Richard Rorty
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Literary intellectuals investigate the power imagination gives us to pose unending questions about our world—viewing religion, philosophy, and science as literary genres full of metaphors.
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While the poet’s goal is to put imaginative notions into another person’s head, ironists instead seek to change themselves.
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Poets, like pragmatists, possess a unique ability to sit with uncertainties and doubts. For them, neither walls nor metaphors are ever complete.
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Pragmatism is an uncertain and pluralistic philosophy, but its malleability and modesty make it an incredibly hope-filled approach to life.
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Contrasting with hope in a fixed or eternal order, pragmatists John Dewey and Richard Rorty connect hope to continual growth and conversation.
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In defending liberalism, the philosopher Richard Rorty argues that there is no difference—in practice—between aiming at justification and aiming at something more called truth.