What Sort Of World Can We Prepare

I Think You Can Have A Left That Isn't Culturally Conservative Talking About Lunch-bucket Issues.

I Illustrate With A Quotation From The Atheist Philosopher Richard Rorty, Who Died Recently And Is, I Suspect, Now Having A Lengthy Conversation With His Maker. Rorty Argued That Secular Professors Ought “to Arrange Things So That Students Who Enter As Bigoted, Homophobic Religious Fundamentalists Will Leave College With Views More Like Our Own.

There Is Nothing Deep Down Inside Us Except What We Have Put There Ourselves.

You Read The Pragmatists And All You Know Is: Not Descartes, Not Kant, Not Plato. It's Like Aspirin. You Can't Use Aspirin To Give Yourself Power, You Take It To Get Rid Of Headaches. In That Way, Pragmatism Is A Philosophical Therapy. It Helps You Stop Asking The Unhelpful Questions.

Complaints About The Social Irresponsibility Of The Intellectual Typically Concern The Intellectual's Tendency To Marginalize Herself, To Move Out From One Community By Interior Identification Of Herself With Some Other Community - For Example, Another Country Or Historical Period... It Is Not Clear That Those Who Thus Marginalize Themselves Can Be Criticized For Social Irresponsibility. One Cannot Be Irresponsible Toward A Community Of Which One Does Not Think Of Oneself As A Member. Otherwise Runaway Slaves And Tunnelers Under The Berlin Wall Would Be Irresponsible.