#richardrorty — Public Fediverse posts

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Although I've read numerous excerpts from Richard Rorty's 1979 "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" and am familiar with the overall drift of his arguments, I've never read the book cover to cover. For a number of reasons, I felt I had to remedy this lacuna in my reading.

As I pulled my copy out of the plastic trunk in the garage where I had been keeping it, I decided that I wanted something else to read as well, something of quite a different literary genre with which to "cut " this dense philosophical tome. This trunk happens to contain two fiction tetralogies which I have yet to read as well as some other lengthy novels. None of those struck me as suitable for the purpose.

Inspiration came instead from a charming photograph of a nude woman lying on a quilt in dappled sunlight, with a basket , a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine beside her, and resting a book open in her hand against her body:

NSFW link https://mstdn.love/@jaj0_0/114472211059585002

On closer inspection the book turned out to be a volume of poetry by...

#Books #Reading #Philosophy #RichardRorty #PhilosophyAndTheMirrorOfNature
#Nudity #NudePhotography #FemaleNudity #NSFW

Change or die - Das Buch, das jedes Klimaaktivisty kennen sollte (5)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrNhdH_EcT0

#Relate #Repeat #Reframe #Erfolgreich #Veränderung #Wandel #Transformation #Fortschritt #Entwicklung #Lernenz #Dazulernen #Verhaltensänderungen #Coaching #Therapie #Begleitung #Lehrer #Mentoren #ChangeAgent #Ermutigung #Frustration #Schwierigkeiten #Hoffnungslosigkeit #Hoffnung #Vernunft #Unvernunft #Frames #Reframing #Denken #Praxis #Überzeugen #Überreden #RichardRorty

Change or die - Das Buch, das jedes Klimaaktivisty kennen sollte (5)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrNhdH_EcT0

#Relate #Repeat #Reframe #Erfolgreich #Veränderung #Wandel #Transformation #Fortschritt #Entwicklung #Lernenz #Dazulernen #Verhaltensänderungen #Coaching #Therapie #Begleitung #Lehrer #Mentoren #ChangeAgent #Ermutigung #Frustration #Schwierigkeiten #Hoffnungslosigkeit #Hoffnung #Vernunft #Unvernunft #Frames #Reframing #Denken #Praxis #Überzeugen #Überreden #RichardRorty

Change or die - Das Buch, das jedes Klimaaktivisty kennen sollte (5)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrNhdH_EcT0

#Relate #Repeat #Reframe #Erfolgreich #Veränderung #Wandel #Transformation #Fortschritt #Entwicklung #Lernenz #Dazulernen #Verhaltensänderungen #Coaching #Therapie #Begleitung #Lehrer #Mentoren #ChangeAgent #Ermutigung #Frustration #Schwierigkeiten #Hoffnungslosigkeit #Hoffnung #Vernunft #Unvernunft #Frames #Reframing #Denken #Praxis #Überzeugen #Überreden #RichardRorty

I’ve been thinking recently about what a deflationary stance towards GenAI would look like. It’s a term I’ve often associated with Richard Rorty’s style, in which he is prone to ‘fuzzing up’ distinctions and trying to recover the pragmatic questions lurking behind overblown discussions. Filip Vostal captures it here in relation to the acceleration debate here:

Drawing on Thomas Osborne, I would define deflationary approach as a sensitivity –or a “weak” method– that contributes to an assessment of whether or not acceleration features aforementioned proportions, especially those that are couched as inherently negative, dangerous, and apocalyptic

https://scholar.archive.org/work/y45p5m7borcipcca6kjle73yly/access/wayback/https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/RPUB/article/download/79243/4564456559250

It’s a style of teasing out what’s really at stake in a debate, getting beyond the poetics which have drawn in partisans in order to move the discussion forward in a minor key with a lighter tone.

Would would this look like with Generative AI? I think a starting point is describing it as just ‘software’, into which an enormous amount of capital and excitement has been invested, which has become subject to overblown claims from multiple conflicting sites. It’s fundamentally overhyped as an object and we need to get beyond this.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/09/15/what-would-it-mean-to-take-a-deflationary-stance-towards-generative-ai/

#deflation #filipVostal #generativeAI #richardRorty

#HistoryOfThought
#Philosophy
#Pragmatism
#RichardRorty
#Rorty

From Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-1960:

The big claims were about the imminence of a final dissolution: ancient knots would be cut, the old metaphysical doctrines hunted to extinction. Once the old detritus was cleared, then the revelation, ‘of a whole world of infinite subtlety and diversity with its own fine and complex structure, a world which had always lain about us to be observed as soon as we ceased straining our eyes towards imaginary grandeurs and simplicities’*. That world would reveal itself once we ceased straining our eyes and tried instead to listen, not least to ourselves.

Remind you of anyone? Now it’s been a long while since I was immersed in Rorty but I don’t recall this ever being part of his intellectual narrative, whereas the ethos of his ironism I now suspect resembles post-war Oxford philosophy much more than, as often alleged, postmodernism. To what extent was this an intellectual juncture reached through multiple pathways or a common ethos which coalesced?

*From Peter Strawon’s post-linguistic thaw

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/07/07/the-unacknowledged-debt-of-richard-rorty-to-the-ethos-of-post-war-oxford-philosophy/

#analyticPhilosophy #irony #language #linguisticTurn #richardRorty

Philosophie und Demokratie - Systemisches Denken:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FPQQa-r368

#Logik #Demokratietheorie #Selbstbegrenzung
#Begründung #Selbstveränderung #Selbstreform #Aristokratie #Aristokratismus #Politik #PolitischeTheorie #Politiktheorie #RichardRorty #Dogmatik #Dogmatismus #Zirkelschluss #PetitioPrincipii #InfiniterRegress #Hinterfragen #Argumente #Legitimität #Staatsformen #Verfassungen

Philosophie und Demokratie - Systemisches Denken:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FPQQa-r368

#Logik #Demokratietheorie #Selbstbegrenzung
#Begründung #Selbstveränderung #Selbstreform #Aristokratie #Aristokratismus #Politik #PolitischeTheorie #Politiktheorie #RichardRorty #Dogmatik #Dogmatismus #Zirkelschluss #PetitioPrincipii #InfiniterRegress #Hinterfragen #Argumente #Legitimität #Staatsformen #Verfassungen

Philosophie und Demokratie - Systemisches Denken:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FPQQa-r368

#Logik #Demokratietheorie #Selbstbegrenzung
#Begründung #Selbstveränderung #Selbstreform #Aristokratie #Aristokratismus #Politik #PolitischeTheorie #Politiktheorie #RichardRorty #Dogmatik #Dogmatismus #Zirkelschluss #PetitioPrincipii #InfiniterRegress #Hinterfragen #Argumente #Legitimität #Staatsformen #Verfassungen

"Vattimo thinks philosophers should stop trying to rewrite Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. They should instead rewrite the narratives offered in Vico’s New Science, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,
Comte’s and Marx’s stories of progress, and Nietzsche’s account (in Twilight of the Idols) of “How ‘the true world’ became a fable.” Part of this rewriting should consist in removing any suggestion of inevitability, any hint that the story being told is itself more than another possible interpretation. The other task that remains for philosophy is what Vattimo calls “the ongoing task of secularization … the unmasking of the sacrality of all absolute, ultimate truths.” This task will never be completed, he says, because “the springs of metaphysical authoritarianism will never run dry” and so antifoundationalism itself is at risk of hardening in a metaphysics." -#RichardRorty on #GianniVattimo 2007

In the newest essay for Erraticus, Rick Joines explores the experience we have with unfixed truths.

What happens when we view science, religion, and philosophy as literary genres full of unending metaphors, rather than as separate disciplines that arrive at static truths?

#Pragmatism #Philosophy #Poetry #RichardRorty #Literature

https://erraticus.co/2023/08/17/the-opposable-thumb-at-the-end-of-the-imagination/

"On the Something There Is" https://erraticus.co/2023/04/17/on-the-something-there-is/
#Erraticus #RobertFrost #WilliamJames #RalphWaldoEmerson #HenryDavidThoreau #RichardRorty