My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have... an ambition of transcendence.
Richard RortyRead
Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.
Interpretation
Truth is not an absolute concept but rather shaped by societal acceptance and norms.
This quote by Richard Rorty suggests that our understanding of truth is largely dependent on the perspectives and beliefs of those around us. What is considered 'true' can vary significantly between different societies and time periods, as it is influenced by cultural norms and collective acceptance rather than objective reality.
In practice
A philosopher discussing relativism in a debate.
My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have... an ambition of transcendence.
To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.
The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.
Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.
National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.
A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well is the chief instrument of cultural change.
The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp before they were five years old.
Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.
Obsessional does not necessarily mean sexual obsession, not even obsession for this, or for that in particular; to be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless.
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh.
But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.
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