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willow
there are many positions i am still highly sympathetic to and influenced by, despite no longer giving them my wholehearted endorsement
willowJan 18, 2025
richard rorty, contingency, irony, solidarity, pg 46 Berlin ended his essay by quoting Joseph Schumpeter, who said, ''To realise the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian." Berlin comments, ''To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and politi­ cal immaturity." 3 In the jargon I have been developing, Schumpeter's claim that this is the mark of the civilized person translates into the claim that the liberal societies of our century have produced more and more people who are able to recognize the contingency of the vocabulary in which they state their highest hopes - the contingency of their own consciences - and yet have remained faithful to those consciences. quoted alt text backfill: raymond geuss, utopian thought between words and action seminar, pg 349 As you know, I have a lot of criticisms of Rorty, but he did say one thing that I thought is right, and I think it's a quotation from someone else. He says 'it's a sign of civilization that you can know that your own beliefs are contingent, your own values are contingent, and you can stand by them'. Not of course in all