TWENTIETH CENTURY
PHILOSOPHY:
Intellectual Heroes and Key Themes
LECTURES
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
The limits of language.
Death and authenticity.
The great community.
Making differences.
Social hope.
Communicative rationality.
SOCIAL HOPE
1.BEYOND EPISTEMOLOGY
Is there an alternative for traditional
philosophy?
2.IRONY AND TRUTH
What is the relation between irony and truth?
3. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE
How to conceive of social hope?
1. BEYOND EPISTEMOLOGY
RICHARD RORTY
BIOGRAPHICAL DATA:
 1931: Born October 4, in New York City.
 1946-1952: Studied Philosophy at the
University of Chicago.
 1952-1956: PhD. at Yale University.
 1961-1982: Professor of philosophy at
Princeton University.
 1982-1998: Professor of the Humanities at
the University of Virginia.
 1998-2007: Professor of Comparative
Literature at Stanford University.
 2007: Died June 8, in Palo Alto.
IMPORTANT PUBLICATIONS
 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).
 Consequences of Pragmatism (1982).
 Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989).
 Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers
I (1991).
 Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers
II (1991). Limited Inc (1990).
 Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought In Twentieth
Century America (1998).
 Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III (1998).
 Philosophy and Social Hope (2000).
 The Future of Religion (with Gianni Vattimo) (2005).
 Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers IV
(2007).
PHILOSOPHICAL STYLE
Change in style > from the analytical article
to the philosophical essay, i.e. a switch from
a more argumentative to a more evocative
style.
Parasitic > mainly stubborn interpretations of
texts.
Provocative one-liners or titles.
Examples: ‘Solidarity or Objectivity?’ and
‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’.
Open encounter with different vocabularies.
DESTRUCTION AND
CONSTRUCTION
An open encounter with different vocabularies
implies an uplifting critique.
Critique > destruction of epistemology (i.e.
mentalism, philosophy of consciousness).
Uplifting > construction of new vocabularies that
are free from the flaws of epistemology.
Its this kind of uplifting critique that makes out of
Rorty a (neo)pragmatist philosopher.
One of Rorty’s heroes is the pragmatist John
Dewey.
THE LEGACY OF DEWEY
“Most of what I have written in the last decade
consists of attempts to tie in my social hopes –
hopes for a global, cosmopolitan, democratic,
egalitarian, classless, casteless society – with my
antagonism towards Platonism. These attempts have
been encouraged by the thought that the same hopes,
and the same antagonism, lay behind many of the
writings of my principal philosophical hero, John
Dewey.”
Neopragmatism > the provision of new vocabularies
that help us to understand or solve a given problem.
BEYOND METHAPYSICS
 Metaphysics:
- to construct a perspective from outside as an attempt to
escape from time, i.e. to view Being (Sein) as
something that has little to do with Time (Zeit).
- the construction of the eternal in order to be free from
the contingency, the uncertainty, and the fragility of the
human condition.
 Criticism:
- there is no non-linguistic, pre-cognitive access to an
already present Being that underscores some narrative.
- people are enmeshed in final vocabularies that present
Being in diverse and incommensurable ways.
- there is no meta-vocabulary to distinguish the adequacy of
one final vocabulary above others.
 What can be done?
 An analysis of the heuristic value of metaphors!
THE MIND AS MIRROR
The heuristic value of ocular metaphors, especially
the mirror, is limited.
“The picture which holds traditional philosophy
captive is that of the mind as a great mirror,
containing various representations – some accurate,
some not – and capable of being studied by pure,
nonempirical methods. Without the notion of the
mind as mirror, the notion of knowledge as accuracy
of representation would not have suggested itself.”
Epistemology > depends upon a picture of the mind
as trying to represent (i.e. mirror) a mindindependent external reality.
PHILOSOPHICAL TARGETS
 Rorty attacks:
- Platonic essentialism.
- Cartesian foundationalism.
- A specific conception of philosophy.
 Essentialism > looking for an everlasting essence behind the
phenomena that can be observed.
 Foundationalism > to avoid the regress inherent in claiming
that all beliefs are justified by other beliefs and the
presupposition that some beliefs must be self-justifying and
can be the foundations of all knowledge.
 Sellar’s critique of the Myth of the given: there is no
“given” in sensory perception.
 Philosophy is dissolving rather than solving problems.
PHILOSOPHY AS CULTURAL
POLITICS
 Dissolving problems is an act of cultural politics.
 The contribution to culture of philosophers is not to
discover the everlasting truth, but to create new
vocabularies that are helpful to interpret the world.
 Instead of looking for the foundation of knowledge it’s
better to accept that language, the selfhood and the
community is contingent and that many aspects of life are
optional.
 Philosophers should scrutinize the possibilities and limits
of vocabularies.
 Vocabularies describe and order the world in a different
way.
 The development of new vocabularies implies the
introduction of new metaphors.
2. IRONY AND TRUTH
BEYOND THE CORRESPONDENCE
THEORY OF TRUTH
 Rorty criticizes in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
the correspondence theory of truth > truth is not that
what corresponds to reality.
 Truth is the qualification of opinions as ‘justified’ or
‘legitimate’.
 Use truth as an adjective (a truth story) and not as a
substantive (the Truth).
 Semantic holism > the meaning of words and sentences
are foremost related to the meaning of other sentences
and not to the non-linguistic world.
 We change our vocabularies and ideas about the truth
because of changed habits.
THE IRONIST
Socrates > irony as a mean to figure out what is
the truth.
Forms of irony:
1. Exaggeration : understatement.
2. Repetition.
3. Say the opposite what you mean.
Rorty argues that irony is not a mean to figure out
what is the truth, but a mean to question what is
seen as self-evident.
The ironist is a person that accepts see that central
aspects in life are contingent.
CONTINGENCIES
The blind spot of epistemology > the
contingencies in life.
Contingency > what is by accident so as it is;
something which could have been otherwise.
Rorty discusses three contingencies:
1. The contingency of language.
2. The contingency of selfhood.
3. The contingency of a liberal community.
THE CONTINGENCY OF
LANGUAGE
Wittgenstein > showing the limits of language and
therefore of a lifeworld.
An individual is by birth thrown in a lifeworld
that is characterized by a specific use of language.
By accent he or she learns a particular language.
And by learning a particular language an
individual acquires a world-view.
It could have been another world-view.
Cultural shifts are contingent changes of
language.
THE CONTINGENCY OF
SELFHOOD
Freud > an individual is not a master of himself
or a mistress of herself.
Individuals are not fully conscious about who
they are.
Psychoanalysis challenges the idea of an
autonomous selfhood.
The selfhood is the product of upbringing and
educational background.
Socialisation and enculturation have a
contingent character.
THE CONTINGENCY OF A
LIBERAL COMMUNITY
Because the selfhood of individuals is
contingent the community life that is build
upon them is also contingent.
If individuals accept that, they don’t have to
look for the essence of the community in which
they are living.
A liberal community is open to the future and
promotes conversation and not violence.
FINAL VOCABULARIES.
The traditional ironist – for instance Socrates – is at
the end a metaphysician who is mainly interested in
THE truth, i.e. the essence behind phenomena.
The modern ironist is someone who knows that his
or her final vocabulary is contingent.
Final vocabulary > words that an individual uses to
justify his or her actions or world-view.
The ironist is someone who recognizes the three
contingencies and has a commitment to the
reduction of all kinds of suffering, especially
cruelty.
This ironist is the opposite of the metaphysician.
METAPHYSCIAN IRONIST
Focus
To discover the truth
To avoid and to
combat cruelty
Method
Logic > inferences
Dialectics >
redescriptions
Form of critique
To look to pictures on
the basis of the original
To compare and look
at different pictures
Philosophy of
language
Realist
Nominalist
Ethics
Judge on the basis of
universal principles
To develop a sense of
solidarity
ROMANTIC LIBERALISM
Based on the three contingencies Rorty
launches his idea of romantic liberalism.
Romantic liberalism > a community life that
creates room for the idiosyncrasies of the
individual and solidarity.
The two pillars of romantic liberalism:
1. Irony.
2. The distinction between the public and
private.
3. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE
CRUELTY
Central question of Rorty’s political philosophy:
what are the driving forces for our political
engagement?
Justice or Equality? No!
Cruelty > how to avoid it?
Solidarity with all those who are the victims of
cruelty.
People should become sensitive to the way people
get hurt.
Why are people not susceptible to the global
injustice?
TWO SPHERES
PRIVATE SPHERE
PUBLIC SPHERE
Irony
Solidarity
Read books to become Read books to become
less cruel
an autonomous person
Nietzsche, Heidegger Dewey and Habermas
and Derrida
AESTEHTICS AND MORAL
THEORY
Beyond the classical dichotomy of aesthetics
(private) and moral theory (public).
The relation between literature and morality is
complex.
Literature makes people sensible for moral
dilemmas.
At first glance there are a lot of differences between
Nabokov and Orwell.
Nabokov and Orwell > both give expression to
cruelty and deal with the tension between private
irony and liberal hopes.
PATRIOTISM
Reiteration of the work of John Dewey and Walt
Whitman in order to criticize anti-liberal and
defeatist intellectuals.
Patriotism > hold on to the liberal tradition.
To sides of left: 1) critical left and 2) progressive
left.
To renew the progressive (i.e. pragmatic) left.
Beyond culturalism of the critical left, i.e.
redescriptions that are mainly based on cultural
differences.
The flaw of culturalism > the neglect of socioeconomic inequalities.
SOCIAL HOPE
It is a disaster when people grow up without
hope.
Social cohesion is based upon shared
vocabularies and hope.
Philosophy can help to (re)create oneself and is
therefore a resource for hope.
“The main trouble is that you might succeed, and
your success might let you imagine that you have
something more to rely on than the tolerance and
decency of your fellow human beings. The
democratic community of Dewey’s dreams is a
community in which nobody imagines that.”
RECOMMENDED
1. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and
Solidarity.
2. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope.
3. Neil Gross, Richard Rorty. The making of an
American Philosopher.