Agnes Callard: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yes. I would say that the dominant reading of Socrates in the literature has always been to think that he is, at least some of the time, either being ironic or being made fun of by Plato. And I don’t share that reading. One thing that’s interesting is that Plato at several points has Socrates’s interlocutors accuse him of irony. They use the word eironeia, irony, our same word. Socrates in the Apology says, “Now you guys are going to think . . . People are always saying this about me. They’re always thinking I’m being ironic.” I think that he isn’t. I think that he is serious in everything that he says, but it’s really hard to read him that way. There’s a way in which our tendency to think that Socrates doesn’t really mean it is a way of pulling his words away from us. Because if he doesn’t mean it, it doesn’t have a bearing on us. I actually think ethically it’s a reading that we ought to try to resist, that there’s something in the text that’s more difficult and more challenging that we escape from if we think either that Socrates is being ironic or that Plato is being ironic about Socrates. Sorry, I should have said, the people who accuse Socrates of being ironic are Versimicus and Callicles. They’re not the good guys or the friends. The fact that it’s those people accusing him suggests at least something about how Plato wanted us to think about the charge of Socratic irony. Why is it that people read these dialogues? If it’s truly a conversational form, we could listen to them. You could teach your class by having people listen to a podcast of Crito and Socrates, Phaedrus and Socrates, but no one does that. You could put them on tape and release it. I think, actually, more people would listen to us. Why is that? What does it tell us about the nature of philosophy also?…

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