Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty recently died. He was one of the biggest names in philosophy of the past half century. He wrote on many subjects, but I'd say he's best known as a pragmatist.
I thought he had an interesting approach in how to deal with the world, when there's so little we're sure of. (Don't ask me to sum up his philosophy--ask an expert.) He rejected the analytical approach, and was far less dogmatic than most philosophers. He was also a real "American" philosopher, in that he had an optimistic, even cheerful attitude, which was quite refreshing.
There are still major problems to pragmatism as a philosophical approach. (There are problems to any approach, I guess.) One problem that stands out to me is it's hardly clear just what approach a pragmatist should take when it comes down to specifics. If the pragmatic approach turns out not to be pragmatic, then where are you?
posted by LAGuy @ 12:09 AM
3 Comments:
Rorty took pragmatism to a much greater extreme than its originators (Peirce, James, Dewey) had. The early pragmatists had basically argued that the "truth" of a belief is something that is determined by its usefulness, rather than its correspondence to objective reality. Rorty, on the other hand, argued that philosophers simply should abandon the attempt to analyze "truth", period.
I disagree with all of them, but in some ways Rorty was more consistent than the earlier ones. The earlier ones are usually vulnerable to attacks along the lines of "Do you think it's absolutely true that there is no absolute truth?" (They usually had rebuttals to this, although not very satisfactory ones.) But Rorty is immune to this criticism.
Rorty's vulnerability, if he had one, was that by advising philosophers to abandon the analysis of truth (and also the analysis of morality), he was pretty much advising them to abandone the entire 2500-year-old philosophical project. But he admitted that and was fine with it. Which may be why he ended up in the literature department at Stanford, instead of in a philosophy department!
And all of them were Americans.
Perhaps pragmatism was the self-destruction of academic philosophy in America, just as postmodernism and poststructuralism were the self-destruction of academic philosophy in Europe.
Or perhaps there's something in the Anglo-American tradition that's simply pragmatic, while the continental tradition, with all its rationalism, doesn't quite live in the real world. (And when it tries, it's a disaster.)
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