I've never known this talk ever happened, but in my heart I knew there must be some correspondence between Rorty and Dennett. I'm so thankful you've shared this!

"I would be glad if religion withered away and had its place taken by art and literature." Based Rorty.

Wow, the year 2000 seems so far away from 2023. The caller who spoke of Zeno’s paradox as it relates to calculus makes me think of this distancing that Time affects as if distance itself is a paradox, as if here and there meet in an interview today where Richard Rorty still is alive as ever. If Zeno’s calculus and paradox can do this, let us have more paradox in our lives because what Rorty says is priceless. Dan Dennett is on my mind too today, even earlier during a Torah study where I brought up his descriptions of cells as little robots (I had been thinking of why God would permit all that sacrificing in the story of Leviticus, and I concluded that the Israelites were sleepwalking as in a dream state.). We hallucinate in dreams, do crazy things, and Dennett asks the question, “do our dreams count as experience?” Sleep is a wilderness for sure. Thanks for this time and show!

Thank you so much!

Thank you for this. Listening while on a morning walk - awesome stuff

Thank you for all the Rorty on your channel!

Thanks for the upload. Always pleased to see any Rorty material. I think Rorty and Dennett had a good back and forth, with enough in common that they well explored the discussion space on science from a pragmatist/pragmatist-leaning perspective.

It seems Dennett would rather go to a bar with a group of scientists, Rorty with poets. Its a bar, after all, so the two groups have the same discussion on the same topics and reach the same conclusions, despite not interacting with each other. 1% of the scientists will insist that only their conclusions matter because they are scientists while 1% of the poets will insist that the conclusions don't matter all. Rorty, Dennett and the rest of us are content to be thankful that consensus was reached, ignoring the 2%, and getting on with sobering up.

I want to see them talk about things they agree about. Rorty mentioned elsewhere, a fascinating essay by Dennet disproving "qualia," which he agreed with and which puts them both in a very unique subcategory of pragmatism.

Where do you find these lol

We are here and we will not be here. The interim is truth

🍃💐🍃

Very interesting. I think Rorty's right about the similarities of theory choice in various disciplines, but Dennett that science is at the basis. But at 44:30 Rorty assigns "arrogance" to the priest who is convinced that he is right about his choice of Church. Wouldn't that also apply to a philosopher convinced by his philosophy? Reply

I hate callers 🙄

This interviewer is unworthy of his subjects.

Dan Dennett is my hero. I base my whole philosophical understanding of the mind/brain debate on his writings. I certainly agree with his sentiments about David Chalmers.

The two best Pragmatists since James and Dewey.

dennett always sounds to me like he's saying something deep, yet his ideas never truly resonate

I can't help it, I hate Daniel Dennett.

We don't form our beliefs in a vacuum or in the mind alone, they are determiined by tradition and culture/environment. We have created a culture that is highly individualistic (as opposed to communal), mechanized (via rapidly evolving technology which is now quite "virtual") and monetized (capitalism) and quantized (ordered in time). Living in such a culture is not compatible with a belief system that is contradicted by our daily "scientific" oritented culture. Secular music has replaced part of our religious need for ritual that alters consciousness, as have tv screens where we reinforce a portion of our mythological need for stories that explain who we are and what our purpose is (the reason men watch sports and violent movies is because - other than driving cars ;) - we don't have many outlets for male aggressive competition). And of course the activities we used to perform mostly within a mythological framing (e.g. as in the hunter gatherer societies) have been secularized and often perverted (e.g. sex and the need for eroticism) because we have turned these things into our entertainment that exists for whatever individual purpose we claim, rather than participating in these things within a social framework that has a completely different sense of the individual and his responsibility to the group. Unless some unforeseen catastrophic events were to occur, ending our current lifestyle, we are not going back to living in small tribes and the old mythologies. It makes no sense. Almost no one would choose to eek out a living off the land given the option of choosing the lifestyle we have now. And it would not be sustainable or even possible unless the population were drastically reduced - likely by violence. Given that we can't put the genie back in the bottle, religious beliefs and practices will need to accommodate the world (modern views) we actually live in. When Christians insist that God, Heaven and Hell are literally facts, they aren't really practicing religion as our ancestors did because for them there was no concept of the secular separate from the myths by which they lived. The scientific method - which has built our "modern "world - doesn't definitively deny the literal existence of these phenomena but it does strongly assert that there is no evidence for them. Anyway, to practice religion - I would argue as it was intended - in as much as we can - would be to understand metaphysical religious concepts as metaphorical. This seems preferable to me anyway because if you listen to most religious leaders argue now, they have all been trained in philosophy and logic and might as well be scientisits. Teachers such as Jung and Joseph Campbell understood this. And the best scientists, such as Dennett, don't try to assert science as a replacement for religion and the arts. We are at a juncture where both science and religion need to yield, sniff each other's behinds and accept what they smell and not try to destroy each other.