I love that Rorty repeats most of the questions before answering them. Not just for our benefit on TH-cam (who can’t hear the questions too well), but for the benefit of his live audience.
Mostly it is rather that academics hide behind a plethora of useless opaque and pompous expressions that don’t mean anything. Jesus spoke in a way that kids could understand. Many thought he was a decent teacher. Kant his « follower » could not speak clearly so… I dunno… Sartre is nonsense at least. I know that much.
I first read Rorty's Mirror of Nature barely out of my teens twice, and it deserves a third reading. At the time, I found him a bit infuriating because he spoiled my honeymoon with philosophy but I later began to appreciate his common thread with Wittgenstein, Dewey, and metaphilosophy. Now, I find him infuriating again because, in his later writings, it seems he's trying to insulate himself from criticism. He can't have it both ways. I find him inspiring and challenging in that sense.
The whole philosophy is a farce. It’s a literary critique of human reality and human perception. He undercuts himself so much. He insists in no moral absolutes and doesn’t seem to have a grasp on religious teachings across all cultures and how intertwined the narratives are. I guess if you are assuming we are post-religious his points can be taken more seriously. However if his literary critique and anthropological research were as astute as possible then he would undoubtedly not speak of human consciousness as such a benign and inconsequential phenomena. Of course this would cut his argument into pieces. Of course I don’t think his pragmatism would ever allow for any underlying principles that could continue a “meta-narrative” lived out by humanity. I know this is from ‘94 but his dispensation of the neurology and psychology of the human being is just incorrect. Carl Jung would do him a lot of good. His thoughts on religion, especially judeo-Christian principles is incorrect. But his insistence on there being no moral absolutes then what the fuck does it matter😂 I understand what he’s saying but Jesus…what pompous nihilism. And every few sentences is just a backtrack of the previous statements. I can see why you’re upset with his insulation of criticism. I find him and his contemporaries always trying to assert their opinions with rationality and reason with a sword that can cut said opinions down. It’s a perfect way to indoctrinate the impressionable while passing out sledgehammers on the way out. Allowing idiots (maybe too cruel) to perceive their own philosophical ideologies while having a fail safe of a highly respected deconstructive philosopher to fall back on. Forgive me because I am on my 10th hour of a 12 hour night shift and articulated my point like a 12 year old. But maybe you agree with me that these types of teachings are extremely dangerous for the future of higher education.
In the philosophy biz, that's taken as quite a tribute. I'm not sure I would go that far, but then I'm familiar with him from before. So it wasn't all new.
@@Philosophy_Overdose @24:18 - ''the men who subjugated wo.....'' Don't spread anti male propaganda. Men NEVER subjugated the opposite s3x. They looked after them and worshiped them (like you are now)
@@Khuno2 Yes, I think so, but it depending on what you mean by "the way that things are." I don't think Rorty attempts to say anything at all about "reality itself," if that's what you mean. That's the whole point of Pragmatism - that thinking in terms of "what is really real" is just silly and useless because we will never know and it doesn't matter. But yes, I think that the way he describes the 'human condition" is particularly insightful and useful for the way it encourages us to keep our focus on what we actually know and thus what is important - how we treat each other and what we want our goals to be.
@@ericb9804 But that's not at all the whole point of pragmatism or pragmaticism (not according to Peirce). Pragmatists and neopragmatists disagree about what pragmatism's whole point is (e.g., Rorty and Putnam, or James vs Peirce). What's real matters a lot to all of them, I'd say, including Rorty. So it's the case that you agree with Rorty, right? Not what Rorty is saying about reality itself, but what you are. You're making a claim about what is real or exists (i.e., that Rorty is right, or rather the claims that he's making are the case). What else could you be making a claim about? We don't REALLY need real reality or absolute reality, or Truth vs truth (whatever that means)-- plain old reality will do. To get things right is to say what's the case, or the way things are regardless of what we believe (and here I'm confident Rorty would agree). Even if you disagreed and said something bizarre like "reality is a social construct" you'd believe that was true, and in a sense that wasn't socially constructed, else the bizarre would become the nonsensical. Anyway, I'm just having a laugh here.
@@Khuno2 I agree there are plenty of philosophers who call themselves pragmatists who disagree about the best way to discuss "truth," however they agree that the "Correspondence Theory of Truth" is a problematic metaphysical assumption that shouldn't be made. This is the essence of pragmatism, to whatever extent something can be said to have an "essence." "To get things right is to say what's the case, or the way things are regardless of what we believe (and here I'm confident Rorty would agree)." No, I don't think he would. I think he would say that we can't tell the difference between "the way things are" and "what we believe" and simply insisting that we do is just a source of confusion. I advocate for positions that I think are justified by experience, just as you do. The only difference is that I realize my justifications are relative only to an audience, not to "plain old reality." It is indeed ironic that I have no choice but to continue to speak and behave as though my claims were "about reality," but I'm none the worse for that. With all due respect, you may be having a laugh, but I don't think you get the joke.
@@ericb9804 But that's not the essence of pragmatism. Many philosophers who aren't pragmatists reject the correspondence theory of truth (Hegel comes to mind, and lo, there are Hegelian pragmatists). Even if you said the pragmatic theory of truth--which one? Difficult to identify what unites all pragmatists given their stark disagreements. It's more like family resemblance than a single school of thought. However, I'd say the essence of pragmatism is Peirce's pragmatic maxim found in his "How to Make Our Ideas Clear". That's his criterion of meaning. But I'd go with what a scholar of the pragmatist tradition has to say about that family resemblance over anything that you'd read in a comment section... Rorty would agree, because he distinguishes between truth and justification (which is why I separated your position from his in our back and forth on truth). He explicitly states that a belief can be true even if it's not justified and justified and false. He also states that mind independent truth isn't relative to anything (which for him is why it's ineffable), but that justification is relative to audiences AND truth candidates. Watch the clip, it's short! So Rorty would agree that a proposition can be true regardless of what we believe, or that a belief can be justified and false. We can't define it, but we know how to use the adjectives. Rorty further states that a pragmatist THEORY of truth amounts to a theory of justification and not truth (which is strenuously denied by other pragmatists). So what you're saying (again!) is that we can't, even in principle, tell the difference between the way things are and what we believe. If that's true, then the gap between Truth and truth, reality itself and our understanding of it is unintelligible to us. (Incidentally, do you realize what Peirce would make of this distinction using the pragmatic maxim? Probly not...suffice it to say not too much). And so your distinctions collapse, and we're left with the way things are or just plain old reality. Therefore, we can access reality without having to somehow step outside of ourselves to verify it in an infinite regress (that is, we don't need to be correspondence truth theorists to take truth seriously). "The only difference is that I realize my justifications are relative only to an audience, not to "plain old reality." Don't forget those truth candidates! But more importantly, is this realization of yours true? Presumably you think that it is. So, what is its truth relative to? Another audience? Nah... So what? Plain old reality or the Truth? Put another way, if truth and falsity are mind dependent creations of thought like language, and that's true, then that truth must be mind independent. Ergo, truth and falsity aren't mind dependent. And that's kinda funny to me.
Great lecture, thank you for posting. Wish a moral philosopher had been there to argue if Rorty’s idea that moral progress has only or best occurred from telling other people’s stories (if I understood his argument correctly) only works if the listener operates from a moral principle, like one should have compassion for other humans or sentient beings. Or if Rorty just speculated what criticism Nietzsche would have with his theory of moral progress.
I think ethics should evolve. For example, right now it should be wholly ethical to administer justice to the world leaders that have ruined our planet. They didn't even do it for their own selfish interests. They just paved the way for others. But if everybody keeps telling the same stories then how do our ethics ever evolve? Have our ethics changed at all, since the days of Shakespeare? Very little if at all, and yet the world is clearly a different place. We evolved our ethics long before we learned to write. The ability to write allowed us to, literally, set them in stone.
@ ctho admin I’d have to rewatch it at this stage to answer most seriously, but if I recall the gist, all of his arguments unanimously fall to standard critiques of relativism, because for all his postulating his points boil down that way. He wants to point to disagreement between perspectives and say that it is intractable, and he avoids this sounding like a piece of prophesy by claiming that Darwin ‘debunks the notion of the self’, i.e. there’s no common human nature that runs deeper than culture or circumstance, such that the disagreements are fundamental. Even if this were an accurate account of the theory it’s the assertion that because things change they at no point retain a sameness or consonance. Or else it’s a claim that temporal ethical principles are static, which is non-sequitur since realist ethics are always posited as metaphysical. It doesn’t follow in abstract and I would argue vehemently that it doesn’t play out in practice; human nature is really very consistent in many basic ways, which however fuzzy do set real parameters to what people can do, and so tangentially delimits the set of things that they should do. At minimum it’s a giant question mark in the middle of his argument that he glosses over without even acknowledging, but by common sense it’s an error. Consistency matters, and people broadly have it. Otherwise what’s the point in consistency in anything humans do? Certainly he shouldn’t bother having, say, a consistent argument. He also criticises the inconsistency of morals and moralisers, and cites circumstances where principles fail, but these only amount to a criticism of particular principles and ethicists, not a critique of the notion of ethical principles. So that much is definitely mistaken. With those arguments done he basically just holds up the unprincipled life and says ‘maybe?’. It’s weak, despite the proposition being immensely contentious. If you’re already a relativist such that ethical principles appear cosmically narrow and so not worth clinging to then he doesn’t even need to convince you, and makes no serious effort to. But if you’re not a relativist there’s nothing here that should diminish your view of principles, he just asserts that ‘the good life’ has no object.
@@thomaskilroy3199 That's a fair analysis, although, I would say, you're clearly abusing the 'law of non-contradiction' when you equate behavioral inconsistency with logical inconsistency.
@Nadeem Shaikh I admit to being facetious on that count. The serious version of what I meant was that tossing out ethical principles *per se* must include tossing out arguments as to the moral burden incumbent upon people to make proper arguments and respect consistency as a standard. It doesn’t mean Rorty is necessarily inconsistent, but it does mean that he’s proposing a world where it wouldn’t ‘matter’ ethically if he was being inconsistent.
Which, out of common sense, I feel obliged to point out is much too delectable an intellectual luxury to permit, accidentally or otherwise. I consider it enough to call his proposals dangerous not just wrong. Same thing goes when any scruple is tossed aside really: the unscrupulous person gains an ‘unfair’ advantage, but naturally *they* won’t consider it unfair, they can naturally be logically consistent there. It’s just a shame for everyone else struggling about trying to be ‘good’.
I've noticed that Rorty dislikes Kant, and others, such as his student Robert Brandom, have brought out the ways that Kant's views are more similar to Rorty's than he will admit. Here, for example, Kant's view of ethics as a form of self-legislating are closer to the views of Sartre that Rorty praises than Rorty will admit. When Kant argues that the ethical thing to do is to kill illegitimate children, as he did in one essay, that's the Kant that Rorty has in mind.
Rorty agrees w/Kant that reality is unknowable, that man is lost inside his mind. He has expllcitly said that he doesnt believe in anything. Hes an intellectual killer.
Forgive me I'm an idiot. In the instance of the opening problem, you say that philosophy can not help him make a decision. This led me to think this leaves him no option but to rely on fight or flight, because I'm slightly obsessed with it. But when I think about it, it's not. Or rather not the way I first assumed. My first assumption was that the decision to fight would, naturally represent the choice to fight, and the decision to take care of mother would be the flight. But on reflection I think it could easily be the other way around.
I'd like to add that making it about 'fighting Hitler and the Nazis' is a bit of a leading question, today at least. It's a brave man that argues that not fighting the Nazis is ethical in any way.
As Rorty implies, this question has no answer, but nevertheless requires a decision. In that case, I would stay with Mom. It also has the advantage of being safer. And Mom is a great cook.
At 1:09:18 it sounds like a burp and then people laughing at it. Is that what’s going on? Nothing that I can make out about the question sounds funny. Then again, it’s a surprisingly slap happy crowd.
Regardless of whether your ethical leaning is utilitarian or deontological, one should be grounded in virtue ethics which is informed by the master virtue of phronesis (prudence). Prudence gives one the latitude for different choices depending upon the particulars of any given situation based upon what the most prudent course of action would be.
I want to agree, but there is a serious problem with the concept of prudence. What is most prudent? Immediately further principles are begged, else you must specially plead on prudence’s behalf.
Prudence with respect to whose benefit though? Not one's own. And in exceptional cases such as standing up to an unjust regime with a very uncertain chance of upsetting it, it's not clear any prudence is involved
18:20 absolutely false. As soon as América was discovered a group of catholic Christian scholastic thinkers from the School of Salamanca, who drew their views from medieval Thomas Aquinas immediately denounced the abuses perpetrated against Indians and declared them as having the very same rights as a Spanish person. This was done very quickly and the authorities also responded to their call. Basically, this basic principle was well known and assumed in very established catholic intellectual circles as a matter of fact.
@@wanderingdude. The nonchalant moral relativism frequently comes across as dismissive rather than a deep or sophisticated explanation of the crisis it can cause.
@@wanderingdude. neo-pragmatism, not neo-platonism I would say is the source of Rorty’s relativism. I think there is the over-reliance on “effective” truth rather than an attempt to ground ethics in something universal or transcendent like a Platonist would.
@@joshcotlar2099ah I read you wrong sorry about that! That makes sense, effectively Could we accept that a universal truth exists (would that be the cat imperative?), but just get to it through what is effective? Why must we know what the truth is?
50:52min Like forgoing grasping history, like a police investigation should, truthfully and objectively to not be responsible for, autonomous (ought-is), with regards to developing and adhering to ways we construct optimal relations. Not related to gobbelianized shapes of consciousness stalkers.
@Research vs Gaslighting you appear to have deleted or had deleted a comment of yours. So I’ll just respond here. Yes, Thomas who has not formally studied logic says that it does not prove itself. That’s not my opinion that’s the opinion of Kurt Gödel, aswell as the same idea encapsulated in the concept of circular reasoning. If every term in a system proves its other then you have a closed system. Deduction for instance, requires terms, the terms are taken for granted not irrefutably proven by some prior chain of deductions. In other words they come from outside the system. Research vs Gaslighting, who is clearly very proud of having studied logic, would do well to admit a very very mild criticism of logic instead of posturing defensively. It doesn’t mean logic is wrong, or bad, or not immensely important and useful. It just means it’s not a divine automatic truth-stick like the Positivists thought it was. We appear to take various primitive categories for granted. That’s just life. Logicians are to be praised for maximally clearing the ground of redundant and ambiguous categories, but the road was never walked to its end in this respect.
It's true that Godel concluded that, and he wanted to expand the theory to figure out how inference works, unfortunately failed as he withered away dealing with it. Ofc, like Zeno's paradox it's predicated ultimately on a Creator and a sustainer, which is what no reasonable person can't help but arrive to. Similarly both enlightenment and the renaissance were curiously spurred by the two great translation movements from Arabic.
A man [Alex] witnesses a second man [Bob] administering a heavy beating to a third man [Colin]. Colin looks close to death, and Bob doesn't look like easing up. With no alternative presenting itself, Alex steps in. His only intention is to save Colin, but Bob is so persistently dangerous that Alex has to kill Bob, just to save his own life. At which point Alex notices the fourth man [Dead] as Colin retrieves his knife from his back.
Ethical principles used to serve an individual’s survival interests but that’s no longer the case. In the world we now live in, in which naked capitalist greed governs all human activity, ethical principles are a distinct disadvantage. The one who can lie, cheat, steal and bully will prevail and be rewarded. The one who adhered to ethical principles will lose and ultimately perish. In the corporate capitalist jungle, decent people finish last, if they finish at all.
Merely an observation. I’d like to get rich but I’m burdened with a conscience so I’m probably doomed to a life of resentful poverty. And I’m a lawyer, too! I’ve done my best to rid myself of all sense of moral decency but alas! Without success! 😂
And you don’t know about anyone who has “made it” so to say while still being a moral person having a good conscience? Btw, what has convinced you of your previous claim?
24:45 "If Plato and Kant had been correct in believing that all human beings were, at bottom, the same, thanks to their shared faculty of reason-that acculturation and historical location were only skin deep-then there would indeed be only one set of ethical principles. But Plato and Kant were wrong." This is a simple conditional argument, that IF (A) THEN (B), NOT (B), THEREFORE NOT (A). That makes the argument _valid_, but it doesn't make it _sound_. As a matter of fact in this moment of the lecture, Dr. Rorty has not substantiated the basic (and uninteresting) relativist claim that a plurality of normative sets of principles is evidence to the impossibility of a universal, shared set of principles. I know this is almost 30 years old, and hopefully people _today_ have a firmer understanding of everything than they did before two decades of widespread adoption of the Internet, but the argument is so easy to challenge that it is absurd. Alternatively, one could merely follow this quote from Rorty here with "_Or_ some sets of ethical principles are wrong." Certainly, both positions can't be correct. But just because two opposing positions can't both be correct, doesn't mean that either is correct. The disjunctive claims of people are not necessarily real; these are often false dichotomies. Conditionals like Rorty's (and every other relativist) are also not necessarily real. What confuses me is why Rorty (_along with_ Sartre) chooses to abandon the challenge of figuring out what constitutes universal justice. What's the appeal of relativism? Explanatory power? Saying that relativism has explanatory power is like saying a drawing of dynamite has explosive power: relativism doesn't explain anything about morality, just like the drawing doesn't explain anything about dynamite. In both cases, morality and dynamite existed before the claim. In both cases, the best that can be done is to _describe_ what is going on in the case of morality or dynamite. Yes, people _do_ engage in moral talk and development of moral ideas, but what is every normative system _trying_ to do? Moral practice cannot agree with normative relativism because from the point of view of most moral agents, their own moral endeavor is universal and absolute. People do not live relativistic lives. The moral intuition is toward a unitary, universal, absolute system of moral law. Just because Kant has old-dead-white-guy syndrome, doesn't mean that moral absolutism is misguided. What seems misguided is the apparent surrender of well-meaning philosophers to the vice of negative peace. Dissonance is there to remind you that-whatever you're doing-you're not done yet. If it doesn't make sense, then you haven't made sense of it yet. But don't just _give up_ like this.
(this comment is just going to reply to the ideas in the 4th paragraph of your post; if there is anything in the other paragraphs that's crucial to the point(s), feel free to bring them up) I think the appeal of relativism, or at least in descriptive relativism ("these people have different moral codes", as opposed to "these people *should* have different moral codes") *is* in its explanatory power. Take a look at any two cultures, and you will find at least one moral disagreement in their overall practices (IE, the presence of strict caste systems vs. the potential for upward or downward social mobility, and whether or not either of them are a good thing). On top of that, within cultures, there will be some degree of internal diversity (see Rorty vs. Buckley, to name drop an example that came up elsewhere in this comment section; or see Ibn Sinna vs. Ibn Rushd's wildly different takes on Aristotle), barring extreme top-down imposition of some moral law (literally), and even then, it's probably only going to change the outward appearance _of_ diversity, not the underlying diversity itself (see any dissident from any authoritarian regime). Regarding the "people do not live relativistic lives" point, that depends on what their lives are relative *to*. If you mean "relative to their previous standards", then sure, most people don't (at least on a day-to-day basis; extend the timeline and things get fuzzy), but "relative to each other" I think is just patently false. Sam Harris and Alasdair MacIntyre have wildly different moral codes, and in turn, both are wildly different from Friedrich Nietzsche, who is in turn wildly different from Zhuangzhi. I could go on, but I think that small list of four is enough to make the point. "The moral intuition is towards" Imma stop you there; the observational intuition is to think the earth is static, the sun goes around us, and the night sky is constant. We know from subsequent, more rigorous observation that all three of those are false. Why should moral intuition be immune from having comparable errors? Aristotle held that some people are naturally slavish, a view I hold to be incompatible with findings from (my admittedly-limited understanding of) ethology (namely that gene-environment interaction is what determines a large portion of your behavioral patterns, with no innateism at all). Moreover, I think the "moral absolute ideal" has to posit that once we hit that point, things will not change, a view I do not agree with. If and when we reached the platonic ideal of the utopia, would the world's natural processes cease to throw shit at us? Would we stop evolving? Would the Andromeda Galaxy change its course so that it wouldn't dry up our oceans when it hits the Milky Way? What reason do we have to believe that, despite the universe being in constant-yet-predictable flux, we somehow won't have to become problem-solvers whenever novel situations come up that our moral ideals didn't prepare us for? (apologies if this read as hostile, I just wanted to make sure my disagreement came across. No ill will wished towards you)
@@JH-le4sd he was woke! More a difference in temperament and communication style than principles, policies.. but maybe that is the difference between the woke of the current year and 90's and aughts P.C. bourgeoisie liberals.
@@S2Cents Is there any comment section that is safe from irrelevant blather bout who is and isn't ""woke"? It's such an empty, meaningless word (at least in its newly-concocted usage). You certainly can't be "deep" if you insist on talking about who's "woke".
1:05:30MIN Again his relation to history "Everybody thought they were crazy" (if they said such a thing). But thank God they were there. I mean everybody thought they were totally crazy.
I love Rorty, but has anyone else noticed that he adopts this weird sort of trans-atlantic accent at times when he's lecturing, when compared to when he's speaking privately in interviews as such? If I'm right, I wonder how he picked up that habit?
Sure. Principles are great. They're just not more important than basic needs, family, or common sense. For example: if a child is on fire, do you run across the street to help her, or do you walk to the corner a block away and back just to follow jaywalking laws? Jaywalking laws exist for a reason. And it's ethically unsound to break laws.
That doesn’t follow. You can have a hierarchy of principles, and ethicists always have had as much. And indeed most if not all ethical systems distinguish between ethical rules and written laws. Only a totalitarian would say that the law and the ethic are a priori synonymous, and maybe not even them. Laws are supposed to be imitations of ethical rules, the latter having veto power over the former (hence reform and referendum being a feature of all liberal politics). You can easily suggest a law that life-saving efforts be granted certain immunities, indeed we already do this with, say, the contextual right of a driver to break the lights to get out of the way of an emergency services vehicle. That’s real law and the ethics behind it are not really that complex. Human life matters more than certain perennial safeties within it. It’s a bit like acknowledging that life has inherent risks.
@@thomaskilroy3199 the fact that ethics are even debatable makes them subjective. You can't just go around insisting that everybody adhere to your own subjective, whimsical ethical principles. It just doesn't work. Laws work. If everybody follows the laws getting written by legislators voted in by the people. In the scenario of the child in trouble, you just break the law to do the right thing and then pay the ticket for jaywalking. That's the ethically sound way to handle it. There is no payoff for the hero, though. His actions are strictly altruistic. Kind of a gyp.
Debatable doesn’t equal subjective. It just means people are ignorant. In the Socratic sense. Truth can be approached or discovered, but you have to first believe there is a truth. If you believe in ethical truths, even if only as a general theory, then that is far better than just following laws with no object. ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I can’t know’ are very different notions.
@@thomaskilroy3199 Laws are not supposed to be imitations of ethical rules. In a liberal democratic society, they sometimes appear to be imitations, but that is due to a reflection of the electorates' reasons for voting in any particular case. Laws are a tool to ensure stability of the government in any given society. Edit: I think from this perspective, we can more accurately build a society that most people want and can agree to.
This is isane. He just opposes two "arbitrary systems of morality" as if they were the only two metaphysical possibilities and is applauded in the end. People don't study anything anymore.
Forgive the pretentious accent, one is who he is... Alfred Lord Byron was not so simple, as those declarations on a public transport may support, we may say that Sylvia Plath's "the Bel Jar" are ostententious, even snobbish... And we still miss her. We miss America. They are our children, autonomous, independent, with pride and self estteeem. (a praise to United States im an epoch of doubt) I personally endorse America culture, Science, Literature, Philosophy, Epistemology, History, Cosmopolitan Thinking, Think Thanks. Democracy fighting. I fight for Liberal Democrats in America. I defend the American people, those who know too much also those who are objects of manipulation... Ryse America.
I don't agree with Rorty. Because some people, not many perhaps, live by absolute moral conviction. And some people, again perhaps not many, live as if nothing whatever mattered and do whatever they feel like doing. Think of Jim Morrison, for example. Or Marilyn Manson. Basically didn't give a shit about anything, even whether they died or not.
If he is saying that ethics are pragmatic, I agree. Cicero said goodness requires virtue. I think that is why Declaration of Independence states we have a right to pursue happiness. It leads to virtue, if we live long enough.
"All, I know Is that If I see a military man holding weapons and they are loyal to me and serve me all the goods anyone can say to me...I was inspired by his non-normativity and brought it into this and those beings there classroom, or, proto-classrooms...there not here.
Since student early days I say that's an upmost exemple of existence of strong philosophy outside continental strong European corrents... Philosophische Deutsche Schule sind sehr Wichtig und Wahrheit Inner Hauses. L'école Française est fondamentale mais doit dialoguer. United States have every nationality that counts, or especially their thinkers... It's not the military industrial complex the greatest strength of the fascinating States. 😏❤️✨ God bless this lecturer, being an atheist that's not a joke. On the contrary, it's a bow to American Culture. Today we are not coerced to use the Bible a d the words so help me God... Little steps. 🙏
1:20:42min I mean it is true that if you ask a Gobbelianized-non-desiring-non-self-consciousnes to predict if the sun will rise tomorrow, or, whether he will be capable to look at someone and phoneticalize words made up of the English alphabeth he will say that science although a nice novel has not had enough imagination to lie to itself about something that...like just hummmmms out there...did I say world? And time? And then here and being there world...race...God in bio race Wars.
Rorty liked the moral/cultural milieu of standard NPR liberal "tote baggers" of his day. So, working backward from the conclusion that the standard NPR liberal tote bagger of his day was the highest and ideal form of life, he assembled a "philosophy" to justify that ideal. Like pretty much every other philosopher in history really.
This is mostly very good but I can’t help but notice how much he sounds like he loves the sound of his own voice. There’s a very smug undertone running throughout that makes everything he says sound so dismissive.
If we listen to Eckhart tolle people before the great drought lived peacefully in the now.They lived a shared life.In short the question of ethics arise only of you are bad, if you are innately bad you need ethics to regulate you badness. It's the warlike Aryan culture that stresses ethics whereas the peaceful Dravidian culture does not.It stresses on pleasure. The Tamil culture millenia before Christ saw only two values in life.Agam அகம் meaning internal or private and Puram புறம் meaning external or public.Agam consists of secret love life ,pleasures, sentiments and Puram is power and politics. It was a matriarchial originally.
Pragmatism is so odd and arbitrary and pointless and boring… Its artistic representation would be that of a large, empty parking lot, so I guess it could only come from America… 🇺🇸 🇺🇸🇺🇸
@@JH-le4sd What kind of world do you imagine in which erudite people explain their thoughts about specific subjects, explanations that take time to fully develop, but they don't sound like human beings try to explain their thoughts? Nearly all "polished" speakers are charlatans, propagandists, salespeople, sermonizers. I prefer thinkers.
@@jamesragsdale8202 that muddies the water then. Is it better to be a passive image of something reprehensible? Both older philosophers and younger philosophers never had to answer this question.
It is not about ethics within modern western philosophy any more. It is about what are the dark forces luking in the history of thd modern world as it's driving power. When the answer to this question is unearthed by questioning modern, modernisation, use of modern science and tech by modern colonial political economic power, it's presence and doing a much more istrumentalisatio by the same old wine in a new bottle, a foreinsic analysis of the history of modern education as it's brewing centre, anthropocentric worldview and the catastrophe modern man has done to the Earth would not give the right to talk about ethics to any one who does not interrogate the extra-survival praxis of modern economy. As the destroyer of the beautiful Earth based on the Darwinian Extra-survival competitive maritocracy which ultimately selects those who can sit on the top of the Pyramid of Modetn Economy, the Anthropocentric humanism is has no ground. No one so far has asked what is wrong with the maritocratic modern humanism as an anthropocentric blunder of western civilisation and how is it linked to the dwindling fate of the non-human species in the biosphere. Why theoretical Sciences has no more takers? Do we need mega cities? Is urbanisation a sign of being civilised ? Do the deliberations about ethics have any legitimacy when it is only a part of the modern duality namaste between man and nature. This exploitative exploitation extends to the opposition between the globalised filthy agenda of only very few affluent rich people and their helpless majority global population. The Over-view and Cognitive Shift of those astronauts who had coined them then when they saw the Earth from their rockets and the elemental feelings of the unity of existence the had then- the first of it's kind in the human history should be studied instead.
The purpose of Postmodernism, according to one of them, Richard Rorty, is to bring about "the end of man, of the sovereign subject, and w/it the collapse of the moral foundations of the Enlightenment and of the end of the epistemological foundations of philosophy and of science." [_After Philosophy_]....Condemning nihilists for worshiping Nothing, Rorty said that his Neo-Pragmatism is better because "We don't worship anything." ["Anti-Essentialism"] Despite Rorty's claim, he is a nihilist, a hater of values and their base, reason. This is the Kantian nihilism that caused modern "art," Marxism, Nazism and the increasing cultural irrationalism of Left and Right. Rorty is an intellectual death camp guard. The alternative is Ayn Rand's, Objectivism, a philosophy for living on Earth.
@@kensey007 He should do whatever floats his boat - if he thinks the cause is just, he desires the common feeling of having a superior investment in his culture over those who do not go, then he should go. If he thinks that the cause is not just and the price is not too high, and his mother will die without his presence, then he should not go. Easy peasy.
Pragmatists without an Other. Just be certain, practical, at least do away with a looooot of non-sense like wayyy to much time like reading. And if you interact with others just speak, but first do away with computational logic and grammar and just get to the infantile point that always works for all such that wait...
Like at least do away with as much, and be practical, and like talk, just talk, and relax first and relaxed until you feel like, it helps to be on a couch first and we are practical we are laying on a couch and you are now sleepy and I get to mock victims with Lee C and then ba-zahwee sloths and millions are like: I agree with that and what you do in full identificatory laughter....sleepy...sleep further in whose that? A victim? No it's more complex they are Hitler and we are Einstein.
And what do you want race Wars are also fiction want that all fictitious ? Slaves are real how much can you not grasp with that and that is a story. Like what don't you think Alf...and our hatred of cats?"
He said nothing. Instead he sold young people on M arxist ideology propaganda. He needs to be more rigorous with his understanding of history. Or he's down right lieing. This view might seem scientific and benevolent, but it's not. It's religion. And unreasonable.
It’s remarkable that in your whole paragraph there you didn’t say a single substantive thing: what’s wrong about his history? What is religious or unreasonable about his views? What makes this “Marxist ideology propaganda”?
I love that Rorty repeats most of the questions before answering them. Not just for our benefit on TH-cam (who can’t hear the questions too well), but for the benefit of his live audience.
I love listening to eloquent erudition that i will never comprehend - a sieve for a brain is all i am blessed with ...
Mostly it is rather that academics hide behind a plethora of useless opaque and pompous expressions that don’t mean anything.
Jesus spoke in a way that kids could understand. Many thought he was a decent teacher. Kant his « follower » could not speak clearly so…
I dunno…
Sartre is nonsense at least. I know that much.
Give yourself more credit. You can always look up terms, concepts, and names that are unfamiliar and listen to things more than once.
I first read Rorty's Mirror of Nature barely out of my teens twice, and it deserves a third reading. At the time, I found him a bit infuriating because he spoiled my honeymoon with philosophy but I later began to appreciate his common thread with Wittgenstein, Dewey, and metaphilosophy. Now, I find him infuriating again because, in his later writings, it seems he's trying to insulate himself from criticism. He can't have it both ways. I find him inspiring and challenging in that sense.
The whole philosophy is a farce. It’s a literary critique of human reality and human perception. He undercuts himself so much. He insists in no moral absolutes and doesn’t seem to have a grasp on religious teachings across all cultures and how intertwined the narratives are. I guess if you are assuming we are post-religious his points can be taken more seriously. However if his literary critique and anthropological research were as astute as possible then he would undoubtedly not speak of human consciousness as such a benign and inconsequential phenomena. Of course this would cut his argument into pieces. Of course I don’t think his pragmatism would ever allow for any underlying principles that could continue a “meta-narrative” lived out by humanity. I know this is from ‘94 but his dispensation of the neurology and psychology of the human being is just incorrect. Carl Jung would do him a lot of good. His thoughts on religion, especially judeo-Christian principles is incorrect. But his insistence on there being no moral absolutes then what the fuck does it matter😂 I understand what he’s saying but Jesus…what pompous nihilism. And every few sentences is just a backtrack of the previous statements. I can see why you’re upset with his insulation of criticism. I find him and his contemporaries always trying to assert their opinions with rationality and reason with a sword that can cut said opinions down. It’s a perfect way to indoctrinate the impressionable while passing out sledgehammers on the way out. Allowing idiots (maybe too cruel) to perceive their own philosophical ideologies while having a fail safe of a highly respected deconstructive philosopher to fall back on. Forgive me because I am on my 10th hour of a 12 hour night shift and articulated my point like a 12 year old. But maybe you agree with me that these types of teachings are extremely dangerous for the future of higher education.
Thank you for posting this and for providing the date of the presentation.
Thanks for posting this. It's the first time I've been able to follow Rorty's conclusions
Those initial 10 minutes tracing out the discussion of two points of view was very valuable for me, I understand both sides better
It's like he is dismantling the foundations of modern moral suggestions with every sentence for 50 minutes straight.
It's lovely.
In the philosophy biz, that's taken as quite a tribute. I'm not sure I would go that far, but then I'm familiar with him from before. So it wasn't all new.
The zealots will throw it all out if we aren’t careful.
Never forget to activate automatic subtitles. Thanks so much!
We've been through this already.
@@Philosophy_Overdose hahaha. For every great video there's a repeated question and/or comment.
@@Philosophy_Overdose 🤦🏽
@@Philosophy_Overdose @24:18 - ''the men who subjugated wo.....''
Don't spread anti male propaganda. Men NEVER subjugated the opposite s3x. They looked after them and worshiped them (like you are now)
@@Philosophy_Overdose Thanks my brother, you r my virtual hero.
Geez this is good.
this is a really good summation
49:27min-49:29min His meta-principle.
What philosopher does he refer to at e.g. 46:18? Sounds like "Buyer"? can someone help? :-)
Baier
Annette Baier.
Its not so much that Rorty is right, as much as that if everyone read and understood Rorty, we'd all be so much better off.
So you believe that what he's saying is true? Right with respect to the way that things are?
@@Khuno2 Yes, I think so, but it depending on what you mean by "the way that things are."
I don't think Rorty attempts to say anything at all about "reality itself," if that's what you mean. That's the whole point of Pragmatism - that thinking in terms of "what is really real" is just silly and useless because we will never know and it doesn't matter.
But yes, I think that the way he describes the 'human condition" is particularly insightful and useful for the way it encourages us to keep our focus on what we actually know and thus what is important - how we treat each other and what we want our goals to be.
@@ericb9804 But that's not at all the whole point of pragmatism or pragmaticism (not according to Peirce). Pragmatists and neopragmatists disagree about what pragmatism's whole point is (e.g., Rorty and Putnam, or James vs Peirce). What's real matters a lot to all of them, I'd say, including Rorty.
So it's the case that you agree with Rorty, right? Not what Rorty is saying about reality itself, but what you are. You're making a claim about what is real or exists (i.e., that Rorty is right, or rather the claims that he's making are the case). What else could you be making a claim about? We don't REALLY need real reality or absolute reality, or Truth vs truth (whatever that means)-- plain old reality will do. To get things right is to say what's the case, or the way things are regardless of what we believe (and here I'm confident Rorty would agree). Even if you disagreed and said something bizarre like "reality is a social construct" you'd believe that was true, and in a sense that wasn't socially constructed, else the bizarre would become the nonsensical.
Anyway, I'm just having a laugh here.
@@Khuno2 I agree there are plenty of philosophers who call themselves pragmatists who disagree about the best way to discuss "truth," however they agree that the "Correspondence Theory of Truth" is a problematic metaphysical assumption that shouldn't be made. This is the essence of pragmatism, to whatever extent something can be said to have an "essence."
"To get things right is to say what's the case, or the way things are regardless of what we believe (and here I'm confident Rorty would agree)." No, I don't think he would. I think he would say that we can't tell the difference between "the way things are" and "what we believe" and simply insisting that we do is just a source of confusion.
I advocate for positions that I think are justified by experience, just as you do. The only difference is that I realize my justifications are relative only to an audience, not to "plain old reality." It is indeed ironic that I have no choice but to continue to speak and behave as though my claims were "about reality," but I'm none the worse for that.
With all due respect, you may be having a laugh, but I don't think you get the joke.
@@ericb9804 But that's not the essence of pragmatism. Many philosophers who aren't pragmatists reject the correspondence theory of truth (Hegel comes to mind, and lo, there are Hegelian pragmatists). Even if you said the pragmatic theory of truth--which one? Difficult to identify what unites all pragmatists given their stark disagreements. It's more like family resemblance than a single school of thought. However, I'd say the essence of pragmatism is Peirce's pragmatic maxim found in his "How to Make Our Ideas Clear". That's his criterion of meaning. But I'd go with what a scholar of the pragmatist tradition has to say about that family resemblance over anything that you'd read in a comment section...
Rorty would agree, because he distinguishes between truth and justification (which is why I separated your position from his in our back and forth on truth). He explicitly states that a belief can be true even if it's not justified and justified and false. He also states that mind independent truth isn't relative to anything (which for him is why it's ineffable), but that justification is relative to audiences AND truth candidates. Watch the clip, it's short! So Rorty would agree that a proposition can be true regardless of what we believe, or that a belief can be justified and false. We can't define it, but we know how to use the adjectives. Rorty further states that a pragmatist THEORY of truth amounts to a theory of justification and not truth (which is strenuously denied by other pragmatists).
So what you're saying (again!) is that we can't, even in principle, tell the difference between the way things are and what we believe. If that's true, then the gap between Truth and truth, reality itself and our understanding of it is unintelligible to us. (Incidentally, do you realize what Peirce would make of this distinction using the pragmatic maxim? Probly not...suffice it to say not too much). And so your distinctions collapse, and we're left with the way things are or just plain old reality. Therefore, we can access reality without having to somehow step outside of ourselves to verify it in an infinite regress (that is, we don't need to be correspondence truth theorists to take truth seriously).
"The only difference is that I realize my justifications are relative only to an audience, not to "plain old reality."
Don't forget those truth candidates! But more importantly, is this realization of yours true? Presumably you think that it is. So, what is its truth relative to? Another audience? Nah... So what? Plain old reality or the Truth? Put another way, if truth and falsity are mind dependent creations of thought like language, and that's true, then that truth must be mind independent. Ergo, truth and falsity aren't mind dependent.
And that's kinda funny to me.
Great lecture, thank you for posting. Wish a moral philosopher had been there to argue if Rorty’s idea that moral progress has only or best occurred from telling other people’s stories (if I understood his argument correctly) only works if the listener operates from a moral principle, like one should have compassion for other humans or sentient beings. Or if Rorty just speculated what criticism Nietzsche would have with his theory of moral progress.
I think ethics should evolve. For example, right now it should be wholly ethical to administer justice to the world leaders that have ruined our planet. They didn't even do it for their own selfish interests. They just paved the way for others.
But if everybody keeps telling the same stories then how do our ethics ever evolve? Have our ethics changed at all, since the days of Shakespeare? Very little if at all, and yet the world is clearly a different place.
We evolved our ethics long before we learned to write. The ability to write allowed us to, literally, set them in stone.
An example of an account of social relations as evacuated from Historical Materialism as you could make it. Its that exact.
"evacuated"?
Brilliant 101 on Ethics
25:47 Ethics aren't arbitrary.
59:37 A little of both
I would stay with the old mother without second thought and with clear conscience
Insightful!
1:14:17
Hegel surfacing?
Ignorance is not a necessary validation of one's truth.
Thanks a lot.
Wrong versus right - right down to the interior of Rorty's thought.
ah 1994, before the internet age made people afraid of being clipped out of context saying things like 35:56
What a speaker
Thankyou for uploading this video, even if it is just to prove that yes, Rorty is full of it.
Why is Rorty full of it? Can you give examples from the lecture?
@ ctho admin I’d have to rewatch it at this stage to answer most seriously, but if I recall the gist, all of his arguments unanimously fall to standard critiques of relativism, because for all his postulating his points boil down that way.
He wants to point to disagreement between perspectives and say that it is intractable, and he avoids this sounding like a piece of prophesy by claiming that Darwin ‘debunks the notion of the self’, i.e. there’s no common human nature that runs deeper than culture or circumstance, such that the disagreements are fundamental.
Even if this were an accurate account of the theory it’s the assertion that because things change they at no point retain a sameness or consonance.
Or else it’s a claim that temporal ethical principles are static, which is non-sequitur since realist ethics are always posited as metaphysical.
It doesn’t follow in abstract and I would argue vehemently that it doesn’t play out in practice; human nature is really very consistent in many basic ways, which however fuzzy do set real parameters to what people can do, and so tangentially delimits the set of things that they should do.
At minimum it’s a giant question mark in the middle of his argument that he glosses over without even acknowledging, but by common sense it’s an error.
Consistency matters, and people broadly have it. Otherwise what’s the point in consistency in anything humans do? Certainly he shouldn’t bother having, say, a consistent argument.
He also criticises the inconsistency of morals and moralisers, and cites circumstances where principles fail, but these only amount to a criticism of particular principles and ethicists, not a critique of the notion of ethical principles. So that much is definitely mistaken.
With those arguments done he basically just holds up the unprincipled life and says ‘maybe?’.
It’s weak, despite the proposition being immensely contentious.
If you’re already a relativist such that ethical principles appear cosmically narrow and so not worth clinging to then he doesn’t even need to convince you, and makes no serious effort to.
But if you’re not a relativist there’s nothing here that should diminish your view of principles, he just asserts that ‘the good life’ has no object.
@@thomaskilroy3199 That's a fair analysis, although, I would say, you're clearly abusing the 'law of non-contradiction' when you equate behavioral inconsistency with logical inconsistency.
@Nadeem Shaikh I admit to being facetious on that count.
The serious version of what I meant was that tossing out ethical principles *per se* must include tossing out arguments as to the moral burden incumbent upon people to make proper arguments and respect consistency as a standard.
It doesn’t mean Rorty is necessarily inconsistent, but it does mean that he’s proposing a world where it wouldn’t ‘matter’ ethically if he was being inconsistent.
Which, out of common sense, I feel obliged to point out is much too delectable an intellectual luxury to permit, accidentally or otherwise.
I consider it enough to call his proposals dangerous not just wrong.
Same thing goes when any scruple is tossed aside really: the unscrupulous person gains an ‘unfair’ advantage, but naturally *they* won’t consider it unfair, they can naturally be logically consistent there. It’s just a shame for everyone else struggling about trying to be ‘good’.
Great lecture! Rorty is like a distinguished Southern Derrida.
The absolute contradiction of course is when one is used as a means WITHOUT one knowing it
I've noticed that Rorty dislikes Kant, and others, such as his student Robert Brandom, have brought out the ways that Kant's views are more similar to Rorty's than he will admit. Here, for example, Kant's view of ethics as a form of self-legislating are closer to the views of Sartre that Rorty praises than Rorty will admit. When Kant argues that the ethical thing to do is to kill illegitimate children, as he did in one essay, that's the Kant that Rorty has in mind.
Rorty agrees w/Kant that reality is unknowable, that man is lost inside his mind. He has expllcitly said that he doesnt believe in anything. Hes an intellectual killer.
I mean, if it was ethical to kill illegitimate children we wouldn't have survived long enough to invent marriage,.
Forgive me I'm an idiot.
In the instance of the opening problem, you say that philosophy can not help him make a decision. This led me to think this leaves him no option but to rely on fight or flight, because I'm slightly obsessed with it. But when I think about it, it's not. Or rather not the way I first assumed. My first assumption was that the decision to fight would, naturally represent the choice to fight, and the decision to take care of mother would be the flight. But on reflection I think it could easily be the other way around.
I'd like to add that making it about 'fighting Hitler and the Nazis' is a bit of a leading question, today at least. It's a brave man that argues that not fighting the Nazis is ethical in any way.
Fight or flight is pre decision. Courage can be fear that has said its prayers.
As Rorty implies, this question has no answer, but nevertheless requires a decision. In that case, I would stay with Mom. It also has the advantage of being safer. And Mom is a great cook.
At 1:09:18 it sounds like a burp and then people laughing at it. Is that what’s going on? Nothing that I can make out about the question sounds funny. Then again, it’s a surprisingly slap happy crowd.
35:56
That's some hard R 😆
Everybody wants to have a voice in politics
Regardless of whether your ethical leaning is utilitarian or deontological, one should be grounded in virtue ethics which is informed by the master virtue of phronesis (prudence). Prudence gives one the latitude for different choices depending upon the particulars of any given situation based upon what the most prudent course of action would be.
For me it's the other way around. To the extent I consider virtue ethical principles, it is for ultimately utilitarian reasons.
I want to agree, but there is a serious problem with the concept of prudence.
What is most prudent?
Immediately further principles are begged, else you must specially plead on prudence’s behalf.
@@thomaskilroy3199 Well, you must be prudent in your prudence. Anything else would be imprudent… even impudent.
MacIntyre, is that you?
Prudence with respect to whose benefit though? Not one's own. And in exceptional cases such as standing up to an unjust regime with a very uncertain chance of upsetting it, it's not clear any prudence is involved
18:20 absolutely false. As soon as América was discovered a group of catholic Christian scholastic thinkers from the School of Salamanca, who drew their views from medieval Thomas Aquinas immediately denounced the abuses perpetrated against Indians and declared them as having the very same rights as a Spanish person. This was done very quickly and the authorities also responded to their call. Basically, this basic principle was well known and assumed in very established catholic intellectual circles as a matter of fact.
How could they endorse slavery, then? Locke defended slavery only as a criminal punishment.
@johnstewart7025 I believe Locke also benefited financially from slavery.
32:00
A great lecture, I now understand why I despise neo-pragmatism with great clarity lol
why do you despise it?
@@wanderingdude. The nonchalant moral relativism frequently comes across as dismissive rather than a deep or sophisticated explanation of the crisis it can cause.
@@joshcotlar2099 neoplatonism and relativism don't seem to mix in my mind, maybe that will change I still haven't watched it
@@wanderingdude. neo-pragmatism, not neo-platonism I would say is the source of Rorty’s relativism. I think there is the over-reliance on “effective” truth rather than an attempt to ground ethics in something universal or transcendent like a Platonist would.
@@joshcotlar2099ah I read you wrong sorry about that! That makes sense, effectively
Could we accept that a universal truth exists (would that be the cat imperative?), but just get to it through what is effective? Why must we know what the truth is?
str8 🔥
35:56
50:52min Like forgoing grasping history, like a police investigation should, truthfully and objectively to not be responsible for, autonomous (ought-is), with regards to developing and adhering to ways we construct optimal relations. Not related to gobbelianized shapes of consciousness stalkers.
Are you serious with this comment? It reads like gibberish.
@@ntodd4110 Can you copy paste? Yes, I am serious.
@Research vs Gaslighting you appear to have deleted or had deleted a comment of yours.
So I’ll just respond here.
Yes, Thomas who has not formally studied logic says that it does not prove itself.
That’s not my opinion that’s the opinion of Kurt Gödel, aswell as the same idea encapsulated in the concept of circular reasoning.
If every term in a system proves its other then you have a closed system.
Deduction for instance, requires terms, the terms are taken for granted not irrefutably proven by some prior chain of deductions.
In other words they come from outside the system.
Research vs Gaslighting, who is clearly very proud of having studied logic, would do well to admit a very very mild criticism of logic instead of posturing defensively.
It doesn’t mean logic is wrong, or bad, or not immensely important and useful. It just means it’s not a divine automatic truth-stick like the Positivists thought it was.
We appear to take various primitive categories for granted. That’s just life. Logicians are to be praised for maximally clearing the ground of redundant and ambiguous categories, but the road was never walked to its end in this respect.
It's true that Godel concluded that, and he wanted to expand the theory to figure out how inference works, unfortunately failed as he withered away dealing with it. Ofc, like Zeno's paradox it's predicated ultimately on a Creator and a sustainer, which is what no reasonable person can't help but arrive to. Similarly both enlightenment and the renaissance were curiously spurred by the two great translation movements from Arabic.
A man [Alex] witnesses a second man [Bob] administering a heavy beating to a third man [Colin]. Colin looks close to death, and Bob doesn't look like easing up. With no alternative presenting itself, Alex steps in. His only intention is to save Colin, but Bob is so persistently dangerous that Alex has to kill Bob, just to save his own life. At which point Alex notices the fourth man [Dead] as Colin retrieves his knife from his back.
Wondering
The ghost of Plato haunts the Western Mind. It drove this fellow mad.
Ethical principles used to serve an individual’s survival interests but that’s no longer the case. In the world we now live in, in which naked capitalist greed governs all human activity, ethical principles are a distinct disadvantage. The one who can lie, cheat, steal and bully will prevail and be rewarded. The one who adhered to ethical principles will lose and ultimately perish. In the corporate capitalist jungle, decent people finish last, if they finish at all.
Interesting.
I wonder if this is a description or a confession. 🤔
Merely an observation. I’d like to get rich but I’m burdened with a conscience so I’m probably doomed to a life of resentful poverty. And I’m a lawyer, too! I’ve done my best to rid myself of all sense of moral decency but alas! Without success! 😂
And you don’t know about anyone who has “made it” so to say while still being a moral person having a good conscience?
Btw, what has convinced you of your previous claim?
56:41Theres no such thing as a neutral criteria
❤❤
@ 53:50 your boi slips out a lil doo-doo
24:45 "If Plato and Kant had been correct in believing that all human beings were, at bottom, the same, thanks to their shared faculty of reason-that acculturation and historical location were only skin deep-then there would indeed be only one set of ethical principles. But Plato and Kant were wrong."
This is a simple conditional argument, that IF (A) THEN (B), NOT (B), THEREFORE NOT (A). That makes the argument _valid_, but it doesn't make it _sound_. As a matter of fact in this moment of the lecture, Dr. Rorty has not substantiated the basic (and uninteresting) relativist claim that a plurality of normative sets of principles is evidence to the impossibility of a universal, shared set of principles. I know this is almost 30 years old, and hopefully people _today_ have a firmer understanding of everything than they did before two decades of widespread adoption of the Internet, but the argument is so easy to challenge that it is absurd.
Alternatively, one could merely follow this quote from Rorty here with "_Or_ some sets of ethical principles are wrong." Certainly, both positions can't be correct. But just because two opposing positions can't both be correct, doesn't mean that either is correct. The disjunctive claims of people are not necessarily real; these are often false dichotomies. Conditionals like Rorty's (and every other relativist) are also not necessarily real. What confuses me is why Rorty (_along with_ Sartre) chooses to abandon the challenge of figuring out what constitutes universal justice.
What's the appeal of relativism? Explanatory power? Saying that relativism has explanatory power is like saying a drawing of dynamite has explosive power: relativism doesn't explain anything about morality, just like the drawing doesn't explain anything about dynamite. In both cases, morality and dynamite existed before the claim. In both cases, the best that can be done is to _describe_ what is going on in the case of morality or dynamite. Yes, people _do_ engage in moral talk and development of moral ideas, but what is every normative system _trying_ to do? Moral practice cannot agree with normative relativism because from the point of view of most moral agents, their own moral endeavor is universal and absolute. People do not live relativistic lives. The moral intuition is toward a unitary, universal, absolute system of moral law. Just because Kant has old-dead-white-guy syndrome, doesn't mean that moral absolutism is misguided. What seems misguided is the apparent surrender of well-meaning philosophers to the vice of negative peace.
Dissonance is there to remind you that-whatever you're doing-you're not done yet. If it doesn't make sense, then you haven't made sense of it yet. But don't just _give up_ like this.
(this comment is just going to reply to the ideas in the 4th paragraph of your post; if there is anything in the other paragraphs that's crucial to the point(s), feel free to bring them up)
I think the appeal of relativism, or at least in descriptive relativism ("these people have different moral codes", as opposed to "these people *should* have different moral codes") *is* in its explanatory power. Take a look at any two cultures, and you will find at least one moral disagreement in their overall practices (IE, the presence of strict caste systems vs. the potential for upward or downward social mobility, and whether or not either of them are a good thing). On top of that, within cultures, there will be some degree of internal diversity (see Rorty vs. Buckley, to name drop an example that came up elsewhere in this comment section; or see Ibn Sinna vs. Ibn Rushd's wildly different takes on Aristotle), barring extreme top-down imposition of some moral law (literally), and even then, it's probably only going to change the outward appearance _of_ diversity, not the underlying diversity itself (see any dissident from any authoritarian regime).
Regarding the "people do not live relativistic lives" point, that depends on what their lives are relative *to*. If you mean "relative to their previous standards", then sure, most people don't (at least on a day-to-day basis; extend the timeline and things get fuzzy), but "relative to each other" I think is just patently false. Sam Harris and Alasdair MacIntyre have wildly different moral codes, and in turn, both are wildly different from Friedrich Nietzsche, who is in turn wildly different from Zhuangzhi. I could go on, but I think that small list of four is enough to make the point.
"The moral intuition is towards" Imma stop you there; the observational intuition is to think the earth is static, the sun goes around us, and the night sky is constant. We know from subsequent, more rigorous observation that all three of those are false. Why should moral intuition be immune from having comparable errors? Aristotle held that some people are naturally slavish, a view I hold to be incompatible with findings from (my admittedly-limited understanding of) ethology (namely that gene-environment interaction is what determines a large portion of your behavioral patterns, with no innateism at all).
Moreover, I think the "moral absolute ideal" has to posit that once we hit that point, things will not change, a view I do not agree with. If and when we reached the platonic ideal of the utopia, would the world's natural processes cease to throw shit at us? Would we stop evolving? Would the Andromeda Galaxy change its course so that it wouldn't dry up our oceans when it hits the Milky Way? What reason do we have to believe that, despite the universe being in constant-yet-predictable flux, we somehow won't have to become problem-solvers whenever novel situations come up that our moral ideals didn't prepare us for?
(apologies if this read as hostile, I just wanted to make sure my disagreement came across. No ill will wished towards you)
I wish more left wing philosophers were as straight talking and robust as Rorty
Same
He would have either become a embittered right winger or gone woke if he were alive today (probably the latter)
@@JH-le4sd he was woke! More a difference in temperament and communication style than principles, policies.. but maybe that is the difference between the woke of the current year and 90's and aughts P.C. bourgeoisie liberals.
@@S2Cents Is there any comment section that is safe from irrelevant blather bout who is and isn't ""woke"? It's such an empty, meaningless word (at least in its newly-concocted usage). You certainly can't be "deep" if you insist on talking about who's "woke".
@@ntodd4110 hahah yes you can disregard the overused term for something else or the entire post, have a nice day
1:05:30MIN Again his relation to history "Everybody thought they were crazy" (if they said such a thing). But thank God they were there. I mean everybody thought they were totally crazy.
que pregunta tan estúpida
I love Rorty, but has anyone else noticed that he adopts this weird sort of trans-atlantic accent at times when he's lecturing, when compared to when he's speaking privately in interviews as such? If I'm right, I wonder how he picked up that habit?
I’ve noticed
Sure. Principles are great. They're just not more important than basic needs, family, or common sense. For example: if a child is on fire, do you run across the street to help her, or do you walk to the corner a block away and back just to follow jaywalking laws? Jaywalking laws exist for a reason. And it's ethically unsound to break laws.
That doesn’t follow.
You can have a hierarchy of principles, and ethicists always have had as much.
And indeed most if not all ethical systems distinguish between ethical rules and written laws.
Only a totalitarian would say that the law and the ethic are a priori synonymous, and maybe not even them.
Laws are supposed to be imitations of ethical rules, the latter having veto power over the former (hence reform and referendum being a feature of all liberal politics).
You can easily suggest a law that life-saving efforts be granted certain immunities, indeed we already do this with, say, the contextual right of a driver to break the lights to get out of the way of an emergency services vehicle.
That’s real law and the ethics behind it are not really that complex. Human life matters more than certain perennial safeties within it. It’s a bit like acknowledging that life has inherent risks.
@@thomaskilroy3199 the fact that ethics are even debatable makes them subjective. You can't just go around insisting that everybody adhere to your own subjective, whimsical ethical principles. It just doesn't work.
Laws work. If everybody follows the laws getting written by legislators voted in by the people.
In the scenario of the child in trouble, you just break the law to do the right thing and then pay the ticket for jaywalking. That's the ethically sound way to handle it. There is no payoff for the hero, though. His actions are strictly altruistic. Kind of a gyp.
@@thomaskilroy3199 the hero definitely doesn't care about having his ethical integrity questioned about the jaywalking, though.
Debatable doesn’t equal subjective.
It just means people are ignorant. In the Socratic sense.
Truth can be approached or discovered, but you have to first believe there is a truth.
If you believe in ethical truths, even if only as a general theory, then that is far better than just following laws with no object.
‘I don’t know’ and ‘I can’t know’ are very different notions.
@@thomaskilroy3199 Laws are not supposed to be imitations of ethical rules. In a liberal democratic society, they sometimes appear to be imitations, but that is due to a reflection of the electorates' reasons for voting in any particular case. Laws are a tool to ensure stability of the government in any given society.
Edit: I think from this perspective, we can more accurately build a society that most people want and can agree to.
💟👏🌹
Classic living anachronism
Excellent lecture. Rorty is the closest to a humane philosophy thus far.
This is isane. He just opposes two "arbitrary systems of morality" as if they were the only two metaphysical possibilities and is applauded in the end. People don't study anything anymore.
15
Forgive the pretentious accent, one is who he is...
Alfred Lord Byron was not so simple, as those declarations on a public transport may support, we may say that Sylvia Plath's "the Bel Jar" are ostententious, even snobbish... And we still miss her.
We miss America.
They are our children, autonomous, independent, with pride and self estteeem.
(a praise to United States im an epoch of doubt)
I personally endorse America culture, Science, Literature, Philosophy, Epistemology, History, Cosmopolitan Thinking, Think Thanks.
Democracy fighting.
I fight for Liberal Democrats in America.
I defend the American people, those who know too much also those who are objects of manipulation... Ryse America.
I don't agree with Rorty. Because some people, not many perhaps, live by absolute moral conviction. And some people, again perhaps not many, live as if nothing whatever mattered and do whatever they feel like doing. Think of Jim Morrison, for example. Or Marilyn Manson. Basically didn't give a shit about anything, even whether they died or not.
Political government needs to stop violating sovereignty
If he is saying that ethics are pragmatic, I agree. Cicero said goodness requires virtue. I think that is why Declaration of Independence states we have a right to pursue happiness. It leads to virtue, if we live long enough.
"All, I know Is that If I see a military man holding weapons and they are loyal to me and serve me all the goods anyone can say to me...I was inspired by his non-normativity and brought it into this and those beings there classroom, or, proto-classrooms...there not here.
Since student early days I say that's an upmost exemple of existence of strong philosophy outside continental strong European corrents...
Philosophische Deutsche Schule sind sehr Wichtig und Wahrheit Inner Hauses.
L'école Française est fondamentale mais doit dialoguer.
United States have every nationality that counts, or especially their thinkers...
It's not the military industrial complex the greatest strength of the fascinating States. 😏❤️✨
God bless this lecturer, being an atheist that's not a joke. On the contrary, it's a bow to American Culture.
Today we are not coerced to use the Bible a d the words so help me God...
Little steps. 🙏
1:20:42min I mean it is true that if you ask a Gobbelianized-non-desiring-non-self-consciousnes to predict if the sun will rise tomorrow, or, whether he will be capable to look at someone and phoneticalize words made up of the English alphabeth he will say that science although a nice novel has not had enough imagination to lie to itself about something that...like just hummmmms out there...did I say world? And time? And then here and being there world...race...God in bio race Wars.
wow this is from the 90s?! I expected it to be from the 60's or 70's because of how primitive the talk was
Care to elaborate on the “primitive” part?
@@Catofminerva Where to start. You a fan of buckley?
@@rhetoric5173Primitive in what way? And this has nothing to do with the bigot Buckley
@@WilliamofOckham990 it’s stupid. Better?
Rorty liked the moral/cultural milieu of standard NPR liberal "tote baggers" of his day. So, working backward from the conclusion that the standard NPR liberal tote bagger of his day was the highest and ideal form of life, he assembled a "philosophy" to justify that ideal. Like pretty much every other philosopher in history really.
What proof do you have that he liked the culture milieu of his day?
You dont not love your mum, dad, brother, or daughter we are one people there is one world no bounderies or limits beyond nature / reason / DtRT...
This is mostly very good but I can’t help but notice how much he sounds like he loves the sound of his own voice. There’s a very smug undertone running throughout that makes everything he says sound so dismissive.
If we listen to Eckhart tolle people before the great drought lived peacefully in the now.They lived a shared life.In short the question of ethics arise only of you are bad, if you are innately bad you need ethics to regulate you badness.
It's the warlike Aryan culture that stresses ethics whereas the peaceful Dravidian culture does not.It stresses on pleasure.
The Tamil culture millenia before Christ saw only two values in life.Agam அகம் meaning internal or private and Puram புறம் meaning external or public.Agam consists of secret love life ,pleasures, sentiments and Puram is power and politics.
It was a matriarchial originally.
Pragmatism is so odd and arbitrary and pointless and boring… Its artistic representation would be that of a large, empty parking lot, so I guess it could only come from America… 🇺🇸 🇺🇸🇺🇸
I didn't know Rorty had a speech impediment. Otherwise, why would he speak that ridiculous way?
Academic lectures are an outgrowth of Christian sermons. Rorty spoke like a Presbyterian preacher.
@@JH-le4sd What kind of world do you imagine in which erudite people explain their thoughts about specific subjects, explanations that take time to fully develop, but they don't sound like human beings try to explain their thoughts? Nearly all "polished" speakers are charlatans, propagandists, salespeople, sermonizers. I prefer thinkers.
You haven't been to Harvard.
@@jamesragsdale8202 No, but I've studied and discussed philosophy with many people who came from there. What's your point?
Rorty does have an odd way of speaking but I don't think it's an impediment
brown chalk board? I am not watching this.
It's black with warm white lighting.
It is a photo not a chalkboard.
@@jamesragsdale8202 that muddies the water then. Is it better to be a passive image of something reprehensible? Both older philosophers and younger philosophers never had to answer this question.
It is not about ethics within modern western philosophy any more. It is about what are the dark forces luking in the history of thd modern world as it's driving power. When the answer to this question is unearthed by questioning modern, modernisation, use of modern science and tech by modern colonial political economic power, it's presence and doing a much more istrumentalisatio by the same old wine in a new bottle, a foreinsic analysis of the history of modern education as it's brewing centre, anthropocentric worldview and the catastrophe modern man has done to the Earth would not give the right to talk about ethics to any one who does not interrogate the extra-survival praxis of modern economy. As the destroyer of the beautiful Earth based on the Darwinian Extra-survival competitive maritocracy which ultimately selects those who can sit on the top of the Pyramid of Modetn Economy, the Anthropocentric humanism is has no ground. No one so far has asked what is wrong with the maritocratic modern humanism as an anthropocentric blunder of western civilisation and how is it linked to the dwindling fate of the non-human species in the biosphere. Why theoretical Sciences has no more takers? Do we need mega cities? Is urbanisation a sign of being civilised ? Do the deliberations about ethics have any legitimacy when it is only a part of the modern duality namaste between man and nature. This exploitative exploitation extends to the opposition between the globalised filthy agenda of only very few affluent rich people and their helpless majority global population. The Over-view and Cognitive Shift of those astronauts who had coined them then when they saw the Earth from their rockets and the elemental feelings of the unity of existence the had then- the first of it's kind in the human history should be studied instead.
@@potshangbamkhangamcha9927 good god, but where are your scruples?? Just kidding, take it easy.
Don't know why he picks on Christianity so much , there are other bigoted religions which have yet to reform he could have mentioned
Probably that's what he is most familiar with?
Well, I hear Rorty has a habit of universalising what is actually just his perspective.
The purpose of Postmodernism, according to one of them, Richard Rorty, is to bring about "the end of man, of the sovereign subject, and w/it the collapse of the moral foundations of the Enlightenment and of the end of the epistemological foundations of philosophy and of science." [_After Philosophy_]....Condemning nihilists for worshiping Nothing, Rorty said that his Neo-Pragmatism is better because "We don't worship anything." ["Anti-Essentialism"] Despite Rorty's claim, he is a nihilist, a hater of values and their base, reason. This is the Kantian nihilism that caused modern "art," Marxism, Nazism and the increasing cultural irrationalism of Left and Right. Rorty is an intellectual death camp guard. The alternative is Ayn Rand's, Objectivism, a philosophy for living on Earth.
Cool story. So should he stay home with his mom or go to war according to Objectivism?
Objectivism is a good way to make a cult.
@@arjunravichandran7578 Objectivism is based on a reality-focused mind. Cults are rationalizations of the evasion of focus.
@@kensey007 He should do whatever floats his boat - if he thinks the cause is just, he desires the common feeling of having a superior investment in his culture over those who do not go, then he should go. If he thinks that the cause is not just and the price is not too high, and his mother will die without his presence, then he should not go. Easy peasy.
Ayn Rand-social spending programs are leeches
Also Ayn Rand-If I get cancer I'm getting on medicare and social security
Ohh, like notions of power and being a stalker. Yeah.
Hey! I m gonna ask a question! "Ok, but like Jeff Gordon...." Yeah sleepy ahhhjsehhourrrahhhhlssssss" "Oh yeah that thing I am an experto on: Yeah."
Pragmatists without an Other. Just be certain, practical, at least do away with a looooot of non-sense like wayyy to much time like reading. And if you interact with others just speak, but first do away with computational logic and grammar and just get to the infantile point that always works for all such that wait...
What an over rated nothing.
truth
Like at least do away with as much, and be practical, and like talk, just talk, and relax first and relaxed until you feel like, it helps to be on a couch first and we are practical we are laying on a couch and you are now sleepy and I get to mock victims with Lee C and then ba-zahwee sloths and millions are like: I agree with that and what you do in full identificatory laughter....sleepy...sleep further in whose that? A victim? No it's more complex they are Hitler and we are Einstein.
And what do you want race Wars are also fiction want that all fictitious ? Slaves are real how much can you not grasp with that and that is a story. Like what don't you think Alf...and our hatred of cats?"
He said nothing. Instead he sold young people on M arxist ideology propaganda. He needs to be more rigorous with his understanding of history. Or he's down right lieing. This view might seem scientific and benevolent, but it's not. It's religion. And unreasonable.
It’s remarkable that in your whole paragraph there you didn’t say a single substantive thing: what’s wrong about his history? What is religious or unreasonable about his views? What makes this “Marxist ideology propaganda”?
@@MrJustSomeGuy87 it's a religion
@@davetaitt1528 what is?
@@MrJustSomeGuy87 give up your abstractions and you will give up your questions along with it.
@@davetaitt1528 please explain how that relates to any previous comments
Richard rorty kinda looks like ralph lauren. Long lost successful brothers