Abstract

The thesis is a hermeneutical investigation of the notion of irony couched within Kieran Egan's theory of curriculum. To come to a fair understanding of Egan's theory, one must perforce understand what it aims for: in its author's words, a "kind of person" or "form of consciousness" which "lies at the heart of both modernism and postmodernism." What truth lies at the heart of this way of experience, in the disposition or ethos of irony? ;Part One of the thesis constitutes a set of critical readings whose main thread or topos is 'experience.' Chapter One discusses the question of experience in light of writings by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger on the truth and aesthetics of Dasein's dwelling cum belonging. Chapter Two, in turn, is a hermeneutical appraisal of the notion of experience in certain works by Descartes and Locke, Wordsworth and Frost. All in all, these chapters serve as the philosophical background to the readings in Part Two of three related accounts of ironic experience: Richard Rorty's, Plato's, and Egan's. ;Part Two of the thesis shows that Socratic irony is an early sign of what inescapably occurs to those of us still caught in the drift of so-called enlightened European traditions, say, what Egan the cultural historian runs towards, and Richard Rorty the literary critic runs up against: the ethical truth of our skeptical age. In other words, the thesis finds that the writings of Egan and Rorty struggle to come to grips with what Stanley Cavell has called the "truth or moral of skepticism" and hence, more or less unwittingly preserve the ethical way, the ethos, of Socratic irony. How might one live well in the midst of others by foregoing knowledge of them? Rorty's account of irony, it is argued, struggles for the most part to avoid or elide the truth of Socrates' way. Egan's, on the other hand, endeavours to critically accept the condition of skepticism; more exactly, his curriculum theory reveals the ethical sense in teaching our children to become ironically experienced