#RealityVsAppearance
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Most analytic philosophers still take the question of whether the human mind can get in touch with the really real with perfect seriousness.
Phil as Poetry p.3
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#RealityVsAppearance
When it comes to Reality, however, there is no such thing as common sense. Unlike the case of trees, there are no platitudes accepted by both the vulgar and the learned. In some circles, you can get general agreement that the ultimate nature of Reality is atoms and void. In others, you can get a consensus that it is God—an immaterial, non-spatio-temporal, being. The reason quarrels among metaphysicians about the nature of Reality seem so ludicrous is that each of them feels free to pick a few of his favorite things and claim ontological privilege for them. Despite the best efforts of positivists, pragmatists, and deconstructionists, ontology is as popular among contemporary philosophers as it was in the days of Democritus and Anaxagoras. Most analytic philosophers still take the question of whether the human mind can get in touch with the really real with perfect seriousness.
October 12, 2026 at 2:04 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
Plato's distinction between Reality with a capital R and Appearance with a capital A has outlived whatever usefulness it may have had. We should do our best to get rid of it.
Phil as Poetry p.1
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#RealityVsAppearance
Common sense distinguishes between the apparent color of a thing and its real color, between the apparent motions of heavenly bodies and their real motions, between nondairy creamer and real cream, and between imitation Rolexes and real ones. But only those with a taste for philosophy ask whether real Rolexes are REALLY real. Only philosophers take seriously Plato's distinction between Reality with a capital R and Appearance with a capital A. That distinction has outlived whatever usefulness it may have had. We should do our best to get rid of it.
October 9, 2026 at 2:01 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
Only those with a taste for philosophy ask whether real Rolexes are REALLY real. Only philosophers take seriously Plato's distinction between Reality with a capital R and Appearance with a capital A.
Phil as Poetry p.1
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#RealityVsAppearance
Common sense distinguishes between the apparent color of a thing and its real color, between the apparent motions of heavenly bodies and their real motions, between nondairy creamer and real cream, and between imitation Rolexes and real ones. But only those with a taste for philosophy ask whether real Rolexes are REALLY real. Only philosophers take seriously Plato's distinction between Reality with a capital R and Appearance with a capital A. That distinction has outlived whatever usefulness it may have had. We should do our best to get rid of it.
October 8, 2026 at 2:02 PM
rortyquotes.bsky.social
In a Nietzschean view, one which drops the reality-appearance distinction, to change how we talk is to change what, for our own purposes, we are.
'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.20
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#RealityVsAppearance
But in a Nietzschean view, one which drops the reality-appearance distinction, to change how we talk is to change what, for our own purposes, we are. To say, with Nietzsche, that God is dead, is to say that we serve no higher purposes. The Nietzschean substitution of self-creation for discovery substitutes a picture of the hungry generations treading each other down for a picture of humanity approaching closer and closer to the light. A culture in which Nietzschean metaphors were literalized would be one which took for granted that philosophical problems are as temporary as poetic problems, that there are no problems which bind the generations together into a single natural kind called "humanity." A sense of human history as the history of successive metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species.
October 19, 2025 at 2:01 PM