Richard Rorty. Citazioni

My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have ... "an ambition of transcendence."
Introduction to Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume I (1991).

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change – that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.
Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.
Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).

Truthfulness under oath is, by now, a matter of our civic religion, our relation to our fellow citizens rather than our relation to a nonhuman power.
"John Searle on Realism and Relativism." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).

... our maturation has consisted in the gradual realization that, if we can rely on one another, we need not rely on anything else. In religious terms, this is the Feuerbachian thesis that God is just a projection of the best, and sometimes the worst, of humanity. In philosophical terms, it is the thesis that anything that talk of objectivity can do to make our practices intelligible can be done equally well by talk of intersubjectivity.
"John Searle on Realism and Relativism." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).

Nowadays, to say that we are clever animals is not to say something philosophical and pessimistic but something political and hopeful – namely, if we can work together, we can make ourselves into whatever we are clever and courageous enough to imagine ourselves becoming. This is to set aside Kant’s question “What is man?” and to substitute the question “What sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren?”
"Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).

If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope?
"Richard Rorty Interviewed by Gideon Lewis-Kraus." The Believer, June 2003.

Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister--corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.
"Philosophical Convictions." The Nation, June 14, 2004.

I don't see much use for the idea of philosophy as knowledge production

Philosophy is a tradition of overlapping texts. It's not a scientific discipline

Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that

"‘Pragmatism’ is a vague, ambiguous, and overworked word. Nevertheless, it names the chief glory of our country’s intellectual tradition. No other American writers have offered so radical a suggestion for making our future different from our past, as have James and Dewey.” ~ Consequences of Pragmatism

"Nothing can serve as a criticism of a person save another person, or of a culture save an alternative culture - for persons and cultures are, for us, incarnated vocabularies. So our doubts about our own characters or our own culture can be resolved or assuaged only by enlarging our acquaintance. The easiest way of doing that is to read books, and so ironists spend more time placing books than in placing real live people." ~ Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

"If philosophy is an attempt to see how 'things in the largest sense of the term, hang together, in the largest sense of the term,' then it will always involve the construction of images which will have characteristic genres of writing. One may wish to say, as I do, that the seventeenth-century image is outworn - that the tradition which it inspired has lost its validity. But that is quite a different criticism from saying that this tradition misunderstood something or failed to solve a problem. Skepticism and the principal genre of modern philosophy have a symbiotic relationship. They live one another's death, and die one another's life." ~ Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

"Take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself"

Se con «post-modernismo» intendiamo le idee che io condivido con Vattimo, allora ritengo che il post-modernismo sia già piuttosto forte. Vattimo e io pensiamo che non esista un'autorità da interpellare aldilà del libero consenso, che la secolarizzazione sia l'esito naturale dell'etica cristiana dell'amore. Se questa posizione venisse accettata come universale allora persino l'ex cardinale Ratzinger e attuale papa rimarrebbe senza lavoro. Credo che il post-modernismo sia una continuazione della reazione, avviata dall'Illuminismo, alle regole imposte dal clero e dai sovrani. L'unica differenza tra il post-modernismo e il razionalismo illuminista (per esempio quello di Kant) è che i post-modernisti sono d'accordo con Hume (altro ottimo pensatore illuminista, anche se non razionalista): abbandonano cioè l'idea che esista una forza chiamata «ragione» che assicuri che la ricerca del libero consenso ci garantisca il contatto con la realtà. La visione post-modernista è che si può benissimo tralasciare la discussione sulla ragione e sulla realtà e semplicemente discutere di politica – di come aumentare la libertà umana, di come assicurare che le voci degli oppressi siano ascoltate. Secondo la visione post-modernista, la posizione di Ratzinger è solo una voce in più nella conversazione. Il fatto che parli a nome di un'istituzione autoritaria non dovrebbe farci smettere di ascoltarlo, ma dovrebbe farcelo ascoltare con un minimo di diffidenza. È nell'interesse di istituzioni simili descrivere l'anti-autoritarismo come «relativismo».

Il Bello del Relativismo

 

 

Phoenix