SOCIAL HOPES

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SOCIAL HOPES
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• 1. BEYOND EPISTEMOLOGY
• Is there an alternative for traditional
  philosophy?
• 2. IRONY AND TRUTH
• What is the relation between irony and truth?
• 3. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE
• How to conceive of social hope?

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1. BEYOND EPISTEMOLOGY
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RICHARD RORTY (1930-2004)

• BIOGRAPHICAL NOTIONS
• 4 October 1931 born in New York City.
• 1946-1952 studied Philosophy at the University
  of Chicago.
• 1952-1956 PhD. at Yale University.
• 1961-1982 professor of philosophy at Princeton
  University.
• 1982-1998 professor of the Humanities at the
  University of Virginia.
• 1998-2007 professor of Comparative Literature at
  Stanford University.
• 8 June 2007 death.

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IMPORTANT PUBLICATIONS

• Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).
• Consequences of Pragmatism (1982).
• Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989).
• Objectivity, Relativism and Truth Philosophical
  Papers I (1991).
• Essays on Heidegger and Others Philosophical
  Papers II (1991). Limited Inc (1990).
• Achieving Our Country Leftist Thought In
  Twentieth Century America (1998).
• Truth and Progress Philosophical Papers III
  (1998).
• Philosophy and Social Hope (2000).
• The Future of Religion (with Gianni Vattimo)
  (2005).
• Philosophy as Cultural Politics Philosophical
  Papers IV (2007).

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PHILOSOPHICAL STYLE

• From the analytical article to the philosophical
  essay.
• Argumentative and evocative.
• Provocative one-liners or titles.
• Examples Solidarity or Objectivity? and The
  Priority of Democracy to Philosophy.
• Open encounter with different vocabularies.

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THE LEGACY OF DEWEY

• Most of what I have written in the last decade
  consists of attempts to tie in my social hopes
  hopes for a global, cosmopolitan, democratic,
  egalitarian, classless, casteless society with
  my antagonism towards Platonism. These attempts
  have been encouraged by the thought that the same
  hopes, and the same antagonism, lay behind many
  of the writings of my principal philosophical
  hero, John Dewey.
• Neopragmatism gt the provision of new vocabularies
  that help us to understand or solve a given
  problem.

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BEYOND METHAPYSICS

• Metaphysics
• - to construct a perspective from outside as an
  attempt to escape from time, i.e. to view Sein
  as something that has little to do with Zeit.
• - the construction of the eternal in order to be
  free from the contingency, the uncertainty, and
  the fragility of the human condition.
• Criticism
• - there is no non-linguistic, pre-cognitive
  access to an already present Being that
  underscores some narrative.
• - people are enmeshed in final vocabularies that
  present Being in diverse and incommensurable
  ways.
• - there is no meta-vocabulary to distinguish the
  adequacy of one final vocabulary above others.
• What can be done? Analyse the heuristic value of
  metaphors!

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METAPHORS

• Metaphors gt are literally not truth, but have a
  meaning (example René is a pig).
• Central question which metaphors broaden our
  horizon?
• Two functions of a metaphor
• 1. Semantic filter gt foreground background.
• 2. Relates is and ought gt mixture of facts
  and values.

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THE MIND AS MIRROR

• The picture which holds traditional philosophy
  captive is that of the mind as a great mirror,
  containing various representations some
  accurate, some not and capable of being studied
  by pure, nonempirical methods. Without the notion
  of the mind as mirror, the notion of knowledge as
  accuracy of representation would not have
  suggested itself.
• Philosophy is often seen as reflection.
• Epistemology gt depends upon a picture of the mind
  as trying tot represent (i.e. mirror) a
  mind-independent external reality.

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PHILOSOPHICAL TARGETS

• Rorty attacks
• - Platonic essentialism.
• - Cartesian foundationalism.
• - A specific conception of philosophy.
• Foundationalism gt to avoid the regress inherent
  in claiming that all beliefs are justified by
  other beliefs gt some beliefs must be
  self-justifying and can be the foundations of all
  knowledge.
• Sellars critique of the Myth of the given there
  is no given in sensory perception.
• Philosophy is dissolving rather than solving
  problems.

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2. IRONY AND TRUTH
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BEYOND THE CORRESPONDENCE THEORY OF TRUTH

• Truth is not that what corresponds to reality.
• Truth is the qualification of opinions as
  justifiedor legitimate.
• Use truth as an adjective (a truth story) and not
  as a substantive (the Truth).
• Semantic holism gt the meaning of words and
  sentences are related to the meaning of other
  sentences and not to the non-linguistic world.
• We change our vocabularies and ideas about the
  truth because of changed habits.

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IRONY AS THE ROAD TO THE TRUTH

• Socrates gt irony as a mean to figure out what is
  the truth.
• Forms of irony
• 1. Exaggeration understatement.
• 2. Repetition.
• 3. Say the opposite what you mean.
• Question what is seen as self-evident.
• Ironist are persons that see that central aspects
  in life are contingent.

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CONTINGENCIES

• Contingency gt what is by accident so as it is
  something which could have been otherwise.
• Three contingencies
• 1. The contingency of language.
• 2. The contingency of selfhood.
• 3. The contingency of a liberal community.

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THE CONTINGENCY OF LANGUAGE

• Beyond a fixed idea about language.
• Vocabularies change over time.
• You are thrown in a specific way of dealing with
  language.

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THE CONTINGENCY OF SELFHOOD

• The selfhood is the product of upbringing and
  educational background.
• People are not fully conscious about who they are
  gt Freud.
• Beyond the autonomous selfhood.

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THE CONTINGENCY OF A LIBERAL COMMUNITY

• Because the selfhood is contingent the community
  life is also contingent.
• If we accept that, we should not look for the
  essence of the community.
• A liberal community is open to the future and
  promotes conversation and not violence.

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3. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE
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CRUELTY

• What are the driving forces for our political
  engagement?
• Justice or Equality? No!
• Cruelty gt how to avoid it?
• Solidarity with all those who are the victims of
  cruelty.
• People should become sensitive to the way people
  get hurt.
• Why are people not susceptible to the global
  injustice?

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TWO SPHERES
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AESTEHTICS AND MORAL THEORY

• Beyond the classical dichotomy of aesthetics
  (private) and moral theory (public).
• The relation between literature and morality is
  complex.
• At first glance there are a lot of differences
  between Nabokov and Orwell.
• Nabokov and Orwell gt both give expression to
  cruelty and deal with the tension between private
  irony and liberal hopes.

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PATRIOTISM

• Reiteration of the work of John Dewey and Walt
  Whitman in order to criticize anti-liberal and
  defeatist intellectuals.
• Patriotism gt hold on to the liberal tradition.
• To sides of left 1) critical left and 2)
  progressive left.
• To renew the progressive (i.e. pragmatic) left.
• Beyond culturalism.

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SOCIAL HOPE

• It is a disaster when people grow up without
  hope.
• Social cohesion is based upon shared vocabularies
  and hope.
• Philosophy can help to (re)create oneself and is
  therefore a resource for hope.
• The main trouble is that you might succeed, and
  your success might let you imagine that you have
  something more to rely on than the tolerance and
  decency of your fellow human beings. The
  democratic community of Deweys dreams is a
  community in which nobody imagines that.