Rorty and Pynchon

[Phillip P. Muth]

> At 05:01 PM 8/3/97 +0200, Thomas Eckhardt wrote:
> >A few weeks ago in the German newspaper taz an interview with Richard Rorty
> >was published. His argument was in favor of a "more practical, more
> >economically based left-wing approach to politics". He said that the
> >contemporary left-wing movement in the USA would focus too much on
> >ethnic-minority- and gender-issues, affirmative action etc., which made it
> >easy for people like Buchanan to dismiss them as crazy extremists, confused
> >postmodernists, homosexuals and atheists. (A very strange argument, I think,
> >because what is Rorty's agenda? To become friends with Buchanan?) 
> >
> 
> Among which I found (in part) this in description of RR's beliefs:
> 
> 1. Irrationalism - You begin by recognizing that there is a kind of
> contingent character of the context of any kind of
> inquiry. A consequence of this contingency is that you're not so much
> "discovering" truth in inquiry, but "making" it,
> using the tools given you by your frame of reference.
> 
> 2. This kind of antiessentialism is applied to the language that we use for
> things that philosophers try to describe in
> *noncontingent* terms - that is, notions like "truth" and "language" and
> "morality".
> 
> 
Mr. Rorty is in town, i.e. Charlottesville, where he
teaches/lives.  His email is rr3p at virginia.edu
Anyone want to see if America's great white hope in
philosophy wants to come out and play?