A STUDY OF RICHARD RORTY'S IRONISM

📄 Project Abstract

With a pragmatist approach which he calls Ironism, Richard Rorty makes an attempt to eliminate metaphysics, and finally to replace philosophy with literature. What Rorty sees as metaphysics is the traditional philosophical view that mind or language represents the true nature of things, the universal and changeless essence of reality. And what he sees as Ironism, an attempt to eliminate metaphysics, is redescription of metaphysical concepts (such as truth, mind, reason, etc.). Redescription of the concepts means replacing their speculative metaphysical senses with pragmatic senses. For instance, Rorty argues that the word truth is not found, but made, because truth is not an objective reality out there, but a function of sentences made by humans. He argues that the word 'mind' is not an immaterial entity that mirrors reality, but the ability to use persuasion rather than force to make people do what one wants. When Rorty realized that redescription of vocabularies using theory cannot e...