TWENTIETH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY: Intellectual Heroes and Key Themes

1. TWENTIETH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY: Intellectual Heroes and Key Themes

2. LECTURES • The limits of language. • Death and authenticity. • The great community. • Making differences. • Social hope. • Communicative rationality.

3. SOCIAL HOPE

4. 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?

5. 1. BEYOND EPISTEMOLOGY

6. 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.

7. 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).

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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!

12. 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 mind-independent external reality.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 2. IRONY AND TRUTH

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. 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.

24. 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.

25. 3. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

26. 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?

27. TWO SPHERES

28. 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.

29. 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 socio-economic inequalities.

30. 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.”

31. 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.