Neo-Pragmatism Between Method and Anarchy: Richard Rorty's Syncretism

The article argues that Richard Rorty's pragmatism included a wide range of philosophical views, from criticism of analytic philosophy and relativism to a philosophical ecumenist, and, finally, a syncretist in the prophecy of the coming of the era of “post-philosophy”. The most characteristic feature of Rorty's evolution was the denial of the importance of the concept of the philosophical method. Rorty's syncretism consisted in the fact that the rejection of the method came from different, even incompatible sources. The article analyzes two such sources - the concept of scientific rationality by Thomas Kuhn and existential analytics by Martin Heidegger. Rorty borrowed Kuhn's criticism of the concept of scientific method, which consists in weakening its specific rationality, and used it to demonstrate the unfounded claims of analytic philosophers to the scientific method in philosophy. Rorty went further than Kuhn, trying to get rid of the difference in the “ontological status” of physical objects and the conditions of human existence. Rorty also believes that Heidegger abandoned the phenomenological method after Being and Time, discarded the concept of ontology, and tries to recreate Western philosophy in his own way. At the same time, Heidegger does not want “Being” to be the subject of quasi-scientific research, and does not use any method at all. The above-stated motives of Rorty's apparent rejection of the very concept of method in Kuhn and Heidegger contradict the widespread belief that the success of philosophical works is somehow connected with the accepted or invented philosophical method. This belief causes a special protest in Rorty, primarily because it calls into question everything that is being done by other philosophers. Perhaps, it was the lack of a specific philosophical method that attracted Rorty to the unsystematic continental philosophy, which was a reaction to systems. Hermeneutics, which is often considered a method of philosophizing, acquired very vague outlines in Rorty: in the final analysis, the “conversation of humanity” claims to be a metaphor rather than a method.

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