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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Richard Rorty

In defence of ultimate meaning and truth

24 Sunday Mar 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Buddhism, Epistemology, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Language, Self, Truth

≈ 5 Comments

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Aristotle, Bruce Cockburn, drugs, Kieran Setiya, Kyoto School, mathematics, mystical experience, Nishitani Keiji, Pali suttas, pragmatism, puruṣārthas, Rachael Petersen, religion, Richard Rorty, Seth Zuihō Segall

While the cover of Seth Zuihō Segall’s The House We Live In claims the book draws its account primarily from Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius, the deeper, animating influence turns out to be pragmatism. There’s no problem with taking inspiration from pragmatism as such; the problem is that Seth’s pragmatism is so relentless and extreme that it rules out of court all opinions that differ from it – including, it turns out, those of Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius.

The excessive pragmatism in question is expressed above all in this sentence: “whenever we ask ‘what’s the meaning of “X?”‘, we are really asking, ‘what is the significance of “X” for maintaining and enhancing our lives.'” (107) This pragmatic claim is simply not true. Some of us are really asking the latter question when we ask the former. Seth would like it to be the case that all of us are asking the latter question. But it’s not.

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Paradigms in philosophy

22 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Social Science

≈ 2 Comments

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Ken Wilber, Richard Rorty, Śāntideva, Thomas Kuhn

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a groundbreaking work that changed the way the world thinks about natural science. Kuhn claims that science works not as a steady, additive accretion of knowledge, but as through periods of specialized knowledge accumulation within one paradigm that (every so often) is displaced by a genuinely novel revolution that overthrows the existing paradigm.

It has sometimes been noted that social scientists and philosophers are much more likely to read Kuhn than natural scientists are. I don’t think this is necessarily because natural scientists are less likely to believe Kuhn’s historical account, but because they are less likely to see the history of their discipline as relevant to their current activity. For my part, I do not (yet) know the history of natural science well enough to know how accurately Kuhn’s description fits it. But it’s worth thinking about how Kuhn’s description applies outside the natural sciences he studied, to the humanities and social sciences. Continue reading →

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