ABSTRACT
Rolston tells a grand narrative, under the heading ‘The Way of Nature is the Way of the Cross’, and adds, with self-assurance: ‘The story is quite fantastic, except that it is true.’ In doing so he shows courage but also a certain degree of obstinacy. Since Kant, modern philosophy has taken the road from unity to plurality, to difference, dissemination, deconstruction and discontinuity. Instead of the one grand narrative there is a multitude of narratives, language-games, discourse-genres and vocabularies. To quote Richard Rorty, ‘there are many descriptions of the world and of ourselves possible, and the most important distinction is that between those descriptions which are less and those which are more useful with respect to a specific purpose’ (1999: 27). My main questions will be: what kind of discourse-genre does Rolston’s story represent and which problems are connected with this genre. To answer the first question I will proceed in three steps.
