On the eve of Richard McKay Rorty's 94th birthday*, announcing @rortyquotes: dedicated to tweeting a fresh #Rorty banger each and every day of the year—starting tomorrow! * And the day, 79 years ago, that Rorty went off to the University of Chicago's Hutchins College.

Since there is nothing beyond vocabularies which serves as a criterion of choice between them, criticism is a matter of looking on this picture and on that, not of comparing both pictures with the original. CIS p.80 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Criticism

For us ironists, nothing can serve as a criticism of a final vocabulary save another such vocabulary; there is no answer to a redescription save a re-re-redescription. CIS p.80 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Criticism

The ironist thinks of final vocabularies as poetic achievements rather than as fruits of diligent inquiry according to antecedently formulated criteria. CIS p.77 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Irony

The ironist's description of what she is doing when she looks for a better final vocabulary than the one she is currently using is dominated by metaphors of making rather than finding, of diversification and novelty rather than convergence to the antecedently present. CIS p.77

The opposite of irony is common sense. For that is the watchword of those who unselfconsciously describe everything important in terms of the final vocabulary to which they and those around them are habituated. CIS p.74 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Irony

A final vocabulary is "final" in the sense that if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argumentative recourse. Those words are as far as he can go with language; beyond them there is only helpless passivity or a resort to force. CIS p.73

We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea. (Quoting Swinburne) The Fire of Life in The Rorty Reader p.521 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Holidays

I want to see common purposes against the background of an increasing sense of the radical diversity of private purposes, the radically poetic character of individual lives, and the merely poetic foundations of the "we-consciousness" which lies behind our institutions. CIS p.67

Habermas criticizes both me and Castoriadis for indulging in Lebenphilosophie; this charge means, roughly, that we both want to poeticize rather than rationalize. CIS p.66 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Poetry

My "poeticized" culture is one which has given up the attempt to unite one's private ways of dealing with one's finitude and one's sense of obligation to other human beings. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.68 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Poetry

The ideal citizen will take for granted that it is the revolutionary artist and the revolutionary scientist, not the academic artist or the normal scientist, who most clearly exemplifies the virtues which she hopes her society will itself embody. CIS p.61 #Rorty #Liberalism

To see one's language, one's conscience, one's morality, and one's highest hopes as contingent products, as literalizations of what once were accidentally produced metaphors, is to adopt a self-identity which suits one for citizenship in an ideally liberal state. CIS p.61 #Hope

A liberal society's heroes are the strong poet & the revolutionary [P & R] because it recognizes that it is what it is, has the morality it has, not because it approximates the will of God or the nature of man but because certain [Ps & Rs] of the past spoke as they did. CIS p.61

An ideal liberal society is one which has no purpose except freedom, no goal except a willingness to see how free and open encounters of present linguistic practices with suggestions for new practices go and to abide by the outcome. CIS p.60 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Liberalism

A liberal society is one whose ideals can be fulfilled by persuasion rather than force, by reform rather than revolution, by the free and open encounters of present linguistic and other practices with suggestions for new practices. CIS p.60 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Liberalism

We cannot see Christianity or Newtonianism or the Romantic movement or political liberalism as a tool while we are still in the course of figuring out how to use it. For there are as yet no clearly formulatable ends to which it is a means. CIS p.55 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Vocabulary

We should see allegiance to social institutions as no more matters for justification by reference to familiar, commonly accepted premises—but also as no more arbitrary—than choices of friends or heroes. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.54 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Relativism

A poeticized culture would be a culture which, precisely by appreciating that all touchstones are merely cultural artifacts, would take as its goal the creation of ever more various and multicolored artifacts. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Poetry

A poeticized culture would be one which would not insist we find the real wall behind the painted ones, the real touchstones of truth as opposed to touchstones which are merely cultural artifacts. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Poetry

An ideally liberal polity would be one whose culture hero is Bloom's "strong poet" rather than the warrior, the priest, the sage, or the truth-seeking, "logical," "objective" scientist. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Liberalism