Rorty and The End of Philosophy (1 of 3)

'Rorty and The End of Philosophy'. Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 -- June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His complex intellectual background gave him a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the analytic tradition in philosophy he would later famously reject. The philosophical program he developed included a rejection of a representationalist account of knowledge, a concept he referred to as a "mirror of nature," which he saw as a holdover from Platonism and pervasive throughout the history of philosophy. In response to this tradition, which he saw embodied by analytic philosophy, Rorty developed a novel form of pragmatism in which scientific and philosophical methods are merely contingent "vocabularies" which are abandoned or adopted over time according to social conventions and usefulness. Abandoning the representationalist account of knowledge, Rorty believed, would lead to a state of mind he referred to as "ironism", in which people are completely aware of the contingency of their placement in history and of their vocabulary. For Rorty, this brand of philosophy is always tied to the notion of "social hope," that without the ideas of representation and other concepts standing in the way between the mind and the world, human society would be more free. His best known book is Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).

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Education

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• Philosophy
• Rorty
• Pragmatism

[alisthaboss]

Who is this talking, Do u guys know wich course series this is? Sounds familjer,, hm? Do anyboddy know??

[suddenlyitsobvious]

...MEASURE, a GOLDEN STANDARD.

Everything is stripped of intrinsic sense and meaning which of course opens the way for the social engineers to attach NEW MEANINGS to everything, redefining everything, which of course is a sine qua non for the orwellian society we're heading into...

[suddenlyitsobvious]

It comes as no surprise in this system, that is so taken with notions of 'deconstruction' (read: nihilism) that THIS kind of approach would earn Rorty all the laurels in the world:

'Abandoning the representationalist account of knowledge, Rorty believed, would lead to a state of mind he referred to as "ironism", in which people are completely aware of the contingency of their placement in history and of their vocabulary.'

WHAT is lacking here? As always, always the same thing: an ABSOLUTE...

[suddenlyitsobvious]

...DIRECTLY, without this knowledge coming about through some circular delusion through interposed mechanisms that must be 'relative'. However, the system has always preferred dealing with dumbed down masses than psychologically awake people, wherefore such awareness is discouraged in society at large, and influential theories always make sure to emphasize the RELATIVITY (read: meaninglessness, void) of it all.

[suddenlyitsobvious]

Quantum-physicists are today agreed that everything IS connected, there are no boundaries, and if we accept their conclusion, that all sensitive, connected people know to be true from direct experience, the basis of your rendering of Rorty's philosophy -'lack of immediate relation' wherefore 'our cognition is always mediated by what Rorty called a final vocabulary'- is merely a description of the results of social conditioning, NOT of 'human nature' or our natural make-up.

People CAN know...

[bluetoebeing]

superb 

[carlo88moe]

i use to have this series, its an excellent collection....thnx for posting:)

[pedagogyagent]

Thank you for this lecture . You explain things excellently .