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RORTY, Richard. Philosophy as Cultural Politics. Philosophical Papers 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xü + 206 pp. Cloth, $80.00; paper, $22.99-The essays in this collection form a manifesto designed to affirm (and sometimes to argue) the following propositions:
1. That professional philosophers are now quite properly little valued.
2. That philosophers should give up the search for truth and concern themselves with cultural politics-with which they have always been more interestingly concerned, even when apparently otherwise engaged.
3. That the history of Western thought shows that we have advanced from a religious culture through a philosophical culture to a literary culture.
4. That the aim of philosophers should be to increase tolerance, promote democracy and thereby advance human happiness.
In defending these propositions Rorty concludes that philosophy was once useful in freeing us from religion, and from the invocation of what he likes to refer to as "spooks", but that it went off the rails (in ancient times through the influence of Parmenides and especially of Plato, more recently through that of Kant, viewed as exaggerating the worst aspects of Platonism) in a vain search for Truth or Reality. To repair this damage, "cultural politics should replace ontology" (pp. 3,139).
Much of Rorty's book is a display of erudition about the present interests of Anglo-American philosophy departments: heroes are selected (Darwin,...