The Theaetetus’s midwife metaphor contains a puzzling feature, often referred to as the “midwife paradox”: the physical midwives must have first given birth to their own children in order to have the necessary experience to practice their art. Socrates, however, seems to disavow having any children of his own and thus appears to be unqualified to practice philosophical midwifery. In this paper, I aim to dissolve the midwife paradox by arguing that it rests on problematic assumptions, namely, that Socrates never (...) gave birth to a child at all or the child of wisdom in particular, and that he is primarily an intellectual midwife. I offer a new interpretation of Socratic midwifery, arguing that what Socrates may have birthed in the past which qualifies him for midwifery is his virtuous recognition of his ignorance, and that this “epistemic virtue” is also the proximate goal of Socratic midwifery. (shrink)

Recent debates over the role of recognition by the community for one’s development and flourishing generally discuss community in a univocal sense: the way that recognition functions in particular communities is not fundamentally different from the way it functions in the larger community. They also tend to logically prioritize a fundamental human identity over particular religious, ethnic, or societal identities, which are understood to be secondary to, and derivative of, this basic identity. In his depiction of how communal recognition contributes (...) to individual selfhood, Søren Kierkegaard challenges these accounts by (1) differentiating between how communal recognition occurs in society in general and in one particular community, the Christian church and (2) questioning the idea that the self created in the former is more fundamental than that created in the latter. For Kierkegaard, one’s identities as both a Christian and a fully-developed self depend essentially on recognition by the Other: initially and fundamentally on recognition by God alone, and secondarily and derivatively on recognition by the human Other. (shrink)