Abstract

Socratic irony is said to be essentially heuristic: Socrates feigns ignorance inorder that he can more easily educe and examine the ideas of others. Then,his irony has a heuristic goal. This view is quasi-universally agreed on. Tothis view a different one is opposed in this paper: Socratic irony is far frombeing only heuristic. There are things that, indeed Socrates does not know.But what is it exactly that he does not know. To answer this question, wemake reference to Theaetetus. In this dialogue, Socrates tacitly compareshimself to Artemis. This Goddess, although childless herself, is patron ofpregnant women. By analogy, Socrates is ignorant, but he helps others togive birth to their ideas. So there is a certain relationship between Socraticignorance and divine childlessness of Art emis. That is why to understand thereal meaning of Socratic ignorance, one should first know what Artemis’childlessness really means.In this paper, it has been tried to made this point clear