You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
“One of the joys of doing philosophy,” Lear writes in the introduction to his volume, “is the conversation one gets to have” (p. xi). This tone, a generosity of spirit, seems just right: Lear creates conversations everywhere he goes. I imagine his spirit alive in Ancient Greece, walking beside friends and students—talking, challenging, engaging—everyone absorbed in deep conversation. And yes, with Lear's love of philosophy (which is literally the love of wisdom), we join an infinite conversation throughout all of human history, one that, if we are lucky, we dip into, extend—all the while knowing this conversation preceded us and will continue long after we have bowed out.
So what is Lear after with his project of making “a case for irony”? The preface of his volume gives us a hint. He comments that Kierkegaard's writing about irony was “not to explain irony, but to instill it” (p. xi, italics in original). And so we are off: we appreciate Lear's sly, ironic intention—his book, too, will be about instilling irony. That is, his words will be in the nature of linguistic performatives1: words that not only instill a state of mind in the reader, but more precisely, instill a change of being: “Irony is a form of existence” (p. 6). Lear's text will perform