Richard Rorty on Santayana. Richard Rorty (1931-2007), one of the leading contemporary American philosophers, is perhaps most famous for his claim that philosophy and literature are just two different types of culture. It means that philosophy is not privileged by having any ‘special’ methods (methodology) thanks to which it has a closer access to the truth about the nature of reality, and philosophers, despite their cognitive ambitions, cannot know much more about the reality and truth than novelists, poets, and dramatists can. His philosophical position is commonly known as ‘neopragmatism’ or as an American version of postmodernism, so much developed in France, Germany, and Italy. In his famous Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty recognized the role of Santayana’s philosophy, putting him close to the biggest names: “On the periphery of the history of modern philosophy, one finds figures who, without forming a ‘tradition,’ resemble each other in their distrust of the notion that man’s essence is to be a knower of essences. Goethe, Kierkegaard, Santayana, William James, Dewey, the latter Wittgenstein, the later Heidegger, are figures of that sort” (Rorty 1979, 367). [Read more…]
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