The whole philosophy is a farce. It’s a literary critique of human reality and human perception. He undercuts himself so much. He insists in no moral absolutes and doesn’t seem to have a grasp on religious teachings across all cultures and how intertwined the narratives are. I guess if you are assuming we are post-religious his points can be taken more seriously. However if his literary critique and anthropological research were as astute as possible then he would undoubtedly not speak of human consciousness as such a benign and inconsequential phenomena. Of course this would cut his argument into pieces. Of course I don’t think his pragmatism would ever allow for any underlying principles that could continue a “meta-narrative” lived out by humanity. I know this is from ‘94 but his dispensation of the neurology and psychology of the human being is just incorrect. Carl Jung would do him a lot of good. His thoughts on religion, especially judeo-Christian principles is incorrect. But his insistence on there being no moral absolutes then what the fuck does it matter😂 I understand what he’s saying but Jesus…what pompous nihilism. And every few sentences is just a backtrack of the previous statements. I can see why you’re upset with his insulation of criticism. I find him and his contemporaries always trying to assert their opinions with rationality and reason with a sword that can cut said opinions down. It’s a perfect way to indoctrinate the impressionable while passing out sledgehammers on the way out. Allowing idiots (maybe too cruel) to perceive their own philosophical ideologies while having a fail safe of a highly respected deconstructive philosopher to fall back on. Forgive me because I am on my 10th hour of a 12 hour night shift and articulated my point like a 12 year old. But maybe you agree with me that these types of teachings are extremely dangerous for the future of higher education.

It's lovely.

In the philosophy biz, that's taken as quite a tribute. I'm not sure I would go that far, but then I'm familiar with him from before. So it wasn't all new.

The zealots will throw it all out if we aren’t careful.

Mostly it is rather that academics hide behind a plethora of useless opaque and pompous expressions that don’t mean anything. Jesus spoke in a way that kids could understand. Many thought he was a decent teacher. Kant his « follower » could not speak clearly so… I dunno… Sartre is nonsense at least. I know that much.

Give yourself more credit. You can always look up terms, concepts, and names that are unfamiliar and listen to things more than once.

With time and repetition the terms and ideas become familiar and take on lives of their own for each student. The confusion is the fun part enjoy it! Once you “know” what everything means, you lose

So you believe that what he's saying is true? Right with respect to the way that things are?

@@Khuno2 Yes, I think so, but it depending on what you mean by "the way that things are." I don't think Rorty attempts to say anything at all about "reality itself," if that's what you mean. That's the whole point of Pragmatism - that thinking in terms of "what is really real" is just silly and useless because we will never know and it doesn't matter. But yes, I think that the way he describes the 'human condition" is particularly insightful and useful for the way it encourages us to keep our focus on what we actually know and thus what is important - how we treat each other and what we want our goals to be.

​@@ericb9804 But that's not at all the whole point of pragmatism or pragmaticism (not according to Peirce). Pragmatists and neopragmatists disagree about what pragmatism's whole point is (e.g., Rorty and Putnam, or James vs Peirce). What's real matters a lot to all of them, I'd say, including Rorty. So it's the case that you agree with Rorty, right? Not what Rorty is saying about reality itself, but what you are. You're making a claim about what is real or exists (i.e., that Rorty is right, or rather the claims that he's making are the case). What else could you be making a claim about? We don't REALLY need real reality or absolute reality, or Truth vs truth (whatever that means)-- plain old reality will do. To get things right is to say what's the case, or the way things are regardless of what we believe (and here I'm confident Rorty would agree). Even if you disagreed and said something bizarre like "reality is a social construct" you'd believe that was true, and in a sense that wasn't socially constructed, else the bizarre would become the nonsensical. Anyway, I'm just having a laugh here.

@@Khuno2 I agree there are plenty of philosophers who call themselves pragmatists who disagree about the best way to discuss "truth," however they agree that the "Correspondence Theory of Truth" is a problematic metaphysical assumption that shouldn't be made. This is the essence of pragmatism, to whatever extent something can be said to have an "essence." "To get things right is to say what's the case, or the way things are regardless of what we believe (and here I'm confident Rorty would agree)." No, I don't think he would. I think he would say that we can't tell the difference between "the way things are" and "what we believe" and simply insisting that we do is just a source of confusion. I advocate for positions that I think are justified by experience, just as you do. The only difference is that I realize my justifications are relative only to an audience, not to "plain old reality." It is indeed ironic that I have no choice but to continue to speak and behave as though my claims were "about reality," but I'm none the worse for that. With all due respect, you may be having a laugh, but I don't think you get the joke.

​@@ericb9804 But that's not the essence of pragmatism. Many philosophers who aren't pragmatists reject the correspondence theory of truth (Hegel comes to mind, and lo, there are Hegelian pragmatists). Even if you said the pragmatic theory of truth--which one? Difficult to identify what unites all pragmatists given their stark disagreements. It's more like family resemblance than a single school of thought. However, I'd say the essence of pragmatism is Peirce's pragmatic maxim found in his "How to Make Our Ideas Clear". That's his criterion of meaning. But I'd go with what a scholar of the pragmatist tradition has to say about that family resemblance over anything that you'd read in a comment section... Rorty would agree, because he distinguishes between truth and justification (which is why I separated your position from his in our back and forth on truth). He explicitly states that a belief can be true even if it's not justified and justified and false. He also states that mind independent truth isn't relative to anything (which for him is why it's ineffable), but that justification is relative to audiences AND truth candidates. Watch the clip, it's short! So Rorty would agree that a proposition can be true regardless of what we believe, or that a belief can be justified and false. We can't define it, but we know how to use the adjectives. Rorty further states that a pragmatist THEORY of truth amounts to a theory of justification and not truth (which is strenuously denied by other pragmatists). So what you're saying (again!) is that we can't, even in principle, tell the difference between the way things are and what we believe. If that's true, then the gap between Truth and truth, reality itself and our understanding of it is unintelligible to us. (Incidentally, do you realize what Peirce would make of this distinction using the pragmatic maxim? Probly not...suffice it to say not too much). And so your distinctions collapse, and we're left with the way things are or just plain old reality. Therefore, we can access reality without having to somehow step outside of ourselves to verify it in an infinite regress (that is, we don't need to be correspondence truth theorists to take truth seriously). "The only difference is that I realize my justifications are relative only to an audience, not to "plain old reality." Don't forget those truth candidates! But more importantly, is this realization of yours true? Presumably you think that it is. So, what is its truth relative to? Another audience? Nah... So what? Plain old reality or the Truth? Put another way, if truth and falsity are mind dependent creations of thought like language, and that's true, then that truth must be mind independent. Ergo, truth and falsity aren't mind dependent. And that's kinda funny to me.

We've been through this already.

@@Philosophy_Overdose hahaha. For every great video there's a repeated question and/or comment.

@@Philosophy_Overdose 🤦🏽

@@Philosophy_Overdose @24:18 - ''the men who subjugated wo.....'' Don't spread anti male propaganda. Men NEVER subjugated the opposite s3x. They looked after them and worshiped them (like you are now)

@@Philosophy_Overdose Thanks my brother, you r my virtual hero.

I think ethics should evolve. For example, right now it should be wholly ethical to administer justice to the world leaders that have ruined our planet. They didn't even do it for their own selfish interests. They just paved the way for others. But if everybody keeps telling the same stories then how do our ethics ever evolve? Have our ethics changed at all, since the days of Shakespeare? Very little if at all, and yet the world is clearly a different place. We evolved our ethics long before we learned to write. The ability to write allowed us to, literally, set them in stone.

Baier

Annette Baier.

"evacuated"?

Why is Rorty full of it? Can you give examples from the lecture?

@ ctho admin I’d have to rewatch it at this stage to answer most seriously, but if I recall the gist, all of his arguments unanimously fall to standard critiques of relativism, because for all his postulating his points boil down that way. He wants to point to disagreement between perspectives and say that it is intractable, and he avoids this sounding like a piece of prophesy by claiming that Darwin ‘debunks the notion of the self’, i.e. there’s no common human nature that runs deeper than culture or circumstance, such that the disagreements are fundamental. Even if this were an accurate account of the theory it’s the assertion that because things change they at no point retain a sameness or consonance. Or else it’s a claim that temporal ethical principles are static, which is non-sequitur since realist ethics are always posited as metaphysical. It doesn’t follow in abstract and I would argue vehemently that it doesn’t play out in practice; human nature is really very consistent in many basic ways, which however fuzzy do set real parameters to what people can do, and so tangentially delimits the set of things that they should do. At minimum it’s a giant question mark in the middle of his argument that he glosses over without even acknowledging, but by common sense it’s an error. Consistency matters, and people broadly have it. Otherwise what’s the point in consistency in anything humans do? Certainly he shouldn’t bother having, say, a consistent argument. He also criticises the inconsistency of morals and moralisers, and cites circumstances where principles fail, but these only amount to a criticism of particular principles and ethicists, not a critique of the notion of ethical principles. So that much is definitely mistaken. With those arguments done he basically just holds up the unprincipled life and says ‘maybe?’. It’s weak, despite the proposition being immensely contentious. If you’re already a relativist such that ethical principles appear cosmically narrow and so not worth clinging to then he doesn’t even need to convince you, and makes no serious effort to. But if you’re not a relativist there’s nothing here that should diminish your view of principles, he just asserts that ‘the good life’ has no object.

@@thomaskilroy3199 That's a fair analysis, although, I would say, you're clearly abusing the 'law of non-contradiction' when you equate behavioral inconsistency with logical inconsistency.

@Nadeem Shaikh I admit to being facetious on that count. The serious version of what I meant was that tossing out ethical principles *per se* must include tossing out arguments as to the moral burden incumbent upon people to make proper arguments and respect consistency as a standard. It doesn’t mean Rorty is necessarily inconsistent, but it does mean that he’s proposing a world where it wouldn’t ‘matter’ ethically if he was being inconsistent.

Which, out of common sense, I feel obliged to point out is much too delectable an intellectual luxury to permit, accidentally or otherwise. I consider it enough to call his proposals dangerous not just wrong. Same thing goes when any scruple is tossed aside really: the unscrupulous person gains an ‘unfair’ advantage, but naturally *they* won’t consider it unfair, they can naturally be logically consistent there. It’s just a shame for everyone else struggling about trying to be ‘good’.

Rorty agrees w/Kant that reality is unknowable, that man is lost inside his mind. He has expllcitly said that he doesnt believe in anything. Hes an intellectual killer.

I mean, if it was ethical to kill illegitimate children we wouldn't have survived long enough to invent marriage,.

I'd like to add that making it about 'fighting Hitler and the Nazis' is a bit of a leading question, today at least. It's a brave man that argues that not fighting the Nazis is ethical in any way.

Fight or flight is pre decision. Courage can be fear that has said its prayers.

As Rorty implies, this question has no answer, but nevertheless requires a decision. In that case, I would stay with Mom. It also has the advantage of being safer. And Mom is a great cook.

For me it's the other way around. To the extent I consider virtue ethical principles, it is for ultimately utilitarian reasons.

I want to agree, but there is a serious problem with the concept of prudence. What is most prudent? Immediately further principles are begged, else you must specially plead on prudence’s behalf.

@@thomaskilroy3199 Well, you must be prudent in your prudence. Anything else would be imprudent… even impudent.

MacIntyre, is that you?

Prudence with respect to whose benefit though? Not one's own. And in exceptional cases such as standing up to an unjust regime with a very uncertain chance of upsetting it, it's not clear any prudence is involved

It's true that Godel concluded that, and he wanted to expand the theory to figure out how inference works, unfortunately failed as he withered away dealing with it. Ofc, like Zeno's paradox it's predicated ultimately on a Creator and a sustainer, which is what no reasonable person can't help but arrive to. Similarly both enlightenment and the renaissance were curiously spurred by the two great translation movements from Arabic.

Same

He would have either become a embittered right winger or gone woke if he were alive today (probably the latter)

@@JH-le4sd he was woke! More a difference in temperament and communication style than principles, policies.. but maybe that is the difference between the woke of the current year and 90's and aughts P.C. bourgeoisie liberals.

@@S2Cents Is there any comment section that is safe from irrelevant blather bout who is and isn't ""woke"? It's such an empty, meaningless word (at least in its newly-concocted usage). You certainly can't be "deep" if you insist on talking about who's "woke".

@@ntodd4110 hahah yes you can disregard the overused term for something else or the entire post, have a nice day

How could they endorse slavery, then? Locke defended slavery only as a criminal punishment.

@johnstewart7025 I believe Locke also benefited financially from slavery.

Are you serious with this comment? It reads like gibberish.

@@ntodd4110 Can you copy paste? Yes, I am serious.

That doesn’t follow. You can have a hierarchy of principles, and ethicists always have had as much. And indeed most if not all ethical systems distinguish between ethical rules and written laws. Only a totalitarian would say that the law and the ethic are a priori synonymous, and maybe not even them. Laws are supposed to be imitations of ethical rules, the latter having veto power over the former (hence reform and referendum being a feature of all liberal politics). You can easily suggest a law that life-saving efforts be granted certain immunities, indeed we already do this with, say, the contextual right of a driver to break the lights to get out of the way of an emergency services vehicle. That’s real law and the ethics behind it are not really that complex. Human life matters more than certain perennial safeties within it. It’s a bit like acknowledging that life has inherent risks.

@@thomaskilroy3199 the fact that ethics are even debatable makes them subjective. You can't just go around insisting that everybody adhere to your own subjective, whimsical ethical principles. It just doesn't work. Laws work. If everybody follows the laws getting written by legislators voted in by the people. In the scenario of the child in trouble, you just break the law to do the right thing and then pay the ticket for jaywalking. That's the ethically sound way to handle it. There is no payoff for the hero, though. His actions are strictly altruistic. Kind of a gyp.

@@thomaskilroy3199 the hero definitely doesn't care about having his ethical integrity questioned about the jaywalking, though.

Debatable doesn’t equal subjective. It just means people are ignorant. In the Socratic sense. Truth can be approached or discovered, but you have to first believe there is a truth. If you believe in ethical truths, even if only as a general theory, then that is far better than just following laws with no object. ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I can’t know’ are very different notions.

@@thomaskilroy3199 Laws are not supposed to be imitations of ethical rules. In a liberal democratic society, they sometimes appear to be imitations, but that is due to a reflection of the electorates' reasons for voting in any particular case. Laws are a tool to ensure stability of the government in any given society. Edit: I think from this perspective, we can more accurately build a society that most people want and can agree to.

I’ve noticed

Interesting. I wonder if this is a description or a confession. 🤔

Merely an observation. I’d like to get rich but I’m burdened with a conscience so I’m probably doomed to a life of resentful poverty. And I’m a lawyer, too! I’ve done my best to rid myself of all sense of moral decency but alas! Without success! 😂

And you don’t know about anyone who has “made it” so to say while still being a moral person having a good conscience? Btw, what has convinced you of your previous claim?

(this comment is just going to reply to the ideas in the 4th paragraph of your post; if there is anything in the other paragraphs that's crucial to the point(s), feel free to bring them up) I think the appeal of relativism, or at least in descriptive relativism ("these people have different moral codes", as opposed to "these people *should* have different moral codes") *is* in its explanatory power. Take a look at any two cultures, and you will find at least one moral disagreement in their overall practices (IE, the presence of strict caste systems vs. the potential for upward or downward social mobility, and whether or not either of them are a good thing). On top of that, within cultures, there will be some degree of internal diversity (see Rorty vs. Buckley, to name drop an example that came up elsewhere in this comment section; or see Ibn Sinna vs. Ibn Rushd's wildly different takes on Aristotle), barring extreme top-down imposition of some moral law (literally), and even then, it's probably only going to change the outward appearance _of_ diversity, not the underlying diversity itself (see any dissident from any authoritarian regime). Regarding the "people do not live relativistic lives" point, that depends on what their lives are relative *to*. If you mean "relative to their previous standards", then sure, most people don't (at least on a day-to-day basis; extend the timeline and things get fuzzy), but "relative to each other" I think is just patently false. Sam Harris and Alasdair MacIntyre have wildly different moral codes, and in turn, both are wildly different from Friedrich Nietzsche, who is in turn wildly different from Zhuangzhi. I could go on, but I think that small list of four is enough to make the point. "The moral intuition is towards" Imma stop you there; the observational intuition is to think the earth is static, the sun goes around us, and the night sky is constant. We know from subsequent, more rigorous observation that all three of those are false. Why should moral intuition be immune from having comparable errors? Aristotle held that some people are naturally slavish, a view I hold to be incompatible with findings from (my admittedly-limited understanding of) ethology (namely that gene-environment interaction is what determines a large portion of your behavioral patterns, with no innateism at all). Moreover, I think the "moral absolute ideal" has to posit that once we hit that point, things will not change, a view I do not agree with. If and when we reached the platonic ideal of the utopia, would the world's natural processes cease to throw shit at us? Would we stop evolving? Would the Andromeda Galaxy change its course so that it wouldn't dry up our oceans when it hits the Milky Way? What reason do we have to believe that, despite the universe being in constant-yet-predictable flux, we somehow won't have to become problem-solvers whenever novel situations come up that our moral ideals didn't prepare us for? (apologies if this read as hostile, I just wanted to make sure my disagreement came across. No ill will wished towards you)

Care to elaborate on the “primitive” part?

@@Catofminerva Where to start. You a fan of buckley?

@@rhetoric5173Primitive in what way? And this has nothing to do with the bigot Buckley

@@WilliamofOckham990 it’s stupid. Better?

What proof do you have that he liked the culture milieu of his day?

Probably that's what he is most familiar with?

Well, I hear Rorty has a habit of universalising what is actually just his perspective.

Academic lectures are an outgrowth of Christian sermons. Rorty spoke like a Presbyterian preacher.

@@JH-le4sd What kind of world do you imagine in which erudite people explain their thoughts about specific subjects, explanations that take time to fully develop, but they don't sound like human beings try to explain their thoughts? Nearly all "polished" speakers are charlatans, propagandists, salespeople, sermonizers. I prefer thinkers.

You haven't been to Harvard.

@@jamesragsdale8202 No, but I've studied and discussed philosophy with many people who came from there. What's your point?

Rorty does have an odd way of speaking but I don't think it's an impediment

It's black with warm white lighting.

It is a photo not a chalkboard.

@@jamesragsdale8202 that muddies the water then. Is it better to be a passive image of something reprehensible? Both older philosophers and younger philosophers never had to answer this question.

It is not about ethics within modern western philosophy any more. It is about what are the dark forces luking in the history of thd modern world as it's driving power. When the answer to this question is unearthed by questioning modern, modernisation, use of modern science and tech by modern colonial political economic power, it's presence and doing a much more istrumentalisatio by the same old wine in a new bottle, a foreinsic analysis of the history of modern education as it's brewing centre, anthropocentric worldview and the catastrophe modern man has done to the Earth would not give the right to talk about ethics to any one who does not interrogate the extra-survival praxis of modern economy. As the destroyer of the beautiful Earth based on the Darwinian Extra-survival competitive maritocracy which ultimately selects those who can sit on the top of the Pyramid of Modetn Economy, the Anthropocentric humanism is has no ground. No one so far has asked what is wrong with the maritocratic modern humanism as an anthropocentric blunder of western civilisation and how is it linked to the dwindling fate of the non-human species in the biosphere. Why theoretical Sciences has no more takers? Do we need mega cities? Is urbanisation a sign of being civilised ? Do the deliberations about ethics have any legitimacy when it is only a part of the modern duality namaste between man and nature. This exploitative exploitation extends to the opposition between the globalised filthy agenda of only very few affluent rich people and their helpless majority global population. The Over-view and Cognitive Shift of those astronauts who had coined them then when they saw the Earth from their rockets and the elemental feelings of the unity of existence the had then- the first of it's kind in the human history should be studied instead.

@@potshangbamkhangamcha9927 good god, but where are your scruples?? Just kidding, take it easy.

Cool story. So should he stay home with his mom or go to war according to Objectivism?

Objectivism is a good way to make a cult.

@@arjunravichandran7578 Objectivism is based on a reality-focused mind. Cults are rationalizations of the evasion of focus.

@@kensey007 He should do whatever floats his boat - if he thinks the cause is just, he desires the common feeling of having a superior investment in his culture over those who do not go, then he should go. If he thinks that the cause is not just and the price is not too high, and his mother will die without his presence, then he should not go. Easy peasy.

Ayn Rand-social spending programs are leeches Also Ayn Rand-If I get cancer I'm getting on medicare and social security

truth

It’s remarkable that in your whole paragraph there you didn’t say a single substantive thing: what’s wrong about his history? What is religious or unreasonable about his views? What makes this “Marxist ideology propaganda”?

@@MrJustSomeGuy87 it's a religion

@@davetaitt1528 what is?

@@MrJustSomeGuy87 give up your abstractions and you will give up your questions along with it.

@@davetaitt1528 please explain how that relates to any previous comments