This is a good review of Richard Rorty by an English analytic philsopher. Simon Blackburn is concerned with truth and takes exception to some of the things that Rorty says about truth.
Like Rorty I have to admit that I'm bored with the problem of truth. Oh,I know truth is important for those with a scientific bent, since discovering truth is what science is supposed to do.
However, Blackburn, like most analytic philosophers, overlooks or ignores the way that Rorty has opened up the question of the transformation of philosophy and his signposting the ways that philosophy can be something more than a scientific philosophy. What Blackburn is concerned to do is defend the analytic philosophical tradition and the idol of science. But why not give up on science, the whole epistemological project of modernity and an epistemological centered philosophy? Why not embrace an interpretive conception of philosophy or start reading novels by people like Nabokov and Orwell, Dickens and Proust?
Why not follow those pathways that lead to a different kind of philosophy? If you want to avoid the lit crit scence why not a conception of philosophy as a kind of social or culture critic as an alternative to the bankrupt conception of modern philosophy's traditional claim to "knowledge"?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at April 21, 2003 12:21 AM | TrackBack