ABSTRACT
According to Rorty, philosophy cannot fulfil the aspirations of foundational epistemology. These were pretentious and led philosophy to overreach itself. Exposition of the nature of the hermeneutic conversation is difficult, because Rorty himself is not consistent nor always clear in what he has to say about it. He tells us, Hermeneutics sees the relation between various discourses as those of strands in a possible conversation, a conversation which presupposes no disciplinary matrix, but where the hope of agreement is never lost as long as the conversation lasts. The role of the philosopher is to note that there are the agreements and disagreements when, for some reason or another, a philosopher is tempted to distort or ignore them. Rorty would not only be opposed to the foundationalism which seeks an external foundation for all human practices. He would also be opposed to those Reformed epistemologists who argued as though all the practices already have a common foundation in God.
