Rorty Index Locorum

60s
70s
PMN
CP
80s
CIS
ORT
TP
PSH
RHC
PRR


These are uncollected essays from the 1960s.

"Recent Metaphilosophy" in Review of Metaphysics Dec. 1961
"Finally, one may deny the truth of (1) ["A game in which each player is at liberty to change the rules whenever he wishes can neither be won nor lost."], and say that, on the contrary, philosophy is the greatest game of all precisely because it is the game of 'changing the rules.' This game can be won by attending to the patterns by which these rules are changed, and formulating rules in terms of which to judge changes in rules." (301) -- "Rorty's Metaphilosophy"


These are uncollected essays from the 1970s.

"Transcendental Argument, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism" in Transcendental Arguments and Science, eds. Peter Bieri, Rolf-P. Horstmann, and Lorenz Kruger, 1979
"Despite this similarity in strategy -- which seems to me sufficient to let us call Davidson's argument an instance of transcendental argumentation -- the aim of his argument is to make impossible the whole Cartesian and Kantian dialectic which makes skepticism and anti-skeptical transcendental argumentation possible. I construe (pace its author) Davidson's argument against the notion of 'conceptual scheme' and against the 'scheme-content distinction' as an argument for pragmatism, and thus against the possibility of epistemology. Davidson, in other words, seems to me to have found a transcendental argument to end all transcendental arguments -- one which tears down the scaffolding upon which the standard paradigms of 'realistic' transcendental arguments were mounted." (78) -- "Rorty's Metaphilosophy"


Pagination to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is so far standard between all editions.

"It is as if Quine, having renounced the conceptual-empirical, analytic-synthetic, and language-fact distinctions, were still not quite able to renounce that between the given and the postulated. Conversely, Sellars, having triumphed over the latter distinction, cannot quite renounce the former cluster. Despite courteous acknowledgment of Quine's triumph over analyticity, Sellars's writing is still permeated with the notion of 'giving the analysis' of various terms or sentences, and with tacit use of the distinction between the necessary and the contingent, the structural and the empirical, the philosophical and the scientific. Each of the two men tends to make continual, unofficial, tacit, heuristic use of the distinction which the other has transcended. It is as if analytic philosophy could not be written without at least one of the two great Kantian distinctions, and as if neither Quine nor Sellars were willing to cut the last links which bind them to Russell, Carnap, and 'logic as the essence of philosophy.'" (171-2) -- "Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn"


Pagination to Consequences of Pragmatism is so far standard between all editions.

"The essays in this book are attempts to draw consequences from a pragmatist theory about truth. This theory says that truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about. For pragmatists, 'truth' is just the name of a property which all true statements share." (xiii) -- "Are There Bad Questions?"

"Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the Truth or the Good, or to define the word 'true' or 'good,' supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area. It might, of course, have turned out otherwise. People have, oddly enough, found something interesting to say about the essence of Force and the definition of 'number.' They might have found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they haven't. The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call 'philosophy'—a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness." (xiv) -- "Are There Bad Questions?"

"In this second sense, it can mean following Plato's and Kant's lead, asking questions about the nature of certain normative notions (e.g., 'truth,' 'rationality,' 'goodness') in the hope of better obeying such norms. The idea is to believe more truths or do more good or be more rational by knowing more about Truth or Goodness or Rationality. I shall capitalize the term 'philosophy' when used in this second sense, in order to help make the point that Philosophy, Truth, Goodness, and Rationality are interlocked Platonic notions. Pragmatists are saying that the best hope for philosophy is not to practise [sic] Philosophy. They think it will not help to say something true to think about Truth, nor will it help to act well to think about Goodness, nor will it help to be rational to think about Rationality." (xv) -- "Cavell and Romanticism", "Rorty's Metaphilosophy"

"This chorus should not, however, lead us to think that something new and exciting has recently been discovered about Language--e.g., that it is more prevalent than had previously been thought. The authors cited are making only negative points. They are saying that attempts to get back behind language to something which 'grounds' it, or which it 'expresses,' or to which it might hope to be 'adequate,' have not worked." (xx) -- "Rorty's Metaphilosophy"

"The really exasperating thing about literary intellectuals, from the point of view of those inclined to science or to Philosophy, is their inability to engage in such argumentation—to agree on what would count as resolving disputes, on the criteria to which all sides must appeal. In a post-Philosophical culture, this exasperation would not be felt. In such a culture, criteria would be seen as the pragmatist sees them—as temporary resting-places constructed for specific utilitarian ends. On the pragmatist account, a criterion (what follows from the axioms, what the needle points to, what the statute says) is a criterion because some particular social practice needs to block the road of inquiry, halt the regress of interpretations, in order to get something done." (xli) -- "Rorty's Metaphilosophy"

"For the non-Kantian philosophers, there are no persistent problems--save perhaps the existence of the Kantians. Non-Kantian philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida are emblematic figures who not only do not solve problems, the do no have arguments or theses. They are connected with their predecessors not by common subjects or methods but in the 'family resemblance' way in which latecomers in a sequence of commentators on commentators are connected with older members of the same sequence." (93) -- "Are There Bad Questions?"

"What is most distinctively modern in modern literature depends for its effect upon straight men, and especially upon philosophers who defend 'common-sense realism' against idealists, pragmatists, structuralists, and all others who impugn the distinction between the scientist and the poet. The modern revolt against what Foucault calls 'the sovereignty of the signifier' helps us think of the creation of new descriptions, new vocabularies, new genres as the essentially human activity--it suggests the poet, rather than the knower, as the man who realizes human nature. But this is dangerous; the poet needs to be saved from his friends. If the picture picture is as absurd as I think it, it would be well that this absurdity should not become widely known. For the ironist poet owes far more to Parmenides and the tradition of Western metaphysics than does the scientist. The scientific culture could survive a loss of faith in this tradition, but the literary culture might not." (136-7) -- "Two Uses of 'Rational'"


These are uncollected essays from the 1980s.

"Signposts Along the Way that Reason Went," in London Review of Books, Feb. 16 1984
"If you want to know what the common sense of the bookish will be like fifty years from now, read the philosophers currently being attacked as 'irrationalist'. Then discount the constructive part of what they are saying. Concentrate on the negative things, the criticisms they make of the tradition. That dismissal of the common sense of the past will be the enduring achievement of the long-dead 'irrationalist'. His or her suggestions about what to do next will look merely quaint, but the criticisms of his or her predecessors will seem obvious." (5) -- "Two Uses of 'Rational'"

"Reply to Six Critics," in Analyse und Kritik, June 1984
"Few people who use speech rather than guns do not advance such a [rational] vision. If one wants, as [Jay] Rosenberg does, to get Derrida and Heidegger, as well as Rawls and Sellars, in under the description 'philosopher', then one is going to have to explicate 'rational' so broadly that Baudelaire and Brecht and [Alexander] Hamilton will also be advancing 'rational visions', and practicing a 'dialectical' method." (82-3) -- "Two Uses of 'Rational'"

"I realized that I had written a weak last chapter [to PMN] when I found readers of my book concluding that I was calling on philosophers to go out and edify. I managed, alas, to produce the impression that I was both recommending edification as 'the new mission of philosophy', and setting a good example by doing a bit of edification myself. This was disastrous. I had meant to suggest that there were about as many edifying philosophers in a century as there were great and original poets or revolutionary scientific theories - perhaps one or two, if the century was lucky. It is a status I would not dream of claiming myself, nor do I wish to recommend edifying philosophy to the young as a career objective." (84) -- "Two Uses of 'Rational'"


Pagination to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is so far standard between all editions.

"On the view of philosophy which I am offering, philosophers should not be asked for arguments against, for example, the correspondence theory of truth or the idea of the 'intrinsic nature of reality.' The trouble with arguments against the use of a familiar and time-honored vocabulary is that they are expected to be phrased in that very vocabulary. They are expected to show that central elements in that vocabulary are 'inconsistent in their own terms' or that they 'deconstruct themselves.' But that can never be shown." (8) -- "Two Uses of 'Rational'", "Are There Bad Questions?", "Rorty's Metaphilosophy"

"Conforming to my own precepts, I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace. Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics." (9) -- "Rorty's Metaphilosophy"

"It makes perfectly good sense to ask how we got from the relative mindlessness of the monkey to the full-fledged mindedness of the human, or from speaking Neanderthal to speaking postmodern, if these are construed as straightforward causal questions. In the former case the answer takes us off into neurology and thence into evolutionary biology. But in the latter case it takes us into intellectual history viewed as the history of metaphor." (15-6) -- "Notes on Mysticism"

"That one uses familiar words in unfamiliar ways -- rather than slaps, kisses, pictures, gestures, or grimaces -- does not show that what one said must have a meaning. An attempt to state that meaning would be an attempt to find some familiar (that is, literal) use of words -- some sentence which already had a place in the language game -- and, to claim that one might just as well have that. But the unparaphrasability of metaphor is just the unsuitability of any such familiar sentence for one's purpose." (18) -- "Notes on Mysticism"

"If, with Davidson, we drop the notion of language as fitting the world, we can see the point of Bloom's and Nietzsche's claim that the strong maker, the person who uses words as they have never before been used, is best able to appreciate her own contingency. For she can see, more clearly than the continuity-seeking historian, critic, or philosopher, that her language is as contingent as her parents or her historical epoch." (28) -- "Notes on Mysticism"

"But they [Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment] had no suggestions for its [civilization's] friends. They had no utopian vision of a culture which was able to incorporate and make use of an understanding of the dissolvant character of rationality, of the self-destructive character of the Enlightenment. They did not try to show how 'pragmatized thought' might cease to be blind and become clear-sighted." (57) -- "The Representation of Animals"

"It is a familiar fact that the term 'literary criticism' has been stretched further and further in the course of our century. It originally meant comparison and evaluation of plays, poems, and novels – with perhaps an occasional glance at the visual arts. Then it got extended to cover past criticism (for example, Dryden's, Shelley's, Arnold's, and Eliot's prose, as well as their verse). Then, quite quickly, it got extended to the books which had supplied past critics with their critical vocabulary and were supplying present critics with theirs. This meant extending it to theology, philosophy, social theory, reformist political programs, and revolutionary manifestos." (81) -- Philosophy Books for Literature Students"


Pagination to Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth is so far standard between all editions.

"Those who share Dewey's pragmatism will say that although it may need philosophical articulation, it does not need philosophical backup. One this view, the philosopher of liberal democracy may wish to develop a theory of the human self that comports with the institutions he or she admires. But such a philosopher is not thereby justifying these institutions by reference to more fundamental premises, but the reverse: He or she is putting politics first and tailoring a philosophy to suit." (178) -- "Religion, a Utilitarian Ethics of Belief, and the Public/Private Distinction"


Pagination to Truth and Progress is so far standard between all editions.

"My principal suggestion is that [Daniel] Dennett put his claim that the self is a 'center of narrative gravity' in the context of the more general claim that all objects resemble selves in being centers of descriptive gravity. Narratives are just a particular form of description -- the one being employed by novelists and autobiographers -- but the sort of thing novelists do is not all that different from the sort of thing logicians, physicists, and moralists do. All these people are weaving or reweaving sets of descriptions of objects. The only general truth we know, and the only one we need to know, about the relation between the objects and the descriptions is that the object X is what most of the beliefs expressed in statements using the term 'X' are true of." (105) -- "Morton and Metaphysics"

"On my reading of Derrida, he does not 'deny' the existence of any of the things to which Habermas accuses him of being blind. He knows perfectly well that there are communicative practices to which argumentation by reference to standard rules is essential, and that these are indispensable for public purposes. He does not need to say, with [Jonathan] Culler, that 'the serious is a special case of the non-serious,' though he and Habermas should be able to agree that 'other discourses can be seen as cases of a generalized literature' if some useful purpose is served by so seeing them." (313) -- "Two Uses of 'Rational'"


Pagination to Philosophy and Social Hope is so far standard between all editions.

"One of James's most heartfelt convictions was that to know whether a claim should be met, we need only ask which other claims -- 'claims actually made by some concrete person' -- it runs athwart. We need not also ask whether it is a 'valid' claim. He deplored the fact that philosophers still followed Kant rather than Mill, still thought of validity as raining down upon a claim...." (148) -- "Rorty, Religion, and Romance"

"It is a consequence of James's utilitarian view of the nature of obligation that the obligation to justify one's beliefs arises only when one's habits of action interfere with the fulfilment [sic] of others' needs. The underlying strategy of James's utilitarian/pragmatist philosophy of religion is to privatize religion. This privatization allows him to construe the supposed tension between science and religion as the illusion of opposition between cooperative endeavors and private projects." (149) -- "Religion, a Utilitarian Ethics of Belief, and the Public/Private Distinction"

"The wrongness of believing without evidence is, therefore, the wrongness of pretending to participate in a common project while refusing to play by the rules." (151) -- "Religion, a Utilitarian Ethics of Belief, and the Public/Private Distinction"

"When we encounter paradigmatic cases of unjustifiable beliefs -- Kierkegaard's belief in the Incarnation, the mother's belief in the essential goodness of her sociopathic child -- we can still use the attribution of such beliefs to explain what is going on: why Kierkegaard, or the mother, are doing what they are doing. We can give content to an utterance like 'I love him' or 'I have faith in Him' by correlating such utterances with patterns of behaviour , even when we cannot do so by fixing the place of such utterances in a network of inferential relations." (159-60) -- "Religion, a Utilitarian Ethics of Belief, and the Public/Private Distinction"


Pagination to Rorty and His Critics (ed. Robert Brandom) is so far standard between all editions.

"Wittgensteinians, however, wonder if the target should not rather have been the idea that the ability to act in ways which are capturable in a recursive theory requires one to describe the agent as applying such a theory. In the case at hand, they wonder whether the ability to cope with Mrs. Malaprop need be described as the ability to converge with her on any sort of theory, any more than the ability of two bicyclists to avoid collision is an ability to agree on a passing theory of passing. Whatever the competence of these bicyclists consists in, is there any particular reason to think that it is having a theory?" (75) -- "Rorty's Metaphilosophy"

"As far as doctrines within what we Anglo-Saxons call 'the philosophy of mind' or 'the philosophy of language' go, the view I attribute to this 'Continental' figures are, indeed, best expressed in 'Anglo-Saxon' terms. But such doctrines -- such arguable-for propositions -- are not all you get out of these writers. From Heidegger and Derrida you get a brilliantly original idiom (Heideggerese, Derridean) of which it is useful to have a command. From Foucault you get a kind of know-how, a way of looking askance and obliquely at contemporary institutions and practices, analogous to the kind of know-how you pick up from Marx and Weber. Had these three thinkers had to write in the idiom of analytic philosophy, we would have lost a lot. They would have found the idiom imprisoning, just as Peirce and Frege would have chafed at having to write in the idiom of the philosophy professors who made up their proximate intellectual environments." (149) -- "Notes on Mysticism"


Pagination to The Philosophy of Richard Rorty (eds. Auxier and Hahn) is so far standard between all editions.

"Consider Davidson's thesis that most of our beliefs must be true, or Brandom's inferentialist theory about the origin of singular terms. Such theses and theories provide answers to questions like, 'Well, what will we say about the relation between language and nonlanguage, once we abandon the familiar "realist" account?' By providing the pragmatist with such answers, they facilitate his propagandizing efforts. Not everybody feels it necessary to pose such questions seriously, but when somebody does it is nice to be able to gratify her. Though sometimes it works best to say, 'that's a bad question, one that we pragmatists don't ask,' with some interlocutors it is more effective to reply, 'here's an answer to that question, since you insist on asking it.'" (247-8) -- "Are There Bad Questions?"