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Record W1987343257 · doi:10.2307/4135165

The Practical Irony of the Historical Socrates

2004· article· en· W1987343257 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Lowell Edmunds

Bibliographic record

VenuePhoenix · 2004
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicClassical Philosophy and Thought
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSOCRATESIronyLiteraturePhilosophyEpistemologyArt

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

PROBABLY FROM SOCRATES' OWN TIME, certainly from Aristotle's time, irony has been a central feature in the description of the philosopher from Alopeke. importance of Socrates' irony is reflected in the title of an influential book, stemming from influential teaching and articles, by Gregory Vlastos: Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher.' In Vlastos's discussion, and generally, irony is assumed to be an exclusively verbal phenomenon. Greeks, however, down through the fourth century B.C.E., knew of a practical irony. It was an irony of manner or more broadly of style. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle uses Spartan dress, i.e., the imitation of Spartan dress by Athenians, as an example of irony (1127b27-28). Socrates, it will be seen, was associated by contemporaries with this particular style and thus with practical irony as defined by Aristotle. Aristotle's discussion of irony appears in a chapter on truthfulness, the mean between the extremes of boastfulness and irony. He begins: let us discuss truthful persons and untruthful persons in and in practices (rpd~4cat) and in their claims about themselves (1127a19-20). An irony of practices, a practical irony, is presupposed. Consistently with this starting point, Aristotle's whole discussion of the mean and the extremes looks to public and social context. Theophrastus follows Aristotle.2 He begins his character sketch of the ironist: would seem to be ... a pretense of the worse in practices and in words (7npoatnoorlat; Ti XEypov 7tpdx(c0v K~a X6yov, Char. 5.1 Jebb-Sandys). For a narrower, exclusively verbal sense of irony, one can compare the definition in the roughly contemporary Rhetorica adAlexandrum: is to say something while pretending not to say it or to call things by the opposite names (1434a17-18). author of this rhetorical treatise has formulated a definition in which the notion of practice is absent. Irony now has the purely verbal status that it will have in Cicero and in Quintilian (except for a single intriguing statement to be discussed below, 202).3 Vlastos, thinking of verbal irony, resolutely denied irony in Aristophanes' Clouds. The anti-hero of the Clouds is many things to many men, but an ironist to none.4 But with this comedy one can begin to describe the practical irony of the historical Socrates.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.006
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.011
Threshold uncertainty score0.057

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.006
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0100.029
Scholarly communication0.0080.004
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0020.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.002

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.046
GPT teacher head0.245
Teacher spread0.200 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations14
Published2004
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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