Common sense, like Greek philosophy, thinks that conversions should come about by argument. PasAA p.97 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

Putting a Sartrean description before a Spinozist is like putting a bicycle pump in the hands of a ditch digger, or a yardstick in the hands of a brain surgeon—it is not even a candidate for utility. PasAA p.96 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

There is no inescapable truth which either metaphysicians or pragmatists are trying to evade or capture, for any candidate for truth can be escaped by a suitable choice of description and can be underwritten by another such choice. PasAA p.95 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

The metaphysical systems of Aristotle and Spinoza, or Kant’s fanatical pursuit of the unconditional, are not exercises in futility, any more than the anti-metaphysical systems of William James, Nietzsche, and Sartre himself. PasAA p.95 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

We pan-relationalists cannot say, with Sartre, that the attempt to make ourselves a divinity is a “futile passion.” PasAA p.95 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

On our pan-relational view, human beings are what they make themselves and one of the things they have wanted to make themselves is a divinity—what Sartre calls a “being in and for itself.” PasAA p.95 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

Seeing ourself as at last in touch, through physical science, with the ultimate nature of reality is also not an illusion or a confusion. It is one more human project which may, like all human projects, eclipse the possibility of other, incompatible, projects. PasAA p.95 #Rorty #Panrelationalism

Seeing ourselves as participating in the divine life by describing ourselves under the aspect of eternity is not an illusion or a confusion—it is just one more attempt to satisfy one more human need. PasAA p.95 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

A pan-relationalist cannot invoke the appearance-reality distinction. We cannot say that our opponents’ way of looking at physics gets physics wrong, mistakes its intrinsic nature, substitutes an accidental and inessential use of it for what it is in itself. PasAA p.95 #Rorty #Panrelationalism

In our strictly philosophical capacity as opposed to our political capacity, we pan-relationalists cannot afford to sneer at any human project, any chosen form of human life, any description which aids. PasAA p.95 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

Stoic absence of passion, Zen absence of will, Heideggerian Gelassenheit, and physics-as-the-absolute-conception-of-reality are, from this angle, just so many variations on a single project—the project of escaping from time and chance. PasAA p.95 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Antiessentialism

The project of seeing all our needs from the point of view of someone without any such needs is just one more human project. PasAA p.95 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Antiessentialism

The trouble with all such attempts to create a divinity and then to claim a share in the divine life is that the need to be God is just one more human need. PasAA p.94 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Antiessentialism

For us anti-essentialists this temptation to think that we have eluded our human finitude by seeing ourselves under the aspect of elementary particles is just one more attempt to create a divinity—a god of power—and then to claim a share in the divine life. PasAA p.94 #Rorty #Antiessentialism

To the essentialist philosophers, and to many natural scientists who otherwise do not concern themselves with philosophy, this pragmatic view of physics as the handmaiden of technology and of the poetic imagination is offensive. PasAA p.94 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Antiessentialism

The last line of defense for essentialist philosophers is the belief that physical science gets us outside ourselves, outside our language and our needs and our purposes to something splendidly non-human and non-relational. PasAA p.93 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Antiessentialism

From the pan-relationalist’s point of view the Kantian lament that we are forever trapped behind the veil of subjectivity is merely the pointless, because tautologous, claim that something we defined as being beyond our knowledge is, alas, beyond our knowledge. PasAA p.93 #Rorty #Panrelationalism

The anti-essentialist has no doubt that there were trees & stars long before there were statements about trees & stars. But the fact of antecedent existence is of no use in giving sense to the question “What are trees and stars apart from our statements about them?” PasAA p.93 #Antiessentialism

Questions which have a point are those which meet James’s requirement that any difference must make a difference. Other questions—such as those about the ontological status of constellations or moral values—are “merely verbal” or, worse yet, “merely philosophical.” PasAA p.92 #Panrelationalism

Pragmatists do not think that truth is the aim of inquiry. The aim of inquiry is utility, and there are as many different, useful tools as there are purposes to be served. PasAA p.89 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Truth

All human purposes are, from a philosophical as opposed to a practical point of view, on a par. There is no over-riding purpose called “discovering the truth” which takes precedence. PasAA p.89 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism [Quote for 2026-04-25, posted belatedly.]

To insist that there is a difference between a non-relational ordo essendi and a relational ordo cognoscendi is, inevitably, to recreate the Kantian thing-in-itself. PasAA p.89 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

To say that relations go all the way down is a corollary of what Sellars called “psychological nominalism,” that is, of the doctrine that there is nothing to be known about anything save what is stated in sentences describing it. PasAA p.89 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

The system of natural numbers is a good model of the universe because in that system it is obvious, and obviously harmless, that there are no terms of relations which are not simply clusters of further relations. PasAA p.88 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

There are, so to speak, relations all the way down and all the way out in every direction; you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations. PasAA p.88 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

There is no point in asking for terms of relations which are not themselves relations, for everything that can serve as the term of a relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on forever. PasAA p.88 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

We pan-relationalists suggest that you think of all such objects as resembling numbers in the following respect: there is nothing to be known about them except an infinitely large, and forever expansible, web of relations to other objects. PasAA p. 88 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

It simply does not pay to be an essentialist about numbers. Pan-relationalism holds that it also does not pay to be essentialist about tables, stars, electrons, human beings, academic disciplines, social institutions, or anything else. PasAA p.88 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

How to see things from the panrelationalist point of view: Think of everything as if it were a number. The nice thing about numbers, for my present purpose, is just that it is very difficult to think of them as having intrinsic natures. PasAA p.87 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

Pan-relationalism puts aside the distinction between subject & object, between the elements in human knowledge contributed by the mind & those contributed by the world. It does so by saying that nothing is what it is under any and every description of it. PasAA p.85 #Pragmatism #Panrelationalism

Twentieth-century neo-Leibnizian Pan-relationalism restates Leibniz’s idea that each monad is nothing but all the other monads seen from a certain perspective, each substance nothing but its relations to all the other substances. PasAA p.212 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

My hunch is that the twentieth century will be seen, by historians of philosophy, as the period in which a kind of neo-Leibnizian pan-relationalism was developed in various different idioms. PasAA p.212 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Panrelationalism

Philosophers have long wanted to understand concepts, but the point is to change them so as to make them serve our purposes better. PasAA p.83 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Concepts

Like MacIntyre, Benhabib, Kelly, and others, I think that you have to smuggle some provinciality into your universals before they do you any good. PasAA p.80 #Pragmatism #Rorty #RegulativeIdeal

I recognize, of course, that domination-free communication is only a regulative ideal, never to be attained in practice. But unless a regulative ideal makes a difference to practice, it is not good for much. PasAA p.80 #Pragmatism #Rorty #RegulativeIdeal

I don’t see anything domination free about my handling of my fundamentalist students. I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the domination of people like me, and to have escaped from that of their rather frightening and dangerous parents. PasAA p.80 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Education

Fundamentalist parents think that the “liberal Establishment” is engaged in a conspiracy. Had they read Habermas, they would say that the typical communication situation in American college classrooms is no more domination free than that in the Hitler Youth camps. PasAA p.78 #Rorty #Education

You cannot have any language, or any beliefs, without being in touch with both a human community and non-human reality. There is no possibility of agreement without truth, nor of truth without agreement. PasAA p.70 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Truth

The principal source of conflict between human communities is the belief that I have no reason to justify my beliefs to you, and none in finding out what alternative beliefs you may have. PasAA p.68 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Justification

I do not much care whether democratic politics are an expression of something deep, or whether they express nothing better than some hopes which popped from nowhere into the brains of a few remarkable people and which, for unknown reasons, became popular. PasAA p.67 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Politics

I see the development of the social conventions in which Habermas and I both rejoice as a lucky accident. PasAA p.67 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Politics

Unlike Habermas, I do not think that disciplines like philosophy, linguistics, and developmental psychology can do much for democratic politics. PasAA p.67 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Politics

Pragmatists like me can’t figure out how to tell whether we are understanding a justification as just a “justification for us” or as a “justification, period.” PasAA p.65 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Truth

Putnam, Apel, and Habermas all take over from Peirce an idea which I reject: the idea of convergence upon the One Truth. PasAA p.54 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Truth

We pragmatists use “truth” to remind ourselves that people in different circumstances—people facing future audiences—may not be able to justify the belief which we have triumphantly justified to all the audiences we have encountered. PasAA p.52 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Truth

We pragmatists, who think that beliefs are habits of action rather than attempts to correspond to reality, see the cautionary use of the word “true” as flagging a special sort of danger. PasAA p.52 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Truth

It is no more necessary to have a philosophical theory about the nature of truth, or the meaning of the word “true,” than it is to have one about the nature of danger, or the meaning of the word “danger.” PasAA p.52 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Truth

The moral to be drawn, I think, is that the idea of communal self-creation—of realizing a dream which has no justification in unconditional claims to universal validity—is neutral between Hitler and Jefferson. PasAA p.50 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Antifoundationalism

We shall never know for sure whether a given belief is true, but we can be sure that nobody is able to summon up any residual objections to it, that everybody agrees that it ought to be held. PasAA p.48 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Truth

For those who are willing to use the term “religious faith” to cover both a religion of obedient submission to non-human power and a religion of love between human beings, James’ and Dewey’s project of reconciliation may have some attractions. PasAA p.46 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Religion