CPS reading group 15/04
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Thomas Graham
Apr 6, 2026, 7:40:23 PMApr 6
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Hi all,
This week the CPS reading group is taking a short break. We will return next week with chapter one of "Platonism and Naturalism" by Lloyd Gerson. You can find the paper attached to this email, the abstract below, and the zoom link and meeting info below that.
As always, we will meet on Wednesday, in room 6.71, from 10:30 to 11:30.
Cheers,
Tom
In lieu of an abstract:
Some forty years ago, the late Richard Rorty wrote a provocative book titled Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.1 In that book, and in many subsequent books and essays, Rorty advanced the astonishing thesis that Platonism and philosophy are more or less identical. The point of insisting on this identification is the edifying inference Rorty thinks is to be drawn from it: If you find Platonism unacceptable, then you ought to abandon philosophy or, to put it slightly less starkly, you ought to abandon philosophy as it has been practiced for some 2,500 years. This is not, of course, to say that those trained in philosophy have nothing to contribute to our culture or society. It is just that they have no specific knowledge to contribute, knowledge of a distinct subject matter. What I and many others initially found to be incredible about the thesis that Platonism and philosophy are identical is that almost all critics of Plato and Platonism, from Aristotle onward, made their criticisms from a philosophical perspective. For example, to reject Plato’s Forms was to do so on the basis of another, putatively superior, account of predication. How, then, could Rorty maintain that the rejection of Platonism is necessarily at the same time the rejection of philosophy? Rorty’s insightful response to this question is that those who rejected Platonism did so from what we ought to recognize as a fundamentally Platonic perspective. That is, they shared with Plato basic assumptions or principles, the questioning of which was never the starting point of any objection. According to Rorty’s approach, Platonism should not, therefore, be identified with a particular philosophical position that is taken to follow from these principles, but more generally with the principles themselves. Hence, a rejection of Platonism is really a rejection of the principles shared by most philosophers up to the present. It is from these principles, Rorty thought, that numerous pernicious distinctions arose. As he puts it in the introduction to his collection of essays entitled Philosophy and Social Hope (published in 2000), “Most of what I have written in the last decade consists of attempts to tie my social hopes—hopes for a global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society—with my antagonism towards Platonism.” By “Platonism” Rorty means the “set of philosophical distinctions (appearance/reality, matter/mind, made /found, sensible/intellectual, etc.)” that he thinks continue to bedevil the thinking of philosophers as well as those who look to philosophy for some proprietary knowledge. Other important Platonic dualisms elsewhere rejected by Rorty are knowledge/belief, cognitional/volitional, and subject/object. These distinctions (among others) are the consequences inferred from the principles that together constitute Platonism.
Zoom link:
Join Zoom Meeting
https://anu.zoom.us/j/82595801661?pwd=abASKA1huY1LWb7kwXcWVELJa5n3sJ.1
Meeting ID: 825 9580 1661
Password: 036715
This week the CPS reading group is taking a short break. We will return next week with chapter one of "Platonism and Naturalism" by Lloyd Gerson. You can find the paper attached to this email, the abstract below, and the zoom link and meeting info below that.
As always, we will meet on Wednesday, in room 6.71, from 10:30 to 11:30.
Cheers,
Tom
In lieu of an abstract:
Some forty years ago, the late Richard Rorty wrote a provocative book titled Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.1 In that book, and in many subsequent books and essays, Rorty advanced the astonishing thesis that Platonism and philosophy are more or less identical. The point of insisting on this identification is the edifying inference Rorty thinks is to be drawn from it: If you find Platonism unacceptable, then you ought to abandon philosophy or, to put it slightly less starkly, you ought to abandon philosophy as it has been practiced for some 2,500 years. This is not, of course, to say that those trained in philosophy have nothing to contribute to our culture or society. It is just that they have no specific knowledge to contribute, knowledge of a distinct subject matter. What I and many others initially found to be incredible about the thesis that Platonism and philosophy are identical is that almost all critics of Plato and Platonism, from Aristotle onward, made their criticisms from a philosophical perspective. For example, to reject Plato’s Forms was to do so on the basis of another, putatively superior, account of predication. How, then, could Rorty maintain that the rejection of Platonism is necessarily at the same time the rejection of philosophy? Rorty’s insightful response to this question is that those who rejected Platonism did so from what we ought to recognize as a fundamentally Platonic perspective. That is, they shared with Plato basic assumptions or principles, the questioning of which was never the starting point of any objection. According to Rorty’s approach, Platonism should not, therefore, be identified with a particular philosophical position that is taken to follow from these principles, but more generally with the principles themselves. Hence, a rejection of Platonism is really a rejection of the principles shared by most philosophers up to the present. It is from these principles, Rorty thought, that numerous pernicious distinctions arose. As he puts it in the introduction to his collection of essays entitled Philosophy and Social Hope (published in 2000), “Most of what I have written in the last decade consists of attempts to tie my social hopes—hopes for a global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society—with my antagonism towards Platonism.” By “Platonism” Rorty means the “set of philosophical distinctions (appearance/reality, matter/mind, made /found, sensible/intellectual, etc.)” that he thinks continue to bedevil the thinking of philosophers as well as those who look to philosophy for some proprietary knowledge. Other important Platonic dualisms elsewhere rejected by Rorty are knowledge/belief, cognitional/volitional, and subject/object. These distinctions (among others) are the consequences inferred from the principles that together constitute Platonism.
Zoom link:
Join Zoom Meeting
https://anu.zoom.us/j/82595801661?pwd=abASKA1huY1LWb7kwXcWVELJa5n3sJ.1
Meeting ID: 825 9580 1661
Password: 036715
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