100 ROR 2

‘The notion that we are faced by a challenge to fill this lacuna is one more result of hypostatizing the Platonic focus imaginarius - truth as disjointed from agreement - and allowing the gap between oneself and that unconditional ideal to make one feel that one does not yet understand the conditions of one’s existence.’

I have to give respect to Rorty for contextualising the reasons why the philosophy of language came about, my professor didn’t even come close to situating the importance of the entire field’s relation to the Kantian project and the subsequent failure of the transcendental subject causing analytics to need to reach outside of the subject itself into something external that could possess Truth. My view of the subject as being the quintessential example of useless mental masturbation going on unhindered in faculty rooms around the globe proved to be quite wrong.

However, apart from this one point, I do have to say that for a book of such specificity (bordering on tedium for large sections) the work seems to me to remain incomplete. Now I do not mean this in the sense that Rorty does not carry through this work to a satisfying conclusion, everything he writes from the beginning to the end ties up in a nice little bow, but that the very content itself in its passing over of Dewey, Wittgenstein and Heidegger (the book’s three key cited influences) prevents the work from being, in my eyes, truly great. It’s as if there is some gaping wound in the work itself - we are merely shown how other people utilise the works of these three figures but are never really taken on a Rorty-guided tour through their own individual tomes. On an odd occasion there may be an extended quote by one of them, but the majority of the time you’re spent staring at arguments by the likes of Davidson, Putnam, Sellars etc. who have carried on this tradition (and of course split from it in very significant ways). By the time you’ve got through the umpteenth discussion where it splits hairs on some subtle issue within epistemology itself (I’m willing to concede that on many points I couldn’t feel the importance of these discussions; to me it was as if these digressions physically popped out of the book itself and began chewing away at it as I held it before me, the enthusiasm I had started out with quickly dissipated as I came to realise that I still had a couple of hundred pages left to go) you feel like you’ve been cheated. Perhaps this can all be chalked up to the inaccurate expectations I myself held regarding this book. For what it’s worth I still enjoyed the book, I even share some of Rorty’s intuitions regarding philosophy, but for a book that places such emphasis on these reactive abnormal forefathers, why aren’t we told more about them? They are relegated to passing mentions by Rorty, readers are even directed by Rorty in footnotes to search out these all-important essays for themselves (they should have been appendix pieces at the very least).

I’ll probably come back to this book in a couple of years time and give myself a big smack on the knuckles for my insolence regarding this one point, but hey who gives a fuck? ( )

12/11/21

This is an essay which anybody who has ever regaled a professional philosopher should read. It will make you snort with laughter as Rorty tells you exactly how it is, these guys in their glass castles having obscure debates about nothing that matters, when we all know that philosophy is about the things that do matter. Well, it should be anyway, right? It's lost its way, it used to be vital, now it's irrelevant. We all know it except the professional philosophers and you have to wonder why they are so thick that they don't get it.

So, there you are, chortling away, thinking how hilarious Rorty is, and how brilliantly he has captured what makes you right and them wrong, when at some point you start thinking you didn't laugh at all on that page and you turn and, well, you don't laugh on this one either,

Rest here:

http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2014/10/02/the-philosopher-as-expert-... ( )

This is an essay which anybody who has ever regaled a professional philosopher should read. It will make you snort with laughter as Rorty tells you exactly how it is, these guys in their glass castles having obscure debates about nothing that matters, when we all know that philosophy is about the things that do matter. Well, it should be anyway, right? It's lost its way, it used to be vital, now it's irrelevant. We all know it except the professional philosophers and you have to wonder why they are so thick that they don't get it.

So, there you are, chortling away, thinking how hilarious Rorty is, and how brilliantly he has captured what makes you right and them wrong, when at some point you start thinking you didn't laugh at all on that page and you turn and, well, you don't laugh on this one either,

Rest here:

http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2014/10/02/the-philosopher-as-expert-... ( )