Richard Rorty-one kind of Tory

Richard Rorty – who died last week – was a playful thinker and a serious philosopher. In his time he attracted attacks from the committed left – and the equally convinced right. Great big clunking fists came at him from both directions and on both sides of the Atlantic – so he must have been getting something right in his exposure of so many raw nerves. Academic philosophers were also very sniffy about him – thinking that he dissolved their subject by showing its connections with literature and the arts generally – styles of thinking and imagining which reflected their times rather than giving access to objective truth.

That kind of scepticism lined him up with ‘post-modernism’ – as well as all the other isms he was accused of indulging in – relativism, aestheticism, subjectivism, nihilism, cynicism etc etc. Post-modernism