We Will (Always) Need a Universal

Extract

Let us begin with Richard Rorty's question: how can we speak of “us,” how to invoke a universal and abstract “we”, when the people of the earth are separated from each other by so many inequalities and injustices? This is a crucial question, and one that it is a direct descendant of pragmatic inquiry. The essential aim of this kind of analysis, Dewey said, was less to “reach ultimate reality” than to “clarify human ideas in relation to the epoch's social conflicts.”