RICHARD RORTY (1931-2007) Thinker and intellectual espousing philosophical pragmatism. He taught at Yale, Wellesley College, Princeton, the University of Virginia, and Stanford.

Rorty addresses the elusive answer about the relationship between reality and consciousness about reality. Does reality exist, as the positivists claim and as common sense tells us? After all we can hurt ourselves on hard, sharp, or hot objects, and our wounds can heal with no traces left. We can see the consequences of our actions, we can share our experiences with others, we are aware of our limited existence, but have an account of history as well an idea of future. That is where Richard Rorty enters the debate trying to find a conciliatory opinion about the existence of the world and what we know about things. Rorty proposes to agree upon the fact that we cannot definitively decide if an objective reality exists, or that we even could discover the truth about it, but that we certainly can get into a habit of dealing with reality. It seems that we clearly have no choice about dealing with reality, for the one certain event in our life is death, a topic extensively thought about by Martin Heidegger, about whom Rorty is writing in the second volume of this series of philosophical papers.

In a major new approach Rorty describes science as a cultural system of solidarity. It is a solidarity based in a common believe, the believe in the scientific method. The question is, does this method simply reflect an approach to interpret reality through observation, or does the fact, that scientist can agree upon a general system of exploration indicate that there is a deeper truth, namely the existence of reality independent of our consciousness. For if the latter is the case, we all (past, present, future generations) should arrive at the same truth about reality (physical laws). This arriving at the truth should occur independently of our cultural believes we might otherwise have and follow. Science is a tremendously successful international enterprise that proves by doing that there exists something that we can study in common, other than moral standards (human rights) or religious believes.

May 30, 1999 /  © 1999 Lukas K. Buehler / go back to Book Review Home

Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. His main tractatus 'Being and Time' attempted to firmly found the Being-here-in-the-world in language. Written in German, Heidegger's ontology is firmly rooted in this language and it almost appears as if Heidegger's philosophy is a German philosophy and can hardly be translated. Maybe it is this inexplicable entanglement of language with ontology that Rorty criticizes in the late Heidegger and is the major focus in this volume. Rorty says: "Heidegger and Derrida share a tendency to think of language as something more than just a set of tools. The later Heidegger persistently, and Derrida occasionally, treat Language as if it were a quasi-agent, a brooding presence, something that strands over and against human beings."

Why this essays about Heidegger (and Derrida)? Rorty's purpose is to make clear his stance against representationalism (e.g. the mind-body dichotomy) and explains how both Heidegger and Derrida used a philosophical framework that shows how things look under non-representationalist description. Essentially, Rorty presents Heidegger as a pragmatist who turns away from science to the poet.

May 30, 1999 /  © 1999 Lukas K. Buehler / go back to Book Review Home
Updated June 13, 2007