ABSTRACT
Hegel thought the aim of philosophy was to make us feel ‘at home’ in the world by showing us how to think about the world as something which makes complete sense, with nothing left incomprehensible, alien or strange. He also thought of history as a process in which human reason has been progressing towards this goal of perfect comprehension. Rorty’s understanding of the historical movement of thought from Kant to Davidson is very much within this Hegelian framework. He thinks that now the ‘philosophical senses’ have lost their intellectual viability, we should be able to see through the otherworldly guidance they once seemed to offer, thereby dismissing traditional philosophical problems as simply the result of, ‘hypostatizing the Platonic focus imaginarius – truth as disjoined from agreement – and allowing the gap between oneself and that unconditional ideal to make one feel that one does not yet understand the conditions of one’s existence’ (340). Part Three of PMN is all about making sense of the new and more homely intellectual landscape which Rorty wants to usher in. This task splits into two components: drawing out the full ramifications of rejecting objective truth, and working out what to do with philosophy. Thus
in Chapter 7, Rorty’s concern is with the break-down of the cultural barriers which epistemology once upheld, particularly the barrier between science and other forms of inquiry, and then in Chapter 8, he turns to the question of what use society can make of the philosophical profession, given that there already is one, and that it has an impressive canon of great thinkers and great texts to its credit.
