Richard Rorty

"When the individual finds in her conscience beliefs that are relevant to public policy but incapable of the defense on the basis of beliefs common to her fellow citizens, she must sacrifice her consci…"

"From Richard McKeon and Robert Brumsbaugh I learned to view the history of philosophy as a series, not of alternative solutions to the same problems, but of quite different sets of problems. From Rudo…"

"As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increa…"

"nything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed."

"Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative."

"Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister—corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time ev…"

"Almost as soon as I began to study philosophy, I was impressed by the way in which philosophical problems appeared, disappeared, or changed shape, as a result of new assumptions or vocabularies."

"Rather, we heirs of Enlightenment think of enemies of liberal democracy like Nietzsche or Loyola as, to use Rawls’s word, “mad.” We do so because there is no way to see them as fellow citizens of our …"