Abstract

I have spent 40 years looking for a coherent and convincing way of formulating my worries about what, if anything, philosophy is good for. Richard Rorty had an unusually avid interest in metaphilosophy. Again and again he would return to questions about the practical uses (if any) to which philosophy might be put, about philosophy's role in intellectual culture, about what philosophy is or might become. His answers to these questions were famously negative: philosophy's practical uses are few, its cultural role marginal. Philosophy is or will be whatever we make of it. Yet it is one thing to have given up on the idea of Philosophy as a Fach with a naturally occurring canon of problems, or in terms of the closely ..