Richard Rorty’s new book—the third volume of his philosophical papers—has three sections. Part 1 consists of disquisitions on, or rather against, the idea of objective truth; part 2 discusses moral progress; and part 3, which has the not quite accurate title “The Role of Philosophy in Human Progress,” comprises essays about the history of philosophy.
Do philosophers and philosophy professors find it easy or difficult to change their minds?
I’ll begin with a short description of part 3. In its first essay, Rorty gives a rather interesting account of some possible ways of writing history of philosophy. One might write about a philosopher, say Kant, from what one hopes would be Kant’s own point of view, or from the point of view of a later school of thought, or as part of the project of describing the spirit (Geist) of the eighteenth century. All these approaches are O.K., says Rorty, but he condemns a fourth way, labelled doxography. By doxography he means the system used by weary professors when they convert their ancient lecture notes into books for students. Doxography, he says, de-brains the great philosophers whose work it tries to explain. The second essay is a review of a book about John Locke by Michael Ayers. The third essay links Hegel, Dewey, and Darwin and considers the question of their separate and compound influences on the ideas of today. In the fourth essay, Rorty explains why he loves Habermas and Derrida. They
