andie
> nachgeborenen wrote:
>> What I think Rorty means by saying that democracy
is
> prior to philosophy is pretty much what you say,
plus
> what I said before -- that our adherence to
democracy
> is more basic than any argument we might produce for
> or against it.
I think this shows Rorty's lack of imagination. What if it could be somehow conclusively proved (via the use of a magic crystal ball) that we had two options:
1. Adopt a democracy that would be gentle, but lead to a thermonuclear war.
2. Adopt a dictatorship that would be plenty brutal, but not lead to a thermonuclear war.
I know this is similar to a Wittgensteinian argument about religious beliefs in On Certainty that no emprical data or argument can undermine a tenet based on faith, but I think political beliefs are in a different class.
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