Interesting. Rorty wouldn't disagree, I think, although he'd put it in different language.
Btw, Rorty has inoperable cancer, so if you have any farewell shots to fire at him, fire 'em now. He was my teacher and, I have realized over the years, despite my many lesser and greater annoyances with him, he has been a vast influence on my thinking. I find it somewhat difficult to imagine the world without him. Well, maybe he's got another book or two in him. Bernard Williams, another teacher of mine, less annoying but similarly influential for me, seems to keep on putting out books from the afterlife, so maybe Rorty will manage that trick too.
--- Ismail Lagardien <ilagardien at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Okay, since I am kind of a Critical Realist... I
> read this and was gobsmacked!!!
>
>
>
http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/061123a.htm
>
>
>
> "Liberty is more than consumer choice; and it is
> also more than irony. The
>
> British Marxist philosopher, Roy Bhaskar, in a
> detailed critique of the
>
> liberal constructivism of Richard Rorty, notes that
> once we have identified
>
> the sources of injustice or cruelty or social
> stagnation, once we have
>
> formulated a language in which to think about them,
> we are bound to be
>
> involved, like it or not, in an incipient process of
> public change - 'action
>
> rationally directed to transforming, dissolving or
> disconnecting the
>
> structures and relations which explain the
> experience of injustice'
>
> (Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom, Oxford 1991,
> p.72). Shifts in language
>
> and explanation that arise in the wake of critical
> understanding are bound
>
> to make different kinds of action and therefore
> different kinds of decision
>
> possible. Not to act in the public sphere in
> consequence of such new
>
> possibilities is to make an active choice for
> stagnation. If ironic
>
> redescription is no more than words it is not really
> ironic at all; it
>
> remains dependent on the systems and power-relations
> it claims to
>
> challenge."
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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