Concept

On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates

Overview

On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (Danish: Om Begrebet Ironi med stadigt Hensyn til Socrates) is Søren Kierkegaard's 1841 master's thesis under Frederik Christian Sibbern. This thesis is the culmination of three years of extensive study on Socrates, as seen from the view point of Xenophon, Aristophanes, and Plato.

His thesis dealt with irony, and in particular, Socratic irony. In Part One, Kierkegaard regards Aristophanes' portrayal of Socrates, in his play The Clouds, to be the most accurate representation of the man. Whereas Xenophon and Plato portrayed Socrates seriously, Kierkegaard felt that Aristophanes best understood the intricacies of Socratic irony.

In the shorter Part Two of the dissertation, Kierkegaard compares Socratic irony with contemporary interpretations of irony. Here, he offers analysis of major 19th century writers and philosophers including Fichte, Schlegel, and Hegel. One English translation of the book also contains his notes on Schelling's Berlin Lectures of 1841, which Kierkegaard attended shortly after finishing his dissertation.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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Dialectic, it may be added, is no novelty in philosophy. Among the ancients Plato is termed the inventor of Dialectic; and his right to the name rests on the fact, that the Platonic philosophy first gave the free scientific, and thus at the same time the objective, form to Dialectic. Socrates, as we should expect from the general character of his philosophising, has the dialectical element in a predominantly…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
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122, 123; 60, 61; 105; VI. 15-18); they have, however, only a literary interest, and hence I will pass them by.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
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When the recitation was completed, Socrates requested that the first thesis of the first argument might be read over again, and this having been done, he said: What is your meaning, Zeno? Do you maintain that if being is many, it must be both like and unlike, and that this is impossible, for neither can the like be unlike, nor the unlike like--is that your position? Just so, said Zeno.
Plato, Parmenides
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Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Existentialism.

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