Tag: Richard Rorty

Escaping the prison of (philosophical) modernity, part 1: post-analytics and phenomenologists in dialogue

Posted on by Dave Maier

by Dave Maier

By the beginning of the 20th century, it had become clear to an influential minority of philosophers that something was badly amiss with modern philosophy. (There had been gripes of innumerable sorts since the beginning of modernity in the 17th century; but our subject today is the present.) “Modern” here means something like “Lockean and/or Cartesian,” where this means … well, it’s not immediately clear what exactly this means, nor what exactly is wrong with it, and therein lies the tale of a good deal of 20th-century philosophy. As with every broken thing, we have two choices: fix it, or throw it out and get a new one; and many philosophers have advertised their projects as doing one or the other. However, as we might expect, unclarity about the old results in corresponding unclarity about the supposedly better new. What’s the actual difference, philosophically speaking, between rehabilitation and replacement?

Let’s start with what two important groups of contemporary anti-modern philosophers (again, let’s leave pre-moderns out of it for today) say about what they’re doing. We can all agree that (in Wittgenstein’s words, but quoted by all and sundry) “a picture held us captive,” and even, in his continuation, that the way it did this was that “it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us endlessly.” That is, it’s not simply a philosophical theory, the conclusion of an argument we have come to regard as unsound. Even in such relatively straightforward cases, of course, there may be plenty of disagreement about how to continue; but here part of our task is not simply to outline a better view, but also to diagnose and escape this characteristic feature of the old one. Such a treatment would explain how such captivity was possible, and how our very language could turn against us, as well as (naturally) what to do about it. Read more »



Monday, July 9, 2012

What’s wrong with being a sophist?

Posted on by Dave Maier

by Dave Maier

Romano bookCarlin Romano is at it again. On the last occasion, he was eulogizing Richard Rorty; and here he is doing it again, among other things, in a new book, reviewed last week by Anthony Gottlieb in the New York Times. As Gottlieb quotes him, Romano tells us that the sophist Isocrates “should be as famous as Socrates”, given that his conception of philosophy “jibes with American pragmatism and philosophical practice far more than Socrates' view [i.e. considering the latter as the progenitor of Plato and Aristotle, and thus the entire Western philosophical tradition Romano takes Rorty to be rejecting]”.

Gottlieb is not impressed: “My first thought about this claim was that it is simply nuts, which is also my considered view.” (Heh.) As before, Romano enlists Rortyan pragmatism as an ally in his brief for sophistry. Gottlieb: “Rorty had urged philosophers to abandon their intellectual hubris and instead content themselves with interminably swapping enlightening tales from diverse perspectives. It was never clear why anyone would want to listen to such stories without endings.” I'm not particularly happy with this dismissive slap at Rorty's conception of philosophy as “conversation”, of which more below; but let's let Gottlieb continue:

According to pragmatism, our theories should be judged by their practical value rather than by their accuracy in representing the world. The ultimate fate of this idea was neatly put by a great American philosophical wit, Sidney Morgenbesser, who said it was all very well in theory, but didn't work in practice. He meant that pragmatism sounds like a good ruse, but it emerges as either trivial or incoherent when you try to flesh it out.

Morgenbesser was long retired from Columbia when I got there, but he was still around, and he never struck me as having so negative an attitude toward pragmatism as that (he would never have called it a “ruse”; he had too much respect for Isaac Levi to do that). In fact, the way I heard this quip, it was “Pragmatism is true, but it doesn't work.” This is much cleverer (if not thereby more authentic), and a direct response to the Jamesian dictum that “truth is what works.” (Wikipedia has Gottlieb's version, for what it's worth.) My version also avoids (roll that first half of the quip around in your mind for a bit) the lazy equation of pragmatism with sophistry shared by both Gottlieb and Romano, in dismissal and endorsement respectively. Several versions of pragmatism are perfectly compatible with the truth-directed nature of inquiry, even – with some tweaking – Rorty's own. But what about sophism itself? What exactly is wrong with it, that pragmatists should object to the comparison?

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