If you're the sort of person who knows who Richard Rorty is, you'll want to check out Raymond Geuss' reminiscences of the man. I've had a lot of opportunity in my life to meet famous philosophers, but not the one whose work I like the best.
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Remembering Richard Rorty
15 May 2008 08:41 am
Comments (73)
Many people say that Rorty was a wonderful person to know, but for those of us interested in the philosophy of science he was a real embarrassment.His advocacy of a 'new fuzziness', his portrayal of the important scientists of the future as social consensus-builders rather than seekers of objective truth, etc. project features of a hopeful new type of political style onto a very different area. We want the people who decide whether to launch shuttles to pay more attention to the simple known properties of rubber o-rings than to the joys of social consensus among politicians and managers.The same principle applies to more fundamental questions as well as questions closer to behavioral science.
Many people who knew Rorty remember him fondly. However, for those of us interested in the philosophy of science, he was an embarrassment. He advocated a 'new fuzziness' in which the most important scientists would be social consensus builders, not seekers of some truth outside the circle of discourse. In effect, he sided with the consensus-driven engineers who launched the Challenger shuttle, rather than the nerds who said they knew what happens to cold rubber o-rings. It's hard to think of any aspect of science, from the deepest cosmological questions to simple engineering matters, which would not suffer from Rorty's advice. He may have been thinking about political styles, and shifts away from rigid ideologies. Even such shifts, however, are best guided by the occasional hard fact.
He seems like a nice man.
I really hated his work as well, found it irritating, shallow, long-winded, the opposite of nourishing...it's constantly attacking a straw-man of absolute language-expressed philosophical truth that no one really believes in anyway at the expense of actually pursuing any sort of more difficult insight. It just seems to me now like a bunch of clever talk that gets no one anywhere, not even usefully deconstructed. Your mileage may vary.
Of course I loved Theodor Adorno, and many find him a dessicater (not shallow but elitist and hopeless perhaps). Maybe everyone needs an intellectual hero to blow things up for them, and it's not easy to appreciate others' hero, as deconstruction can be so personal.
Also puzzled by the Rorty admiration. "Philosophy is bunk, reasoned argument never persuades anyone, so just make sure your side has more & bigger guns" is an arguable position, but I don't think Rorty adds anything to Callicles's account in the Gorgias.
I got to hear a few lectures and was in a seminar with him at Stanford. Seemed pretty insightful to me!
What Rorty said was widely misunderstood -- for example, by everyone here. His temporary turn to postmodernism, before he knew how postmodernism would turn out, probably is why. He repented, but by that time it was too late.
Dan Kervick said, "I never cared for Rorty's work, and see him as part of that regrettable trend of dessicated postmodern liberalism which has weakened and intellectually enfeebled the left."
Hear, hear! I second that emotion. Once I read Guess's description of Rorty's disdain for music, that was all I needed to know.
Postmodernism is an infantile and self-refuting form of adolescent skepticism that has indeed weakened the left, as Kervick says.
The facts have a liberal bias. Anything that undermines the status of the facts therefore has a conservative bias. Once you eliminate facts and morals, as the postmodernists do, you are left with raw power -- and guess who has the power?
His temporary turn to postmodernism? That's certainly what he's famous for. What else was there? Please tell.
His books are easy to read, Ban. "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" and "Consequences of Pragmatism" are two. I didn't follow his later work, but they tended more toward a version of American liberalism.
He tried unsuccessfully to get analytic philosophy out of the the obsession with scientoid metaphysics that makes it unreadable to almost everyone. Toward the beginning of that period he tried to assimilate the anti-foundationalism of Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein to post-modernists like Foucault and Derrida. Unfortunately the postmodernists went in the wrong direction, and that was that.
The problem with the O-rings was not a problem with Truth vs. Consensus. The engineering consensus (which had not yet been reached by the engineers) was overwhelmed by the political-campaign consensus (the State of the Union Address was the next day). The kind of analytic-philosophy fussiness about Truth Rorty was arguing against would have done no good, because analytic philosophy argues everything for ten or twenty years before conceding its truth. Analytic philosophy would have given us a 500 page book of arguments about th O-rings a year after the disaster. It wouldn't have improved decision-making on the spot.
This makes Rorty's work sound very narrow, as though its significance were limited to narrow areas of specialized professional philosophy, but Rorty really proposed broadening philosophy so that it actually could contribute to public debate. But philosophy refused to be broadened. By about 1984 he was an outsider within the profession (like many other interesting philosophers willing to participate in everyday reality, e.g. Stephen Toulmin and Ernest Gellner).
As for postmodernism: Lacan, the politics of sex and gender, personal-liberation politics, and self-indulgent prose ruined that.
I never cared for Rorty's work, and see him as part of that regrettable trend of dessicated postmodern liberalism which has weakened and intellectually enfeebled the left.
I find this pretty hilarious, considering Rorty wrote an entire book criticizing the "regrettable trend of dessicated postmodern liberalism which has weakened and intellectually enfeebled the left."
but Rorty really proposed broadening philosophy so that it actually could contribute to public debate
IOW, Rorty really proposed replacing philosophy with politics.
That may've been a good idea, but let's call it what it is.
Postmodernism is an infantile and self-refuting form of adolescent skepticism that has indeed weakened the left, as Kervick says.
I disagree. Post-modernism as a philosophy one believes in probably as 2 or 3 adherents. As a technique to construct arguments, it is the lifeblood of the right wing. For all of their disdain for French intellectuals, the rightwing uses the rhetorical structures of post-modernism with abandon.
And they're the ones with the guns.
I'll never understand how someone who was able to produce fairly clear prose early in his career seemed completely unable to do so later on. Other philosophers (e.g. Putnam and Goodman) had shifts in their thinking that led them away from clear writing, but neither left it entirely, and neither produced the sort of impenetrable prose that Rorty did.
Thanks, John E., for your excellent defense.
I don't know if I'd consider Rorty a "hero", but his arguments against, as you so aptly put it, "The ... analytic-philosophy fussiness about Truth" certainly hastened my exit from the professional discipline of analytic philosophy; so I suppose I do owe him some gratitude for that, at least.
Ban, I don't know anything about you, of course; but I can claim with some confidence that, had you attended the Ohio State graduate program in Philosophy in the early 90s, you probably would not describe Rorty's targets (at least in "Mirror and" "Consequences") as "a straw-man of absolute language-expressed philosophical truth that no one really believes in anyway". Part of the anti-Rorty backlash can surely be seen as evidence that there were (and are) plenty of people who believe in the sort of objectivism that Rorty argued against, and who take it very, very seriously.
Anderson, you're all wrong, and your tough-minded cynicism is delusional. Politics is an honorable and necessary activity, not something unclean as you seem to feel it is, and as a sort of comprehensive discourse philosophy should be able to contribute to it now as it did in the past. Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Mill, and Dewey all had something valuable to say about political things, but Quine, Sellars, and Kripke do/did not. (Of the important classic analytics, Putnam seems at least to be aware of the problem here, and for this reason he is ridiculed and regarded as over the hill by the real pros in the biz. More at my URL).
Anderson, you're all wrong, and your tough-minded cynicism is delusional. Politics is an honorable and necessary activity, not something unclean as you seem to feel it is, and as a sort of comprehensive discourse philosophy should be able to contribute to it now as it did in the past. Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Mill, and Dewey all had something valuable to say about political things, but Quine, Sellars, and Kripke do/did not. (Of the important classic analytics, Putnam seems at least to be aware of the problem here, and for this reason he is ridiculed and regarded as over the hill by the real pros in the biz. More at my URL).
Boy, people are really, really scared of the notion that perfect knowledge is inaccessible to the human brain, an organism that evolved and thus is probably incapable of accurately ordering and understanding the external world.
Look, the vitriol here makes it clear that I'm not going to convince anyone of anything, so let me just say: you cannot stand outside of language while describing language, so the project of classical philosophy is ultimately impossible to complete. (That doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing, though.) The human brain is structured through signs and signifiers; as long as that duality exists (that is, as long as there's such a thing as human consciousness) you can't possibly hope to have Real or True knowledge. Can't, won't, ever.
I've had a lot of opportunity in my life to meet famous philosophers, but not the one whose work I like the best.
This is not good news for philosophers whose work you like.
Though I consider myself a committed Dennettian, and therefore cannot fully embrace Rortian fuzziness, his contribution opened up possibilities that Dennett-style determinism tends to close down. For this his work should be appreciated.
His work on the social-political side is truly masterful. Its inluence can be found in John Gray's essential Straw Dogs and Black Mass.
Though I consider myself a committed Dennettian, and therefore cannot fully embrace Rortian fuzziness, his contribution opened up possibilities that Dennett-style determinism tends to close down. For this his work should be appreciated.
His work on the social-political side is truly masterful. Its inluence can be found in John Gray's essential Straw Dogs and Black Mass.
As can be seen, the software is fucking with us.
I'll just post this once. Maybe it will show up, maybe it won't.
Just started Philosophy and Social Hope, and after 7 years of reading MY, it all felt vaguely familar.
I think Rorty will be very good for me.
so let me just say: you cannot stand outside of language while describing language, so the project of classical philosophy is ultimately impossible to complete. (That doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing, though.) The human brain is structured through signs and signifiers; as long as that duality exists (that is, as long as there's such a thing as human consciousness) you can't possibly hope to have Real or True knowledge. Can't, won't, ever.
From reading bits and pieces of Rorty years ago before I gave up on him (admitting my own glibness and ignorance, I know), Freddie's post pretty much strikes me as Rorty in a nutshell: irritatingly insistent and simplistic about something, to the extent that it's true, should have already been obvious. I'm not sure how it improves on William James, Dewey, or Wittgenstein, other than adding to them what I believe is a shallow "language turn."
The human brain is structured through signs and signifiers? Hmmm, language is, certainly. The human brain? That seems like a rather large assumption on which to base a philosophy. Read James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience," and tell me again how the human brain is structured.
I guess I see the target of Rorty's sort of postmodern rhetoric as a strawman, Joe Bleau, because Shakespeare, Montaigne, Emerson, Nietzsche, etc... beat philosophers such as Rorty to the punch a long time ago and much more readably and penetratingly. So to answer your question, I'm obviously not an analytic philosophy guy. I started as a philosophy major in college, because, in my 19-year-old naivete, I actually believed Emerson, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Lao Tzu...were philosophers: you know, writers who tried to understand and engage the mysterious and complex world in which they lived in the context of what those who came before them had written. Silly me.
Worrying about the problem of describing language outside of language is why I wish I'd met Saul Bellow. (While we're addressing the question of smart people we wish we'd met.) Intellectual pursuits beget clownishness, and Bellow was sympathetic to both.
"Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a normal sky, Mr Artur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of his West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books and papers. In a way, it did not matter much to a man of seventy-plus, and at leisure. You had to be a crank to insist on being right. Being right was largely a matter of explanations. Intellectual man had become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to
husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul, explained. The roots of this, the causes of the other, the source of events, the reasons why. For the most part, in one ear out the other. The soul wanted what it wanted."
And
"Short views!"
"you cannot stand outside of language while describing language"
This is a classic example of begging the question. You may be right, but good luck proving that without resorting to some sort of Absolute truth.
"you can't possibly hope to have Real or True knowledge."
I don't give a shit about analytic philosophy, so forgive me if I'm being impudent, but I've never understood what all the fuss is about; either this is false or it's so banal it's completely meaningless.
I was never fond of Rorty, but at least he was never a nazi, or even worse as smug and prolix as Lacan or Zizek.
Politics is an honorable and necessary activity, not something unclean as you seem to feel it is
Uh, no. You can't point to anything in my comment to support the bolded part, because you are making it up.
Rorty was a political, not a philosophical, thinker. He was quite clear that, as far as he cared, political thought had already arrived at the right answers, and thus it was a matter of implementing the program. (Being Rorty, he was careful to call this his "hunch," but that was his operating principle nonetheless.)
Now, as it happens, I think J.S. Mill's program would be an improvement over the present state of society, so I didn't disagree with Rorty's politics.
But philosophy is not about advancing an ideology; philosophy is self-critical, "dessicating," as I suspect some of Socrates' detractors might have said.
Rorty was sufficiently dismayed by the nature of philosophy that he tried to argue that its self-critical function should be turned away from the public sphere and into "private bliss."
Philosophy has plenty to say about politics -- I mean, duh -- but Rorty was not practicing political philosophy.
Rorty was trying to get philosophy to engage the people you liked to read, Ban. He wasn't trying to surpass them.
He failed, though. There was an insurgent attempt within the profession in the late seventies and early eighties, but it failed. I believe that the losers maintained control of a few departments and may have been assigned minority niches in a few others, but the game was lost. It was bureaucratic politics, and completely unphilosophical. (Don't imagine a great debate, with one side losing the argument). The analytics won the vote, and after that they increasingly controlled hiring, firing and promotion. (When analytic philosophers are engaged in a power struggle with cash value, BTW, they drop their analytic methodologies and resort to misrepresentation and hysterical smears).
Brian Leiter claims that there's no such things as analytic philosophy, just philosophy. That's an index of how total the analytic triumph was: the other people don't even exist for them. The analytics are now trying to broaden philosophy a little bit, on their own terms, but the signs are bad. I just read Leiter's "Nietzsche on Ethics" and it was horrible.
Qualification: Rawls seems to have been accepted into the analytic family, even though in Rorty's terms he was notable for his non-analyitic methods. But that's a very limited broadening.
PMN is one of the most important books of the 20th century.
Unfortunately, the Kripke/Lewis "gotcha" style of philosophy won. Oh well - mebbe in a hundred years or so.
Indeed, my hunch is that Western social and political thought may have had the last *conceptual* revolution it needs. J.S. Mill's suggestion that governments devote themselves to optimizing the balance between leaving people's private lives alone and preventing suffering seems to me pretty much the last word.
Rorty, CIS at 63.
He tried unsuccessfully to get analytic philosophy out of the the obsession with scientoid metaphysics that makes it unreadable to almost everyone.
Yeah, well you know The Critique of Pure Reason is also unreadable to almost everyone who has not put in the effort necessary to master the tradition of thought from which it arises.
And yet Kant was very much an engaged philosopher, writing a great deal of very influential material on the moral and political challenges of his time. The same difficulty characterize Das Kapital, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and other serious intellectual works. Sophisticated theories about truth, cognition, reason, substance, parts and wholes, the fundamental categories of reality, consciousness, mind-dependence and related matters tend to be fairly abstract, and debates in the field employ a specialized conceptual apparatus and body of well-developed techniques. They have been this way since the time of Aristotle at least. The notion that these debates must be automatically intelligible to the average reader of the New York Review of Books, even if that reader has not spent a good deal of time acquiring the relevant bodies of specialized knowledge, is a form of anti-intellectualism that is no less implausible in philosophy than it is in any other field.
This has nothing to do with whether one is inclined toward foundationalist or anti-foundationalist theories of knowledge, for example. It's just a question of recognizing the difference between advanced fields of study and more popularly accessible one. Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was a fairly decent book, I thought, although I disagreed with much of it and found it to be a bit half-baked and imprecise. It was all downhill from there in my estimation. Rorty philosophical work gradually became more intellectually lazy, and Rorty appeared more-and-more to be a dilettante. I thought his argumentation was generally very weak, and that he typically had not done the homework required to argue about the issues he was discussing at the highest level - or even the level of a competent second-year grad student. He compensated for these deficiencies by seeking an expanded base of popular support.
I thought his impact on political thought, though fairly minimal, was harmful. Throughout much of the 20th century, there was is an uneasy coalition among groups sometimes referred to collectively as "left-liberalism". The tradition of the left is all about the critique of the political and economic institutions of modern capitalism, and proposals for the reconstruction of those institutions so as to create a more egalitarian society and more genuinely democratic systems of government and social choice. The tradition of classical liberalism is all the tolerance of different ideas and ways of life and a preference for economic liberty, minimal economic organization and and weakly regulated markets. Obviously there is a great deal of tension between these traditions, but they managed to create a loose fusion in response to extreme right-wing movements like fascism and McCarthyism.
The fusion was a bit of a mess though, and to me Rorty represents that body of lame, post-Reagan liberalism that abandoned serious social and economic analysis, and serious commitment to structural economic reform - that is, most of what had made left-liberalism a movement of the left - in favor of endless and endlessly fragmenting side-debates about sub-cultural tolerance, and an unimaginative economic centrism. This growing intellectual decadence and imbecility in what was once the left is one of the reasons that the labor movement was on the run, market fundamentalism was on the rise and we have seen a continued rightward drift in economic policy for decades.
I just read Leiter's "Nietzsche on Ethics" and it was horrible.
Really? I liked it a lot (surprise). I thought he did a pretty good job restating N's arguments in "analytic" form, which unfortunately is a necessary task given how many people think N didn't have arguments.
If you haven't already, you should blog your review of the book -- I'm curious what was "horrible" about it.
Anderson, why make that absolute disjunction between politics and philosophy? Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Dewey, Mill, and many others were political in a philosophical way, and philosophical in a political way. It's not problematic.
And they all "advanced ideologies". Every single one of them. (In fact, analytic philosophy is tacitly political or crypto-political: it supports technocratic government by experts with minimal public engagement).
Since logical positivism, and increasingly by the decade even after logical positivism was superseded, professional philosophy has detached itself from public engagement and from writing for the general public (not even for highly-educated non-specialists in philosophy). Your statements have been simple assertions of the principles behind this shift.
There are many criticisms I would make about Rorty, but what you've been saying is off the mark.
Dan Kervick, the reason scientoid metaphysics is unreadable is not because of the difficulty, but because if you ever at any point ask yourself "What value would there be in mastering this stuff?", you won't be able to answer. People read lots of difficult stuff, but scientoid ,metaphysics has no payoff.
The exceptions are: if you're in AI, or if you enjoy argument and expect to make a living as a philosopher. But this is a terribly narrowed definition of philosophy.
My interest in Rorty is as someone who tried and failed to change philosophy. After he failed he limped on as a tenured pariah in the biz. He's hardly my favorite political actor / thinker, but he represented an opening of his profession that would have been nice. I don't think that things you miss in Rorty are present in other professional philosophers.
My distinction is between reasoning about what politics are preferable, and advocating for those politics.
Sure, those who think they've argued that X is preferable are also going to advocate X.
I distinguish Rorty from the philosophers you've named because Rorty is announcedly not interested in arguing about what politics we should have. He doesn't think that's an interesting question.
And he expressly renounces argument with someone who disagrees with his politics -- that would be "metaphysics."
The problem I have with Rorty is that, as he notes, ironic "redescription" of other people is hostile and even cruel, whereas benightedly metaphysical people who disagree with me are susceptible to being led to my politics by metaphysical arguments.
The ironist should be able to play the metaphysician, ironically. Nietzsche saw this; Rorty, at least in the work I'm most familiar with (CIS), did not.
Dan Kervick, the reason scientoid metaphysics is unreadable is not because of the difficulty, but because if you ever at any point ask yourself "What value would there be in mastering this stuff?", you won't be able to answer.
What is the value in mastering Paradise Lost, I wonder?
I wouldn't care to "master" either Milton or Quine, but I can't argue the value of it for people who like that kind of thing.
All of the philosophers I name both reasoned and advocated. "On Liberty" was a tract. The two Treatises on Government were tracts. Dewey engaged himself in particular political battles.
Political and ethical philosophy just can't disengage themselves from persuasion; politics and ethics are persuasion.
Rorty did reject the need to find foundations for politics, and that at some point there's nothing to argue about -- at some point the arguments stop. If we want to end the practice of human sacrifice , we'll use a combination of force and persuasion. We don't have to ground our rejection of human sacrifice on some deep principle, because if we did, that would mean that human sacrifice would remain legitimate if someone were able to call the deep principle into question.
I think that Rorty overdid his relativism in one sense. In various sciences, the ones called hard sciences, social consensus is often easy to reach, to the point that you could say that it's not a social consensus but an absolute truth. This is rarely true in human affairs, and the fantasy of philosophy has been to believe that it might be made true or become true sometime. In other words, relativism isn't really evenly distributed through all forms of discourse.
Th O-ring question basically was about how much risk it was acceptable to take. It wasn't a factual question about O-rings. The process was a bureaucratic process in which key information either was not forwarded to the top, or was ignored when it arrived. The Reagan people gambled and lost, though they never suffered any consequences. It was not impossible that the launch would have gone off successfully, in which case it would have been a great triumph.
I have no doubts about the value of "Paradise Lost", but I think that analytc philosophy, with limited exceptions, is a dead end. It just doesn't seem to contribute usable understanding in proportion to its difficulty.
I'm not talking about someone else's decision that analytic philosophy has some worth. I'm talking about my own.
This really isn't a tolerance issue. Analytic philosophy makes some pretty strong claims to being an important window on reality. Almost all analytic philosophers claim to have superseded all past philosophy, which has value insofar as it anticipated or contributed to analytic philosophy. (Even Wittgenstein and Popper get that treatment now). I basically reject this claim.
Interesting story: I hear that George Bush also decided to forego analytic philosophy at Yale and to major in history instead because analytic philosophy was just too darn hard and the only people who liked it were a bunch of pointy-headed ivory tower innaleckshuls.
I think that's also why he didn't go into particle physics...
Those interested in the sociology of knowledge - where Rorty's ideas came from - might be interested in this:
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/05/07/mclemee
GC: thanks for the link.
Here's another interesting link relevant to the sociology of knowledge and how it relates to Rorty and analytic philosophy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy
We don't have to ground our rejection of human sacrifice on some deep principle, because if we did, that would mean that human sacrifice would remain legitimate if someone were able to call the deep principle into question.
Y'know, 5 years ago you could've used "torture" as your example, and the hypo would've worked just fine. Just goes to show.
Until we're in the liberal utopia, we're going to have to argue from first principles and The Way Things Really Are, whatever our private reservations about the existence of either. We're going to have to argue with people who think torture *is* legitimate, and persuade them that they're wrong by their own lights, their own first principles.
And if we're going to be persuasive, we're going to have to argue dialectically, i.e., open to the possibility of being refuted ourselves.
In short, we're going to have to do philosophy, bad old philosophy. It's not going to persuade the David Addingtons of the world, but that should not distract us from the fact that most people -- thank god -- are not David Addington.
It's not going to persuade the David Addingtons of the world, but that should not distract us from the fact that most people -- thank god -- are not David Addington.
It's surprising how many Addingtons there are. There's a great Eric Ambler spy novel, Background to Danger, in which a journalist is on the run for a murder he didn't commit. He gets help from a British traveling salesman whose familiarity with the non-English world gave him a rather jaundiced outlook. In fact his motive for helping the accused journalist was purely to thumb his nose at the Austrias, Italies etc of the world over the myriad petty and not-so-petty cruelties he'd witnessed. And while the traveling salesman is reciting his litany of horrors that the ordinary folk he encountered had committed, it's depressing to think how easily so many ordinary Germans shortly after this (1937) took up the task of incinerating their brethren. In the right circumstances, people are capable of anything. A steady diet of fetid rationales and genuine danger and you can get a whole raft of the willing.
That's persuasion, not philosophy, Anderson. In particular, when you argue from someone else's first principles, which you do not share.
Argument can be a form of persuasion. But in analytic philosophy is something else, something autonomous and true.
We may have out own functional first principles, but we don't have to argue them, and can't. We don't have to defend them against someone who doesn't share them. If we have a dispute with someone who doesn't share our principles, our options are persuasion, force, compromise, bargaining, and separation.
Ban Johnson's comments are right on target.
It's very unlikely that Rorty or any other philosopher will have much influence either on fundamental physical science or on the sorts of political pressures which distort the consensus on practical engineering problems. On the other hand educators, political scientists etc. are often looking for excuses to not think rigorously about real data and robust theories (e.g. thermodynamics), including data and analysis on questions like global warming. Rorty was very much an enabler of that sort of escapism. It was surprising to see MY cite him as a favorite.
Rorty was very much an enabler of that sort of escapism
There's no evidence for that. The global warming deniers are known, and as far as I know none of them are Rortians. They're mostly mercenaries and cynics, but seem especially motivated by know-nothing Christianity and cornucopian economic fundamentalism.
Relativism of the Rortian type, or some other type, can enable obscurantism, but so can insistence on an excessively rigorous argument. One of the toxic things about analytic argument, in my view, is its propensity for dragging out very argument indefinitely. Contrarian quibblers find many useful tools in analytic argumentation.
Rorty was very much an enabler of that sort of escapism
There's no evidence for that. The global warming deniers are known, and as far as I know none of them are Rortians. They're mostly mercenaries and cynics, but seem especially motivated by know-nothing Christianity and cornucopian economic fundamentalism.
Relativism of the Rortian type, or some other type, can enable obscurantism, but so can insistence on an excessively rigorous argument. One of the toxic things about analytic argument, in my view, is its propensity for dragging out very argument indefinitely. Contrarian quibblers find many useful tools in analytic argumentation.
Argument can be a form of persuasion. But in analytic philosophy is something else, something autonomous and true.
I completely disagree. There are two kinds of persuasion: rational and irrational. If you want rational persuasion there's no better place to learn about it than in analytic philosophy. If you want bullshit that gives bullshit a bad name look to postmodernism.
Emerson is trying to have it both ways. The hard stuff in analytic philsophy that Emerson complains about is not the first principles it sometimes appeals to but the incredibly precise argumentation. That's also what makes physics difficult but that's no knock on physics.
Emersonians will argue that analytic philosophy hasn't produced results like physics but I would argue two things:
1) That's not true. In addition to a great deal of clarification and debunking, I think, for example, a consequentialist argument that there should be a progressive tax system because there are diminishing marginal returns to having money and it will increase median utility is quite persuasive. I learned that from political theorists in the analytic school.
Is analytic philosophy pragmatically inert? I don't think so. I work in politics and I use arguments like the above all the time and have even persuaded some people. In general many of the most effective arguments in politics are also the most rational -- believe it or not.
2) Philosophy is less advanced than other areas of inquiry because philosophy is harder.
I have conceded that philosophy of mind has, in fact, produced results usable in AI, psychology, neuroscience, and related fields. The problem is that this is only a small part of philosophy. I would just reassign those people to psychology and revitalize the other areas of philosophy.
Analytic philosophy is not a good place to learn rational persuasion. It takes forever to decide a question in analytic philosophy, and along the way you end up going down all kinds of hypothetical side roads. What I remember is the "other minds" argument: if we're arguing about whether other minds exist, how are we going to say anything about any social question. That's an old argument, but whenever I look at analytic philosophy they seem to be off on sidetracks arguing side issues in enormous detail.
As a case in point, humans live in irreversible, directional time, but analytic philosopher often assume, or hope for, or argue for the possibility of, reversible time or a world of timeless truths.
I worked for Rorty at UVA. He was a really, really nice man.
Shorter Richard Rorty: there are no authoritative metanarratives other than, you know, mine...
"Shorter Richard Rorty: there are no authoritative metanarratives other than, you know, mine..."
Yes, to assert something is to assert that thing as TRUE. No doubt about that.
But of course it misses Rorty's entire point.
Right, right, sherriffruitfly. Rorty filled all those books with not-assertions backed by his not-grand metanarratives.
Uh, I think...not.
Derrida has already explained that all something-or-anothers are self-refuting. Kick the ladder away etc.
But surely Derrida didn't do something as analytic as give an explanation! You must have meant to say that he engaged in a really interesting conversation in which he talked about something or other -- but not authoritatively! Can't have that.
It would be helpful if it could be clarified what and who we're talking about exactly - everybody and their dog has been called/calls himself an "analytic philosopher", yet when one actually reads some of their works, they tend not to conform to the rather one-dimensional image of "analytic philosophy" that is always put forward in discussions like this, both by its detractors and opponents. To give an example: Quine is regarded as one of the most eminent analytic philosophers of the 20th century, yet anybody who has read his Two Dogmas will have a hard time reconciling it with "analytic philosophy" as it exists in popular perception.
erm, I meant:
"detractors and proponents"
Leiter denies that analytic philosophy exists, but he's just denying that there's any non-analytic philosophy of any merit. Analytic philosophy is defined in considerable part by those excluded, the ones who claim to be philosopher but, according to Leiter, aren't, or at least are no good. But there are methodological consistencies, for example the extreme emphasis on rigorous argument rather than on insight.
I would call everyone an analytic of the lineage of Frege, and probably also the Rortyans and Nozickians. There are a lot of philosophers for whom Frege was not of central importance.
I remember reading some saying that Sidgwick was the greatest of ethicists. Probably the lineage of Sidgwick, which includes Rawls, is another analytic component.
Interesting that you put Rawls in the lineage of Sidgwick, since Sidgwick is perhaps the greatest utilitarian and Rawls is a notorious critic of utilitarianism. I think you're right though because as much as he huffs and puffs, Rawls' theory is, at bottom, a consequentialist one too.
I know nothing about Sidgwick, but I've seen him well spoken of, including by Rawls. My guess is that his argumentation is appropriately analytic.
Sidgwick's argument was indeed analytic, as were pretty much all philosophic arguments until the interpretive turn in the 20th Century, and, for that matter, all good arguments since then as well.
You're full of shit, Fool. One of the things analytic philosophy prides itself on is an improvement of the argumentation compared to earlier philosophers. Sidgwick apparently satisfies their standards; most pre-Frege philosophers don't, though they're given points for anticipations of analytic philosophy.
You're absolutely right, Johnny my boy. Allow me to amend my remarks as follows:
Sidgwick's argument was indeed analytic, as were pretty much all philosophic arguments outside Germany until the interpretive turn in the 20th Century, and, for that matter, all good arguments since then as well.
You're still full of shit, Fool, and you're sounding ignorant and provincial with your predictable little anti-pomo snit. The argumentation of James, Dewey, Popper, and Whitehead, for example, is not acceptable to analytic philosophers. At most they're given credit for being precursors. You wouldn't be allowed write like they do.
I don't think Bertrand Russell, the father of aanlytic philosophy, would have a problem with the WAY James and Dewey write, although he would probably make incisive critiques about their arguments.
As for Popper and Whitehead: you're joking, right? Because you can't be serious. LOL.
Elucidate.
You seem to be flailing.
Well, I admire you for putting a brave face on it Johnny, my boy, but you made a complete fool out of yourself at 6:25.
Chin up, old man!
Still flailing, still no elucidation. Are you saying, for example, that Whitehead's philosophy is taught in analytic departments, or are you laughing at the idea that Whitehead's philosophy should be taught?
Obviously I mean "Process and Reality", not the Principia.
Well I don't know Whitehead was Russell's coauthor and Popper was published by the Vienna Circle...you do the math.
Or if math's not your thing have an edifying conversation with yourself until you achieve ironic solidarity with your inner foolishness.
My ignorant young friend, I was talking about the period after 1950 in the case of Whitehead, and after about 1960 in the case of Popper. Believe it or not, I am perfectly aware that Whitehead was Russell's coauthor during the earlier period. But his original philosophy done after that was ignored, as was Popper's later work.
Which contemporary analytic philosopher would write something like "The Open Society and its Enemies"?
Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatism is probably the most important philosophical trend of the 20th century. I think he represents the way in which the problem of skepticism is best put aside (so what if we can't prove anything, we don't need to), and human responsibility for choosing our goals and means is embraced. This avoids the nihilism of post-modernism, and the "ideology as a kind of religion" of some of political philosophies out there. Pragmatism is winning.
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Comments closed May 29, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
I never cared for Rorty's work, and see him as part of that regrettable trend of dessicated postmodern liberalism which has weakened and intellectually enfeebled the left. I'm glad his time has passed, and hope that the generations taking his place will do better.
Posted by Dan Kervick | May 15, 2008 9:00 AM