Richard Rorty on the American Left (1998)

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5 ай бұрын

A 1997 clip of Richard Rorty on C-SPAN discussing the American Left in the context of James W. Ceaser's book "Reconstructing America".
#Philosophy #Rorty

Пікірлер: 42

@lederpsta42 5 ай бұрын

God how I love the way this man speaks.

@dommyajd9033 3 ай бұрын

Can’t get enough

@lonelycubicle 2 ай бұрын

Thought I had seen everything on KZbin of Rorty speaking. Thanks for posting.

@kennyg03 5 ай бұрын

I'm not a Rorty guy but no one has probably spoken this intellectual and candid on the CSPAN channel since then.

@bleaaarghh 5 ай бұрын

Spoken like a true Rorty guy

@kennyg03 5 ай бұрын

@@bleaaarghh 😂

@KingThallion 5 ай бұрын

@@kennyg03 Welcome in man!

@amourdesoipittie2621 5 ай бұрын

Noam Chomsky. Every syllable rorty utters is aboslute non sense.

@KingThallion 5 ай бұрын

@@amourdesoipittie2621 What is that supposed to be, a quote or something?

@kenwatanabe2864 5 ай бұрын

Kinda eerie hearing the audience having a laugh at very unusual timing during the talk. I know this isn’t the full speech but it’s almost as if the laugh track had been added later.

@Catofminerva 5 ай бұрын

Woah how do you find these

@yoramgt 5 ай бұрын

The notion that "democracy is good" is essentially all there is to say about normative political theory seems rather superficial. If this truism is accepted, the question of "what is democracy?" seems very far from being resolved despite having been discussed for about two centuries.

@logos3522 5 ай бұрын

“Democracy is the rule of the poor over the well born” Aristotle

@yoramgt 5 ай бұрын

@@logos3522 This is not much more specific than the literal "rule of the people". What does it mean for the people (or the poor) to "rule"? These days, we are told that this happens when there is "free and fair elections". The Athenians thought that elections are oligarchical and sortition is democratic. Were they right? What does "free and fair" mean anyway? Presumably we can all agree that the US is not democratic. But is, say, Denmark democratic? How would we know? All of these questions are very far from having obvious answers, AFAICT. Rorty's political views were much more conventional and much less penetrating than his ontological/epistemological views, it seems to me.

@ulquiorra4cries 4 ай бұрын

I prefer Rorty's epistemology, Zizek's politics, and Sloterdijk's historicism

@yoramgt 4 ай бұрын

@@ulquiorra4cries I have listened to a bit of Zizek. Other than being generally a socialist. What exactly are his politics?

@ulquiorra4cries 4 ай бұрын

@@yoramgt Ultimately, I'd say he is a postmodern pragmatist. Possibly a liberal.

@mostlytranslucent 5 ай бұрын

Rorty was so articulate, thoughtful and likeable. Yet his inveterate anti-Marxism blinded him to what was (and remains) necessary to reconstruct the left. In the decades since this speech his assertive confidence in capitalist politics looks increasingly tendentious.

@Reviving_Virtue 5 ай бұрын

I think Rorty rightly points out mid-way through this that Strauss came here from a particular culturally and historically situated context, and what his project was all about did not resonate with the America he landed in. However, a reconstruction of American liberalism that Strauss needed to take place in order for his ideas to gain purchase was undertaken by the cold war liberals such as Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar and people like Gertrude Himmelfarb whose son, William Kristol, carried on the mantle of the ideology of Strauss et al thanks to the successful reconstruction of American liberalism.

@KingThallion 5 ай бұрын

Reconstruction? No, deconstruction. The cold war liberals created the mess we are in today.

@hkumar7340 5 ай бұрын

These are the very same intellectuals that Samuel Moyn blames for the decline of liberalism in his recent "Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times." (I have not read the book, just saw many reviews of it in various fora.)