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Reclaiming the Conversations of Mankind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

D. Z. Phillips
D. Z. Phillips
Affiliation:
University College of Swansea and The Claremont Graduate School, California.
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Extract

Many philosophers, of very different persuasions, think that the time has come for philosophy to give up its epistemological pretensions. It must cease to see itself as the arbiter of rationality and truth. Its role as such an arbiter is due, in part, to confusions involved in representationalist theories in epistemology. According to these, our epistemic practices are judged by whether they adequately represent something said to be independent of them all called Reality or Truth. These judgments are said to be the business of philosophy. But, now, it is said that philosophy is redundant in this respect The trouble was not that it did its work badly. There was never any work to perform. Philosophy traded under false pretences.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 69 , Issue 267 , January 1994 , pp. 35 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1994

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References

1 I came to these conclusions in Faith After Foundationalism. Routledge 1988, Part Two. The present paper is a summary and further elaboration of those conclusions. My views are based on Rorty's observations in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and ‘Solidarity or Objectivity?’ These works raise issues which merit attention irrespective of any later modifications of them by Rorty.Google Scholar

2 Tom, Sorell, ‘The World from its Own Point of View’ in Reading Rorty, Alan, Malachowski (ed.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 18.Google Scholar

3 Peter, Winch, ‘Language, Belief and Relativism’ in Trying To Make Sense (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).Google Scholar

4 Bernard, Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 138–139.Google Scholar Quoted by Rorty, in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

5 Bernard Williams, ‘Auto-da-Fe: Consequences of Pragmatism’ in Reading Rorty. p. 27.Google Scholar

6 Richard, Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1980), 361.Google Scholar

7 Op. cit., 19.

8 This remark would have to be modified if by ‘philosophy’ one meant traditions radically different from those Rorty has in mind. There, ‘philosophy’ and ‘argument’ might be something very different.

9 See Charles Taylor, ‘Rorty in the Epistemological Tradition’ in Reading Rorty 258.Google Scholar

10 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 379.

11 Ibid., 157.

12 Faith After Foundationalism, 144.Google Scholar

13 Charles Taylor, op. cit., 257.Google Scholar

14 See Flannery, O'Conner, The Habit of Being Sally, Fitzgerald (ed.), (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1980), 456.Google Scholar

15 For further discussion see ‘What should we expect from ethics?’ in my Interventions in Ethics (Macmillan, 1992).Google Scholar

16 For a discussion of such cases see Timothy Tessin, 'Talking About I Trees,' Philosophical Investigations, Jan 1992. lGoogle Scholar

17 Charles Taylor, Op. cit., p. 258.Google Scholar

18 See my paper, ‘On Morality's Having a Point’ (with H. O. Mounce) in Interventions in Ethics.Google Scholar

19 Rush Rhees, ‘What are Moral Statements Like?’ in Without Answers, Routledge l969, p. 105.Google Scholar

20 For an example of my mistaken acceptance of such a challenge on its own terms see 'In Search of the Moral ‘Must’ in Interventions in Ethics. For my self-criticism see my Introduction, p. xi f.

21 Tom Sorell is tempted to think this. See op. cit.Google Scholar

22 Rush Rhees, ‘Natural Law’ and ‘Reasons in Ethics,’ op. cit., p. 96.Google Scholar

23 Rush Rhees, ‘What are Moral Statements Like?’Google Scholar, Ibid., pp. 106–107.

24 Richard, Rorty, The Consequences of Pragmatism. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982), p. xliii.Google Scholar

25 Rush Rhees, ‘What are Moral Statements Like?’, Op. cit., pp. 103–104.Google Scholar

26 Ludwig, Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, von Wright, G. H. (ed.), trans by Peter Winch. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 77e.Google Scholar

27 Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, p. 23.Google Scholar

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., p. 26.

33 For a fruitful disagreement on these issues see Alasdair, Maclntyre, ‘Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?’ in Faith and the Philosophers, J., Hick (ed.), (London: Macmillan, 1964)Google Scholar and Winch, P., ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’ in Ethics and Action, (London: Routledge, 1972).Google Scholar

34 Richard Rorty, ‘Solidarity or Objectivity?’ Op. cit., 29.Google Scholar

35 Ibid., 29.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 Rush Rhees, ‘Politics and Justification,’ Op. cit., 84–85.Google Scholar