Philosophical irony
The narrator is passionate about criticizing ancient philosophy. Throughout the book, the narrator is not offering an alternative mode of thinking that can help readers find objective truth, which is ironic. The narrator writes, "Each of the three, in his later work, broke free of the Kantian conception of philosophy as foundational and spent his time warning us against those very temptations to which he had once succumbed. The narrator concludes that philosophical work is therapeutic because it is not constructive. The narrator only encourages readers to question the findings of philosophy but fails to offer an alternative thinking mode.
The irony of morality
The narrator strongly believes that the historical philosophers based their work on morality. Satirically, the reader fails to comprehend why the narrator does not give credit to that; instead, he questions their findings throughout the book. The narrator says, "From this perspective, the standard message of Wittgenstein, Dewey, and Heidegger is a historicist one. Each of the three reminds us that investigations of the foundations of knowledge or morality or language or society may be simply apologetics, attempts to eternalize a certain contemporary language game, social practice, or self-image.
The irony of assumption
The reader asks the question, why assume that every person can divide the world into physical and mental intuitions? The ancient philosophers believe that all people are critical thinkers to investigate and understand their philosophical findings regarding objective and subjective truth. The narrator writes, "Discussions in the philosophy of mind usually start off by assuming that everybody has always known how to divide the world into the mental and the physical-that this distinction is common-sensical and intuitive, even if that between two sorts of "stuff," material and immaterial, is philosophical and baffling.”
The irony of orgasm
The reader's understanding of 'orgasm' is different from the philosophers' intuitions. Satirically, the narrator makes his conclusions based on the reader's knowledge rather than philosophical approaches. The narrator writes, "And well they should. The difference between dualism and materialism would vanish if once they said that to describe an organism as in pain is simply one way of talking about a state of its parts. These parts, remember, must be physical parts, since once we have Kantized and Strawsonized Descartes, the notion of "mental part" will no longer even seem to make sense.
Persons Without Minds
The reader finds it ironic that human beings can create bombs and build houses without knowing that they have brains. The narrator writes, “Far away, on the other side of our galaxy, there was a planet on which lived beings like ourselves-featherless bipeds who built houses and bombs, and wrote poems and computer programs. These beings did not know that they had minds.”
