> What is Philosophy?
> Philosophy is like a young child, incessantly asking "but why?" to any
> answer given by their parent. This would continue until the parent
> tires and says, "go ask your Father."
>
> Philosophy is the same. It's the art of inquiry, but its inquiry has
> a special mode: its art is de-creative. Philosophy breaks down a
> concept through its understanding and then the understanding itself is
> questioned. The understanding is that of the inquirer though, which
> shows the profound hunger of philosophy's "why?" - the inquiry feasts
> on its subject matter and then turns on the inquirer. But it doesn't
> stop there. Philosophy continues to question until it arrives at its
> very own activity, "why the why?", where it breaks itself down and
> examines its own motives.
>
> So philosophy is always "negative towards itself." Its goal is to
> remove the want for philosophy. Philosophy's consummation is its own
> consumption, a serpent eating its tail. Its final act is the
> realization of the ultimate foundation or under-standing, a place
> where all questions are answered. The Garden of Eden, as it were,
> where the tree of knowledge is planted.
>
>
> Paradise Lost
> Rorty says that there is no Garden of Eden, that this idea is a
> remnant from a time when it was believed the world was spoken into
> existence. In Genesis God declares the world into being, giving us
> the idea that it's somehow made up of sentence-like things called
> "facts", which can brought into correspondence with human language.
>
> Rorty says that when science discovers that Newtonian physics is
> better than Aristotelian physics, it doesn't mean that the world
> speaks Newtonian. The world doesn't speak language, only we do. He
> goes on to argue that the quest for philosophy's ultimate foundation
> bottoms out at our cultural language game. That is, there is no
> ultimate foundation. Our ideas are a product of time and chance only.
>
> Following Rorty then, philosophy's telos is stripped because of the
> ungroundableness of any epistemology or metaphysical claim. So there
> is no more want for philosophy. It's at an end and its death gives no
> fruit.
>
>
> Language as the Garden
> I think Rorty's right, but there is something I'm not sure about and
> I'd like to discuss it. He says that the world doesn't speak
> language, but I think it can be argued that we do, none the less,
> speak the world. By this I mean something like Heidegger's idea that
> the language we speak is a clearing that reveals some small part of
> the world. That the world is far richer than any language we hope to
> speak, but through language, and through its enriching, we can see
> more of it.
>
> In this respect, the world can still be broken up into sentence-like
> things called "facts", but these sentences are from a much, much
> richer language than our own. So much so, that its utterance /is/
> existence. What we perceive of this world is a shadow cast onto our
> inadequate language, like Plato's cave metaphor.
>
> Rorty's picture sounds more plausible I think, less religious and
> grandiose. But something like what I mention would need to be assumed
> for any sensible theory of truth as correspondence, surely. For a
> sentence to correspond with the world, there needs to be some
> similarity between language and the world.
>
> What do you people think?