You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.

Richard Rorty

Categorized in : Giving Plato Philosophical

Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.

Richard Rorty

weekend friday sunday

Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.

Richard Rorty

truth-is vocabulary made

To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.

Richard Rorty

suggestions legacy age

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.

Richard Rorty

deep-inside belief motivational

There are credentials for admission to our democratic society [...]. You have to be educated in order to be a participant in our conversation So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.

Richard Rorty

religious silly children

Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

Richard Rorty

get-away truth-is

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

Richard Rorty

law love civilization

A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well is the chief instrument of cultural change.

Richard Rorty

chiefs talent arguing

All human relations untouched by love take place in the dark

Richard Rorty

humans dark relation

"True" resembles... a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit in with other sentences which are doing so.

Richard Rorty

truth-is way compliment

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

Richard Rorty

description world

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.

Richard Rorty

causes doe world

The most important advance that the West has yet made is to develop a secularist moral tradition

Richard Rorty

moral important west

What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French.

Richard Rorty

good-french rational determined

At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice.

Richard Rorty

being-human fighting justice

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?

Richard Rorty

philosophical clever animal

National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.

Richard Rorty

pride self country

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.

Richard Rorty

progress becoming philosophy

There is nothing to be known about anything except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other things. Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations.

Richard Rorty

speak forever way

Freedom is the recognition of contingency.

Richard Rorty

contingency recognition