examples from medieval thought to illustrate the proposal that historians of philosophy take up irony as a valuable heuristic tool. To make the examples more helpful I begin with remarks on the sense of irony I have in mind and how it may fit with important purposes of the philosophic historian. While conceding that such controversial matters deserve further thought and discussion, I will simply stipulate my assumptions and hope the examples exhibit their usefulness.1

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Irony · Linguistics · Literature · Classical Studies and Philology · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · Philosophy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography

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