Rorty QOTD
@rortyquotes.bsky.social
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📝 45
Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007): pragmatist, ironist, and panrelationalist.
pinned post!
On the eve of Richard McKay Rorty's 94th birthday*, announcing @rortyquotes: dedicated to tweeting a fresh
#Rorty
banger each and every day of the year—starting tomorrow! * And the day, 79 years ago, that Rorty went off to the University of Chicago's Hutchins College.
about 1 month ago
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A poeticized culture would be one which would not insist we find the real wall behind the painted ones, the real touchstones of truth as opposed to touchstones which are merely cultural artifacts. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Poetry
about 20 hours ago
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An ideally liberal polity would be one whose culture hero is Bloom's "strong poet" rather than the warrior, the priest, the sage, or the truth-seeking, "logical," "objective" scientist. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Liberalism
2 days ago
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We need to substitute the hope that chances for fulfillment of idiosyncratic fantasies will be equalized for the hope that everyone will replace "passion" or fantasy with "reason." Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Liberalism
3 days ago
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We need a redescription of liberalism as the hope that culture as a whole can be "poeticized" rather than as the Enlightenment hope that it can be "rationalized" or "scientized." Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Liberalism
4 days ago
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It is central to the idea of a liberal society that, in respect to words as opposed to deeds, persuasion as opposed to force, anything goes… A liberal society is one which is content to call "true" whatever the upshot of such encounters turns out to be. CIS p.51
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Liberalism
5 days ago
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The liberal societies of our century have produced more and more people who are able to recognize the contingency of the vocabulary in which they state their highest hopes—the contingency of their own consciences—and yet have remained faithful to those consciences. CIS p.46
#Rorty
#Contingency
6 days ago
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The vocabulary I propose, one which revolves around notions of metaphor and self-creation rather than around notions of truth, rationality, and moral obligation, is better suited to the preservation and progress of democratic societies. CIS p.44
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Metaphor
7 days ago
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Every human life is the working out of a sophisticated idiosyncratic fantasy, and no such working out gets completed before death interrupts. It cannot get completed because there is nothing to complete, there is only a web of relations to be rewoven. CIS p.42
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#StrongPoet
8 days ago
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There can be no fully Nietzschean lives, lives which are pure action rather than reaction—no lives which are not largely parasitical on an un-redescribed past and dependent on the charity of as yet unborn generations. CIS p.42
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#StrongPoet
9 days ago
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Just as even the strongest poet is parasitic on her precursors, just as even she can give birth only to a small part of herself, so she is dependent on the kindness of all those strangers out there in the future. CIS p.41
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#StrongPoet
9 days ago
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Freud let us see sexual perversion, extreme cruelty & manic delusion as the private poem of the pervert, the sadist, or the lunatic. He lets us see what moral philosophy describes as extreme, inhuman, and unnatural, as continuous with our own activity. CIS p.38
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#PublicVsPrivate
11 days ago
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Poetic, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or political progress results from the accidental coincidence of a private obsession with a public need. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.37
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#PublicVsPrivate
12 days ago
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Freud suggests that we condemn ourselves for failure to break free of that past rather than for failure to live up to universal standards. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.33
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#SelfCreation
13 days ago
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Every human life is a poem—every such life as an attempt to clothe itself in its own metaphors. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.35
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Metaphor
14 days ago
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After reading Freud we shall see neither Bloom's strong poet nor Kant's dutiful fulfiller of universal obligations as paradigmatic. For Freud himself eschewed the very idea of a paradigm human being. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.35
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism
15 days ago
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My mother used to tell me, with great pride, that when I was seven I had had the honor of serving little sandwiches to the guests at a Halloween party attended both by John Dewey and by Carlo Tresca, the Italian anarchist leader. 'Achieving Our Country' p.61
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Holidays
16 days ago
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Freud makes it possible for us to see science and poetry, genius and psychosis—and, most importantly, morality and prudence—not as products of distinct faculties but as alternative modes of adaptation. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.33
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Adaptation
17 days ago
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To fail as a poet—and thus, for Nietzsche, to fail as a human being—is to accept somebody else's description of oneself, to execute a previously prepared program, to write, at most, elegant variations on previously written poems. CIS p.28
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#SelfCreation
18 days ago
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Anyone who spends his life trying to formulate a novel answer to the question of what is possible and important fears the extinction of that answer. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.23
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Contingency
19 days ago
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The course of history is a long, swelling, increasingly polyphonic poem leading up to nothing save itself. Upon extinction, "human nature's total message" will not be a set of propositions, but of vocabularies—the more, and the more various, the better. 'Rorty & Pragmatism' p.33
#Rorty
#Vocabulary
20 days ago
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We should try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everything—our language, our conscience, our community—as a product of time and chance. CIS p.22
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Contingency
21 days ago
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The very idea that the world or the self has an intrinsic nature— one which the physicist or the poet may have glimpsed—is a remnant of the idea that the world is a divine creation. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.21
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism
22 days ago
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The world does not provide us with any criterion of choice between alternative metaphors; we can only compare languages or metaphors with one another, not with something beyond language called "fact." 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.20
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Metaphor
23 days ago
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A sense of human history as the history of successive metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.20
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#HumanEvolution
24 days ago
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A culture in which Nietzschean metaphors were literalized would be one which took for granted that philosophical problems are as temporary as poetic problems, that there are no problems which bind the generations together into a single natural kind called "humanity." CIS p.20
#Antiessentialism
25 days ago
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The Nietzschean substitution of self-creation for discovery substitutes a picture of the hungry generations treading each other down for a picture of humanity approaching closer and closer to the light. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.20
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#SelfCreation
26 days ago
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To say, with Nietzsche, that God is dead, is to say that we serve no higher purposes. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.20
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiauthoritarianism
27 days ago
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In a Nietzschean view, one which drops the reality-appearance distinction, to change how we talk is to change what, for our own purposes, we are. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.20
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#RealityVsAppearance
28 days ago
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Nietzschean history of culture, and Davidsonian philosophy of language, see language as we now see evolution, as new forms of life constantly killing off old forms—not to accomplish a higher purpose but blindly. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.19
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Boundlessness
29 days ago
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Our language and our culture are as much a contingency, as much a result of thousands of small mutations finding niches (and millions of others finding no niches), as are the orchids and the anthropoids. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.16
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Contingency
30 days ago
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Think of the history of language, and thus of culture, as Darwin taught us to think of the history of a coral reef. Old metaphors are constantly dying off into literalness, and then serving as a platform and foil for new metaphors. CIS p.16
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Metaphor
about 1 month ago
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Revolutionary achievements in the arts, in the sciences, and in moral and political thought typically occur when somebody realizes that two or more of our vocabularies are interfering with each other, and proceeds to invent a new vocabulary to replace both. CIS p.12
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Vocabulary
about 1 month ago
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I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace. Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.9
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#PhilosophyAsProposal
about 1 month ago
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To say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is not to say that we have discovered that, out there, there is no truth. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.8
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Truth
about 1 month ago
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Let us hope for a culture that would regard the realization of utopias, and the envisaging of still further utopias, as an endless process—an endless, proliferating realization of Freedom, rather than a convergence toward an already existing Truth. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.xvi
about 1 month ago
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There is no answer to the question "Why not be cruel?"—no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.xv
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Cruelty
about 1 month ago
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How would things look if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable? 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.xv
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#PublicVsPrivate
about 1 month ago
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Liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.xv
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Politics
about 1 month ago
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Edifying philosophy falls into self-deception whenever it tries to do more than send the conversation off in new directions. 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature' p.378
#Rorty
#Pragmatism
#Conversation
about 1 month ago
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Honesty has nothing to do with any controversy between Realists and non-Realists, both of whom pay it equal honor. 'Response to James Conant ' in 'Rorty and His Critics' p.347
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Truth
about 1 month ago
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A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.7
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Vocabulary
about 1 month ago
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The history of philosophy is the history of Gestalt-switches, not of the painstaking carrying-out of research programs. 'Truth and Progress' p.11
#Rorty
#Pragmatism
#GestaltSwitch
about 1 month ago
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Anything can be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.7
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Redescription
about 1 month ago
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Happy 94th Birthday to Richard McKay Rorty!
#Rorty
#Pragmatism
#Philosophy
#Birthday
about 1 month ago
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On the eve of Richard McKay Rorty's 94th birthday*, announcing @rortyquotes: dedicated to tweeting a fresh
#Rorty
banger each and every day of the year—starting tomorrow! * And the day, 79 years ago, that Rorty went off to the University of Chicago's Hutchins College.
about 1 month ago
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