> Quoting Arlo June 10th: > > Hi All, > > David Granger just brought to my attention that Richard Rorty, whose name is > frequently brought up on our forum, has passed away. > > "Richard Rorty, the leading American philosopher and heir to the pragmatist > tradition, passed away on Friday, June 8. > > He was Professor of Comparative Literature emeritus at Stanford University. > In > April the American Philosophical Society awarded him the Thomas Jefferson > Medal. The prize citation reads: "In recognition of his influential and > distinctively American contribution to philosophy and, more widely, to > humanistic studies. His work redefined knowledge 'as a matter of > conversation > and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature' and thus > redefined philosophy itself as an unending, democratically disciplined, > social > and cultural activity of inquiry, reflection, and exchange, rather than an > activity governed and validated by the concept of objective, extramental > truth." (From www.telospress.com)
The best critique I know of Rorty's philosophy was said by Roger Caldwell: "If, as Rorty proposes, we replace the notion of truth with that of usefulness, so that we accept only those propositions which we find in general to the 'useful,' then the question arises as to whether they are really useful or not. That is, the very criteria by which we judge a proposition to be useful involve the same recourse to a correspondence with reality which the theory denies in advance. We are left, inescapably, with the conclusion that the theory is incoherent." ------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through IMP: http://horde.org/imp/ moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
