Richard Rorty and a linguistic turn in philosophy

The idea of Richard Rorty’s linguistic turn seems to be a good example to substantiate the point of view that the “philosopher’s topos” should be determined not as event-related, but through their involvement in intellectual networks, through their connections and interactions with the scholarly community as a whole. That is, the place of a philosopher should be determined depending on how much their views, ideas, thoughts turned out to be influential, impressive, convincing, which would allow us to judge their “ideological platform”, so to speak, ad hoc. In this sense, Rorty’s linguistic turn may prove to be quite a noteworthy example. Fifty-five years after the publication of Rorty’s famous anthology The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (1967), we can confidently say that today there is no doubt that the idea of eliminating confusion and contradictions arising from our use of language has played and continues to play an important role for the philosophy of the 20th and 21st centuries. But what is of concern is that it is possible to successfully designate an entire movement with such a vague concept, firstly, because the term “linguistic turn” implies too many different methods, and, secondly, because many philosophers who consider themselves, for example, to belong to the analytic tradition, are unlikely to agree to consider this idea as a characteristic of their philosophical activity. Perhaps it is more correct to consider the idea of a linguistic turn as an important stage in the history of (analytic) philosophy, since today the analysis of language is only one of many tools available to modern philosophy. Anyway, the “linguistic turn” in Rorty’s version turned out to be a very fruitful and inspiring idea, and not only for philosophy. What conclusion can be drawn from all this? The “philosopher’s topos” should be considered, as it were, embedded in certain intellectual social networks. And it is this embeddedness that is an important prerequisite for the philosopher’s intellectual success and reputation, and the condition for the recognition of the philosopher is participation, leading them, so to speak, to the “center of the network”. Great thinkers do not appear from scratch, but as a result of the long and collective work of both predecessors and contemporaries. And Rorty’s “fringe analytic philosophy” confirms this very convincingly. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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