“No description of how things are from a God’s-eye point of view, no skyhook provided by some contemporary or yet-to-be-developed science, is going to free us from the contingency of having been acculturated as we were. Our acculturation is what makes certain options live, or momentous, or forced, while leaving others dead, or trivial, or […]
Entries Tagged as 'Richard Rorty'
You can’t see there from here
December 27th, 2016 · No Comments
Tags: Lit & Crit · Richard Rorty
And here is what happened when we threw all that away
November 22nd, 2016 · No Comments
“I think that the rhetoric we Westerners use in trying to get everybody to be more like us would be improved if we were more frankly ethnocentric and less professedly universal. It would be better to say, ‘here is what we in the West look like as a result of ceasing to hold slaves, beginning […]
Tags: Politics & Law · Richard Rorty
Not asking much, guv’nor
November 21st, 2016 · No Comments
“You cannot have an old-timey Gemeinschaft unless everybody pretty well agrees on who counts as a decent human being and who does not. But you can have a civil society of the bourgeois democratic sort. All you need is the ability to control your feelings when people who strike you as irredeemably different show up […]
Tags: Politics & Law · Richard Rorty
Not shocks
November 20th, 2016 · No Comments
“If you want your books to be read rather than respectfully shrouded in tooled leather, you should try to produce tingles rather than truth.” – Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
Tags: Lit & Crit · Richard Rorty
And sparks fly
November 19th, 2016 · No Comments
“The difference between genius and fantasy is not the difference between impresses which lock on to something universal, some antecedent reality out there in the world or deep within the self, and those which do not. Rather, it is the difference between idiosyncracies which just happen to catch on with other people—happen because of the […]
Tags: Lit & Crit · Richard Rorty