The philosophy of natural sciences and the philosophy of man in Richard Rorty: A new need for the concept of "transcendence"?
Abstract
ichard Rorty, American philosopher (1931-2007) is considered to be one of the most influential thinkers of recent times. His main thesis centres on a critique of representationalism - of the ambition of classical modern philosophy to comprehend nature in the mirror of the human mind.
From here Rorty then moves through the area of knowing, and also of a social critique of bigotry, to the work of John Dewey, whom he understands in a fundamentally relativistic way. The aim of this article is to determine the limits of Rorty's relativism, and to show how we might preserve Rorty's original critique of representationalism despite these limits.
Mention is made of the intensive debates between the late-Rorty and his critics, especially in the area of the philosophy of natural science which, in Rorty's work, is tellingly left to one side. The article offers, as a way out of Rortian relativism, the concept of "open authority" and a new philosophical view, still in the tradition of American pragmatism, of human rationality.