Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Rorty on the Holy

Richard Rorty, arguably the greatest of all American philosophers, has died of pancreatic cancer . . . which also killed Jacques Derrida (and, coincidentally, my father; huh). I suppose I ought to write something substantive about Rorty's philosophical project or his impact on my own thinking, but anyone who reads what I post here about science, religion, and ethics will already have seen it. And others are doing a fine job of posting such personal witness. Habermas has this to say, concluding thus:

Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the "holy", the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: "My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."

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