Richard Rorty: From Anti-metaphysical Neo-Pragmatism to Rejection of Philosophy

Richard Rorty is a neo-Pragmatist philosopher. For three decades, he has attacked the traditional philosophy (from Plato to Kant) as well as any other epistemology searching for truth or claiming to mirror the nature in his philosophical works. Rorty holds that, according to the history of philosophy in his reading, there is no final answer to the traditional questions concerning knowledge, truth, and representation. These questions, therefore, should be dissolved and denied. He maintains that knowledge is justified belief, justification, however, being not the consequence of some correspondence between the theory or the statement, but the consequence of conversation, social practice, group consensus, and social solidarity. Rorty also thinks that democracy has priority on philosophy, disagreeing with the thesis that philosophy is the foundation of the rest of culture. Despite of usefulness of some elements and implications of Rorty’s metaphilosophy (such as his emphasis on freedom, democracy, and pluralism as well as his insisting on philosophical humility and avoiding scientific pride), it is faced with several problems, including 1) ignoring the referential and realist features of language, 2) confusing interpretation and reality, 3) eliminating the border between objectivity and subjectivity, 4) interfering of public and private life, and 5) ignoring the need of science, culture, technology and, in particular, politics, in philosophy. The authors try to show and analyze some elements of these problems.