This is an amusingly blistering review by Tim Maudlin (Rutgers) of a recent collection of papers on Truth and Realism, though it is especially timely given the proliferating pontificating about Richard Rorty by people who don't know anything about philosophy (for example--I'll comment more on Carlin Romano's silliness later). Herewith Maudlin:
Rorty tells a just-so story about a "pre-pre-Socratic golden age [when] nobody felt metaphysically emasculated, for phallogocentrism had not yet been invented" (p. 241). The snake in this Eden was Parmenides, who "rolled the grass, the snakes, the gods and the stars into a single well-rounded blob, stood back from it, and called it unknowable. Plato's admiration for this imaginative feat led him to coin the term 'really real'" (p. 240). Rorty wants to lead us back to the prelapserian paradise. It might be worthwhile to note that the historical claim here is perfectly wrong: Parmenides' "one" was supposed to be the one thing that is knowable, the thing described completely by the "path of truth". And Plato similarly reserved a higher sort of being for the mathematicals and the Forms because they were knowable, not because they were unknowable. Rorty's claim that "it is definitory of the really real that there is no agreed-upon way to tell which statements about it are true" (p. 241) gets Plato (the supposed originator of the phrase) exactly backward: mathematics concerns the "really real" because we can prove things about, e.g. squares, and hence come to unshakable agreement, while the best we can get for the physical world is a "likely story" (eikos logos). Should a sensible discussion of realism have to devote time correcting this sort of historical nonsense?
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