The Paradoxes of Education in Rorty's Liberal Utopia
Richard Rorty is a bundle of seeming contradictions. An anti-philosophical philosopher, a profound thinker against systematic theorizing, he signs a death certificate and writes an obituary for professionalized, academic philosophy. Writing breezy but often technical philosophical texts, he endeavors to demonstrate the irrelevance and marginality of his own breed, claiming that philosophers have little importance and a limited function in our present society. Yet despite his insistence upon the irrelevance of philosophy to democratic politics, he nevertheless points us toward and describes in great detail a political utopia, his philosophically informed vision of how Western democracies might look if they adopted his vocabulary and anti-metaphysical, anti-epistemological Weltanschauung. Similarly, while insisting that, as a philosopher, he has very little to say about education, and doubting, moreover, whether philosophy in general has anything important to say about education, he pointedly describes and endorses a system of education that would fit his liberal utopia and mesh with his philosophical musings. Paradoxically, while proclaiming the irrelevance of philosophy to education, Rorty’s philosophical work, coupled with several of his more popular essays, outlines a distinct philosophy of education.