{"agent_id":"rorty","agent_name":"Richard Rorty","slug":"philosophy-as-cultural-politics","label":"Philosophy as cultural politics: is philosophy as a foundationalist discipline finished, while edifying philosophy continues?","topic":"Philosophy as cultural politics","question":"Is philosophy as a foundationalist discipline finished, while edifying philosophy continues?","position":"Philosophy is not a discipline with a special method or privileged subject matter; it is one voice in the ongoing cultural conversation. The Kantian image of philosophy as foundations-of-knowledge — the tribunal that adjudicates claims advanced in other disciplines by providing an understanding of knowledge itself — is dying. What remains is *edifying* philosophy in the Wittgenstein/Heidegger/Dewey mode, the kind of conversation that helps a culture change vocabularies, and *cultural politics* in the more politically-engaged sense — argument over which vocabularies, narratives, and metaphors should structure our common life. The transition is not the death of philosophy but its dissolution into the broader cultural conversation it was always continuous with.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Philosophy is not a discipline with a special method or privileged subject matter; it is one voice in the ongoing cultural conversation.","n":[1]},{"t":"The Kantian image of philosophy as foundations-of-knowledge — the tribunal that adjudicates claims advanced in other disciplines by providing an understanding of knowledge itself — is dying.","n":[2]},{"t":"What remains is *edifying* philosophy in the Wittgenstein/Heidegger/Dewey mode, the kind of conversation that helps a culture change vocabularies, and *cultural politics* in the more politically-engaged sense — argument over which vocabularies, narratives, and metaphors should structure our common life.","n":[3]}],[{"t":"The transition is not the death of philosophy but its dissolution into the broader cultural conversation it was always continuous with.","n":[4,5]}]],"texts":"*Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* (1979) Part III 'Philosophy without Mirrors' and the careful closing pages on the persistence of philosophy; *Consequences of Pragmatism* (1982) 'Philosophy in America Today' and 'Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida'; *Philosophy as Cultural Politics* (PP Vol 4, 2007) — the title essay and the volume as a whole; *Philosophy and Social Hope* (1999) the Preface; the *Rorty and His Critics* (2000) reply to Habermas. Reception: Habermas's *The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity* (1985) on the rational-reconstructive task; Searle's *The Construction of Social Reality* (1995) and 'Rationalism and Realism' (1992); Brandom's 'Vocabularies of Pragmatism' introduction to *Rorty and His Critics* (which, even sympathetically, slightly exaggerates the death-of-philosophy rhetoric Rorty had to walk back); the analytic-philosophy charge that Rorty has betrayed the discipline; the *PMN qualifier* itself ('I do not know whether we are in fact at the end of an era... There is no danger of philosophy's coming to an end').","works":["*Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* (1979) Part III 'Philosophy without Mirrors' and the careful closing pages on the persistence of philosophy","*Consequences of Pragmatism* (1982) 'Philosophy in America Today' and 'Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida'","*Philosophy as Cultural Politics* (PP Vol 4, 2007) — the title essay and the volume as a whole","*Philosophy and Social Hope* (1999) the Preface","the *Rorty and His Critics* (2000) reply to Habermas"],"reception":"Habermas's *The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity* (1985) on the rational-reconstructive task; Searle's *The Construction of Social Reality* (1995) and 'Rationalism and Realism' (1992); Brandom's 'Vocabularies of Pragmatism' introduction to *Rorty and His Critics* (which, even sympathetically, slightly exaggerates the death-of-philosophy rhetoric Rorty had to walk back); the analytic-philosophy charge that Rorty has betrayed the discipline; the *PMN qualifier* itself ('I do not know whether we are in fact at the end of an era... There is no danger of philosophy's coming to an end').","status":"The cultural-politics framing is the late-Rorty self- understanding, articulated in *Philosophy as Cultural Politics* (PP Vol 4, 2007). Habermas's charge that the cultural-politics turn evacuates the rational-reconstructive task is the most serious philosophical objection. Searle's charge that abandoning the discipline destroys its intellectual virtues. The analytic-philosophy charge that Rorty has betrayed the discipline he was once promising within. Brandom's framing in his introduction to *Rorty and His Critics* (2000) is even more sympathetic, but Brandom slightly exaggerates the death-of-philosophy rhetoric in ways Rorty had to walk back. The PMN qualifier itself is important and often forgotten: \"I do not know whether we are in fact at the end of an era... There is no danger of philosophy's coming to an end\" (PMN 393-4).","era":"1931-2007","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature","page":"p. 406","canonical":"","quote":"If we could once see the desire for a permanent, neutral, ahistorical, commensurating vocabulary as 391 turn in another direction without human beings thereby losing their reason, or losing touch with \"the real problems.\" The conversational interest of philosophy as a subject, or of some individual philosopher of genius, has varied and will continue to vary in unpredictable ways depending upon contingencies.","label":"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 406"},{"n":2,"work":"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature","page":"p. 408","canonical":"","quote":"Or it may be that the image of the philosopher which Kant offered is 393 about to go the way of the medieval image of the priest. If that happens, even the philosophers themselves will no longer take seriously the notion of philosophy as providing \"foundations\" or \"justifications\" for the rest of culture, or as adjudicating quaestiones juris about the proper domains of other disciplines.","label":"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 408"},{"n":3,"work":"Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity","page":"p. 71","canonical":"","quote":"There is no such thing as \"first philosophy\" — neither metaphysics nor philosophy of language nor philosophy of science. But, once again and for the last time, that claim about philosophy itself is just one more terminological suggestion made on behalf of the same cause, the cause of providing contemporary liberal culture with a vocabulary which is all its own, cleansing it of the residues of a vocabulary which was…","label":"Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 71"},{"n":4,"work":"Philosophy as Cultural Politics","page":"p. 138","canonical":"","quote":"Analytic philosophy as a whole is not, and has never been, an expert culture characterized by such long-term, near-universal consensus. What consensus has existed has been local and transitory. The problems about which the full professors in analytic philosophy departments wrote their dissertations often look merely quaint to their newly hired junior colleagues.","label":"Philosophy as Cultural Politics, p. 138"},{"n":5,"work":"Philosophy as Cultural Politics","page":"p. 138","canonical":"","quote":"Hegel was expressing impatience with the vocabulary used by philosophers who, like Kant, insisted on the irreducibility of the subject-object distinction.","label":"Philosophy as Cultural Politics, p. 138"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"truth-without-correspondence","label":"Truth without correspondence: is truth anything more than the compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way?"},{"slug":"anti-representationalism","label":"Anti-representationalism: is the entire mirror-of-nature picture of mind and knowledge dispensable?"},{"slug":"triple-contingency","label":"Triple contingency: are language, selfhood, and liberal community contingent all the way down?"},{"slug":"liberal-ironism-the-private-public-split-and-ethnocentric-li","label":"Liberal ironism, the private/public split, and ethnocentric liberalism: is the liberal ironist a defensible synthesis or an evasion of the political?"},{"slug":"continental-engagement-and-strong-textualism","label":"Continental engagement and strong textualism: are pragmatist appropriations of Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault legitimate or domesticating?"}]}