Irony

In Claire Ortiz Hill's "Rethinking Identity and Metaphysics" which is subtitled "On the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy" one finds a number of intended ironies.

'the number of planets' is 9

which disregards the Kuiper belt, the inevitable fate of Mercury and the curious matter of the moon, the asteroid belt and a gas giant rolling on its side. It seems clear that today that philosopher might mean

'the length of the list of names of planets as today taught to most children' is 8

Worse was the fate of

'the number of Jupiter's moons = 4'

and

'Columbus = the discoverer of America'

as one is not a fact and one is not an historical fact.

Worse yet, the conviction that

for the set of fixed stars only seems to be an object; in truth there is no such object at all

when at the time of its writing those stars were known not to be "fixed" and would soon be the very common object, to wit, a spiral galaxy.

Is it even true that Galileo named those particular 4 moons of Jupiter?

We are warned never to attack a philosopher's examples, but rather his argument.  This is advice which botanists and geologists and paleontologists and linguists ignore.

But some ironies are a delight, as are the books of Claire Hill, Claire Ortiz and Claire Ortiz Hill.