Rorty’s Alternate History of Heidegger

I repost here Rorty’s brilliantly written and imagined alternate history of Heidegger. He contingently falls passionately in love with a young Jewess in 1930, moves to American eventually to teach at Rorty’s literal alma mater the University of Chicago (not mentioning that when he enrolled there while still a 14 year old in 1946, Rorty could have taken a course [...]

Rorty’s Daimon

  Rorty, in view of his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, wrote “The Fire of Life” a Socratic-like, just-before-death turn to the power of the music of words. I learned the bad news, I was sitting around having coffee with my elder son and a visiting cousin. My cousin (who is a Baptist minister) asked me whether I [...]

The “Glassy Essence” and a Rorty Reflection

Richard Rorty, in his very influential Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, argues that since the time of the Greeks, Western philosophy has been dominated by one over-riding metaphor, that the mind forms a mirror which reflects with more or less accuracy that which Real. This is a superb critique of philosophy, partly because it subsumes [...]

A Spoonful of Ought

Some Thoughts on the Is-Ought Distinction                    Hume famously said that he noticed something very peculiar in the arguments of those making moral arguments. They would always conducted this curious kind shift, from “is” statements to “ought” statements. This is how he put it: In every system of morality, [...]

Rorty and Davidson Talk

See and hear this 1997 conversation between philosophical fellow travelers Richard Rorty and Donald Davidson, posted by Gundlegung, which ends: Davidson: “Well, it sounds to me that by your standards I am a straight-forward pragmatist.” Rorty: “Even in the romantic sense?” Davidson: “Even in the romantic sense.” Rorty: “That’s nice.” One gets the dramatic sense that these [...]

The Objective truth of Rorty

Richard Rorty, more than any other philosopher, perhaps due to his apostasy from strict Analytic Philosophy, has become the symbol of a seen-to-be corrosive Relativism, one that distains any notion of truth or objectivity, besides the pragmatic regulative of “sentences which work”. This manifested itself in a more than decade long debate between himself and Donald [...]

Davidson’s Razor, Vico’s Magnet

    Ὁ ἄναξ οὗ τὸ μαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς, οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει, ἀλλὰ σημαίνει. The lord whose oracle is at Delphi, neither tells nor conceals, but indicates. – Heraclitus, fragment 93     This study takes as its basis the stark distinction made by philosopher Donald Davidson in his essay “What Metaphors [...]