Search Results (19)

This paper illustrates how Hongzhou Chan Buddhism provides valuable resources for dealing with issues in contemporary moral philosophy. In particular, when philosophers adopt the Hongzhou Chan Buddhist’s non-dualistic account of reality, we can see how their teachings provide us with important resources needed for resolving philosophical problems that were originally undertaken by philosophers like the American Pragmatists John Dewey and Richard Rorty. When the pragmatists hoped to extirpate traditional metaphysics from moral philosophy, one of their focuses was on providing an alternative to the morality/prudence distinction. As this study illustrates, by overcoming the metaphysical dualism between the “unconditioned” and the “conditioned”, the Hongzhou Chan Buddhist can provide an account of compassion that is unconditionally grounded. Their account of compassion can then be understood as bridging the divide between “morality” and “prudence”. Full article

This paper explores two routes along which a pragmatic philosophical approach can contribute to reflections on agnosticism. The first of these approaches is developed in dialogue with William James, and it is oriented towards the needs and obligations of individuals and the extent to which agnosticism affects our abilities to lead strenuous lives. The second is developed in dialogue with Richard Rorty. It is oriented towards how agnosticisms can be adopted within particular vocabularies vis-a-vis other vocabularies as a pragmatically helpful strategy or skill. I discuss the extent to which these can contribute to philosophical reflection on agnosticism and propose that they show that the agnosticism debate would benefit from a broadened focus where epistemic and pragmatic considerations are better integrated than presently. This would enable us to discuss different types of agnosticism that come to the fore in various contexts and whether they prevent us or allow us to better handle concrete problems in our interactions with the world. Full article

People harass people to defend and promote their fundamental beliefs, political ideologies, religious dogmas, and the Truth. They create these with marvelous lucidity and unnerving verve, spreading, guarding, and enforcing their convictions. Fanatical ideologies penetrate and pollute our life world like “lyrical leprosy”. We need a coping strategy. Conformists may want to go along and join the perpetrators, whomever they happen to be. Activists fight ideological pollution, a risky strategy. Indifference and apathy do not pollute others and are less dangerous than rebelling. Following E. M. Cioran, I discuss three defensive strategies: those of a skeptic, an idler, and an aesthete. I reject trivializing the third strategy; instead, I discuss an ironist’s options. A recommendable route to indifference is to read the Truth metaphorically and ironize it. This voids its contents, and the result is adiaphora. We can also start with irony and metaphorize it. Such linguistic–aesthetic methods thwart the viperous dogmas that otherwise harass us from the cradle to the grave. The Truth is a treacherous construct. How to avoid it? How to deflect ideologically motivated terror? Full article

In this paper, I discuss the importance of practices of disidentification and imagination for democratic progress and change. To this end, I bring together certain aspects of Stanley Cavell’s and Richard Rorty’s reflections on democracy, aesthetics, and morality with Jacques Rancière’s account of the importance of appearance for democratic participation. With Rancière, it can be shown that any public–political order always involves the possibility (and often the reality) of exclusion or oppression of those who “have no part” in the current order through a particular order of perceptibility, and that democratic action, therefore, requires rupturing acts of political agency on the part of self-proclaimed political actors through which disidentifications and constructions of difference against such existing orders become possible. With Cavell and Rorty, in turn, it can be shown that these rupturing moments, in order to actually become politically effective, require a responsive disposition and a willingness to engage in practices of imagination on the part of those who occupy dominant positions on existing orders, insofar as they must acknowledge the expression of others’ sense of injustice. The upshot of my discussion is that a comprehensive account of the aesthetic dimension of democratic politics must simultaneously address the interruption of political action on the one hand and responsiveness on the other, and that Rancière and the neo-pragmatists Rorty and Cavell complement each other insofar as they illuminate the blind spots of their respective approaches. Full article

Tragic irony may mean the dramatic irony in scripted tragedy (tragic play). The audience can predict the regrettable outcome on the stage before the main characters do. I focus on non-scripted events and their tragic aspects. Colloquially, disaster and tragedy are synonyms, but this is misleading. Tragedy means a disaster in special circumstances, which I suggest we can read ironically. This is to say, as I argue, tragedy is necessarily ironic. I read Richard Rorty on irony and Hegel on tragic irony and cunning of reason. My aim is to redescribe real-life conflicts by using the dialectical understanding of irony and tragedy. Following Rorty and Hegel, I apply their theories of identity to real tragedies. The validation of the theory of literary criticism is a practical matter. My key illustrations come from modern wars; wars are and cause disasters, and thus I expect we can discover cases of tragic irony in factual and counterfactual contexts. Sometimes, the losses and suffering would have been meaningless regardless of the war’s outcome. The winner suffers, but it would have been better not to win. The losers suffer, but it would not have been better had they won. A total defeat would have been better than a conditional one. These redescriptions show the ironic differences between disaster and tragedy in non-scripted contexts—and all these cases are controversial. Full article

This article responds to the arguments put forth by Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen in Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (1994). It argues that the said work is representative of the widespread tendency in literary theory today to discard the possibility of literary truth, and it provides counterarguments to the work’s main theses. Consequently, it criticizes the philosophy of pragmatism and its implications, and it offers a theory that defines fictional objects as existing and solves contradictions that commonly affect our debates on the ontology of fiction. The article does not provide a positive theory of literary truth, but it undermines its denials, which have become popular in recent decades. Full article

Nearly all philosophical inquiry is rooted in contingency. From ontology and theories of God to politics and ethics, dealing with, explaining, planning for, or even following contingency is a consistent theme. In the background of their recent works, Michael Sandel, Hartmut Rosa, John Gray, and Richard Rorty all see contingency and autonomy in a see-saw relationship: more of one correspondingly results in less of the other. Daoist philosophical reflections provide a different take on contingency. We can still have an experience of “self” and of making choices without positing any notion of autonomy outside of contingency. Full article

Richard Rorty speaks of “we ironists” who use irony as the primary tool in their scholarly work and life. We cannot approach irony in terms of truth, simply because, due to its ironies, the context no longer is metaphysical. This is Rorty’s challenge. Rorty’s promise focuses on top English Departments: they are hegemonic, they rule over the humanities, philosophy, and some social sciences using their superior method of ironizing dialectic. I refer to Hegel, Gerald Doherty’s “pornographic” writings, and Gore Vidal’s non-academic critique of academic literary criticism. My conclusion is that extensive use of irony is costly; an ironist must regulate her relevant ideas and speech acts—Hegel makes this clear. Irony is essentially confusing and contestable. Why would we want to use irony in a way that trumps metaphysics? Metaphysics, as defined by Rorty, is a problematic field, but irony can hardly replace it. At the same time, I admit that universal irony is possible, that is, everything can be seen in ironic light, or ironized. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and criticize Rorty’s idea of irony by using his own methodology, that is, ironic redescription. We can see the shallowness of his approach to irony by contextualizing it. This also dictates the style of the essay. Full article

This paper elucidates the structure of moral action by arguing that Dante’s explanation in the Inferno of why people end up in their respective circles of hell is superior in terms of accounting for the structure of moral reasoning to Richard Rorty’s promotion of the “liberal ironist.” The latter suffers an internal contradiction—it wants a well-lived life without any overriding aims, but such a life is understandable only in light of affirming life-aims. The former convincingly shows that the structure of action reveals the truth of the well-known apothegm—“we reap what we sow.” The main point for Dante is not who is rational (for even the rational can be vicious, as depicted in the Inferno), but whose aims actually fulfill the practical life. This comparison of Dante and Rorty can have larger pedagogical aims, helping students to understand better what Albert William Levi calls “the moral imagination” and deepening their appreciation of how metaphors and paradigms of moral excellence provide, or fail to provide, an overriding unity and purpose to our actions. Full article

This paper takes up the practice and ideas of Richard Rorty and Jane Addams, considering their work at the intersection of pragmatism and social action. It argues that both Richard Rorty and Jane Addams, each in their own way, were thinking through the significant challenges that confront individuals in their everyday lives: How do we adjudicate between the competing values of individual accountability and helping others in our community? This is our social test, and the way we each answer the question matters for the future of democracy and our degree of social hope. Rorty was a champion of engagement with the community, and believed that out of this experience comes our capacity to creatively weave the fabric of liberal democracy. The paper argues that Addams’s work at Hull-House in Chicago offers concrete examples of the potential of reciprocal social relations, providing practical substance to Rorty’s ideas and showing how we can create social hope through action. Full article

Richard Rorty was a strong contextualist in his approach to philosophical and political ideas, yet his own most characteristic arguments are typically evaluated without much reference to the historical circumstances that provoked them. A key participant in the post-1980 revival of pragmatism within North American and European intellectual circles, Rorty reaffirmed the strong connections between American pragmatism and German idealism. This move placed him at odds with scholars who forged the unity of pragmatism—united John Dewey and William James—under the banner of radical empiricism. Those engaged most enthusiastically in celebrating Rorty’s achievements, in short, defend a conception of pragmatism that Rorty sharply criticized and ideas about the history of philosophy that he did not share. His distinctive intellectual agenda is best appreciated after setting it in the context of the history of the American Left and, more specifically, the reckoning with the tumultuous 1960s that animates so many ongoing debates—inside and outside the academy—about cultural and political affairs. Full article

In Contingency, irony and solidarity Rorty attempts to solve what Robert Pippin calls the ‘Modernity Problem’ by outlining a new self-understanding for the intellectuals of the ideal liberal society. The so-called liberal ironists of this post-philosophical milieu are no longer characterized by the quest for what Rorty describes as ‘a single vision’. This paper evaluates Rorty’s attempt to conceptualize the self-image of post-philosophical intellectuals in the light of two similar endeavors; namely, Nietzsche’s and the ancient Sceptics’. The preliminary conclusion is that although Rorty’s attempt fails, it points to an alternative way of interpreting the desire for a single vision; namely, as a form of autobiography. Drawing on Nietzsche, Nagel and Mill, the paper proceeds to argue that Rorty’s own autobiographical fragment exemplifies the way in which the narration of a failed attempt to find a ‘single vision’ can itself be seen as the achievement of such a vision. Full article

One of Richard Rorty's legacies is to have put a Jamesian version of pragmatism on the contemporary philosophical map. Part of his argument has been that pragmatism and analytic philosophy are set against each other, with pragmatism almost having been killed off by the reigning analytic philosophy. The argument of this paper is that there is a better and more interesting reading of both the history of pragmatism and the history of analytic philosophy. Full article

We revisit an important exchange on the problem of radical skepticism between Richard Rorty and Michael Williams. In his contribution to this exchange, Rorty defended the kind of transcendental approach to radical skepticism that is offered by Donald Davidson, in contrast to Williams’s Wittgenstein-inspired view. It is argued that the key to evaluating this debate is to understand the particular conception of the radical skeptical problem that is offered in influential work by Barry Stroud, a conception of the skeptical problem which generates metaepistemological ramifications for anti-skeptical theories. In particular, we argue that, contra Williams, Rorty’s view that Davidson was offering a theoretical diagnosis of radical skepticism can be consistently maintained with his transcendental approach. Full article

This paper introduces Richard Rorty’s notion of the liberal ironist and his vision of a liberal utopia and explores the implications of these for philosophical questions concerning morality, as well as morality in general. Rorty’s assertions of the contingency of language, society and self are explored. Under the contingency of language, the figure of the ironist is defined, and Rorty’s conception of vocabularies is discussed. Under the contingency of society, Rorty’s definition of liberalism, his opposition of literary culture to materialist and metaphysical culture, and his notions concerning utopian politics are discussed. Under the contingency of self, Rorty’s critique of Kantian and his appropriations of Deweyan and Freudian conceptions of morality are presented. Other key factors discussed are Rorty’s theory of the separation of the private and public spheres of life and his ideas concerning cruelty and human solidarity. In this way, a critical analysis of Rorty’s proposed balance between private, ironic doubt and public, liberal social hope is presented and assessed in terms of its merit as a system of thought suited to the needs of post-metaphysical, liberal societies. Full article