"These lectures offered what Rorty called “a fairly simple, albeit sketchy, outline of my own version of pragmatism. This version makes no pretence of being faithful to the thoughts of James or Dewey (much less Peirce, whom I barely mentioned). Rather, it offers my own, sometimes idiosyncratic, restatements of Jamesian and Deweyan themes.” Rorty notes that the themes signaled in the titles of the lectures result from his conviction that James’s and Dewey’s principal accomplishments were of a critical and negative nature. They showed us to how dispense, how to “slough off,” a lot of the baggage we inherited from the Platonic tradition. James and Dewey, according to Rorty, taught us to think “without” a lot of ideas that led us into blind alleys or subordinated us to an authority other than the authority of our social practices and vocabularies. As Rorty explains: “The title ‘Hope in Place of Knowledge’ is a way of suggesting that Plato and Aristotle were wrong in thinking that humankind’s most distinctive and praiseworthy capacity is to know things as they really are—to penetrate behind appearance to reality. That claim saddles us with the unfortunate appearance-reality distinction and with metaphysics: a distinction, and a discipline, which pragmatism shows us how to do without … My candidate for the most distinctive and praiseworthy human capacity is our ability to trust and to cooperate with other people, and in particular to work together so as to improve the future.”7"
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