Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10316.2/42279
Title: Qu'est-ce que l'ironie socratique?
Authors: Narcy, Michel
Issue Date: 2001
Publisher: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra
Abstract: ’Socratic irony’ is often understood in modern scholarship, for instance by Gregory Vlastos, as having a rather favourable sense. It is understood as implying something different from what one says (a sense later defined by Quintilian) and doing so part of a programme of moral education that consisted in challenging the intellectual powers of his interlocutors. However, this sense of eironeia is not found in Plato or in Aristotle in the texts where he discusses Socratic irony. The term ’irony’ occurs in those texts in a consistently negative sense, associated with contemptuous or arrogant treatment of others (for instance in the Republic or Symposium). In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ’Socratic irony’ may appear to have a more favourable sense; but close attention to the relevant passages, taken in the context of Aristotle’s ethical framework, shows that it signifies a kind of wilful disdain of convention, and is no more favourably understood than the other extreme of alazoneia. If we go back to the Platonic uses of the term, for instance, Thrasymachus in Republic 337a or Callicles in Gorgias 489e, we find again a negative connotation. Here, the relevant sense is that of evading one’s share in the discussion by pretending to have no answer to the questions one poses. In fact, ’evasion’ is, probably, what eironeia, means, understood as a deliberate tactic to get the better of one’s opponents. The more favourable sense of ’Socratic irony’ is, thus, a modern invention, partly based on the more positive usage of the term in Latin, in Cicero and Quintilian.
URI: https://hdl.handle.net/10316.2/42279
ISSN: 2079-7567
2183-4105 (PDF)
DOI: 10.14195/2183-4105_1_2
Rights: open access
Appears in Collections:Plato Journal

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