From 'What is Dead in Plato':
"It is quite true that the history of philosophy is a series of footnotes on Plato, but in the last few centuries, many of these footnotes have been saying, 'Notice how much harm this particular bad Platonic idea has done'."
From 'The Paradox of Definition':
"One way of describing what happened when, in the Renaissance, philosophy deserted Aristotle and became 'modern' is to say that their notions of the location of indefiniteness changed."
Some of Rorty's best discussion of his own philosophical position, pragmatism (following the pragmatism of Dewey and Sellars), comes in the final selection, 'Remarks on Nishida and Nishitani' (1999). Rorty acknowledges his 'extremely superficial' knowledge of the Buddhist traditions and literatures that form the background for their thought, but he offers a constructive suggestion in which he describes pragmatism as "an emphatic reaction against Hegel, against absolute idealism, and against metaphysics" (p.241), inspired by Darwin's theory of evolution. He contrasts this with Nishida's and Nishitani's 'enthusiastic' endorsement of a version of absolute idealism. He also cites Josiah Royce as the American philosopher whose view is closest to Nishida.
The Rorty who emerges from these essays is an ardent but not doctrinaire pragmatist and naturalist who warns about the political dangers inherent in the idealist and anti-naturalist positions while also seeing the risks of a headlong rush by philosophers into accepting Locke's vision of the philosopher as a follower, not a leader – a mere "under-labourer, removing some of the Rubbish" in the wake of "the incomparable Mr Newton." This volume sets a timely example of how a politically engaged philosopher can put hard won expertise to valuable use.
© Prof. Daniel C. Dennett 2021
Daniel Dennett is University Professor at Tufts, Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, and author, most recently of From Bacteria To Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (2017).
• On Philosophy and Philosophers: Unpublished Papers, 1960-2000, Richard Rorty, ed by W.P Malecki and Chris Voparil, CUP, 2020, £17.99 pb, 260 pages.
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