Philosophers Role in the Post-Philosophcial World

From an email sent to my Pragmatism professor:

I've been thinking further about the status of philosophers in the post-Philosophical world and I wanted to clarify my response as I didn't mean for it to come across as too egalitarian.

If we are to take the classical pragmatists suggestion seriously, that all of our conditional a priori axioms come from evolutionarily determined behavioral responses to experience, then, at least at the outset, each human organism is grappling with their own experience in their own particular way.

And this can be confirmed, as every human (or at least person) does have experience. So, we are all at least coming from the same fundamental need to engage with our experience and make some sense of it through inquiry and justification.

Rorty's suggestion, it seems to me, is that we should recognize this process of inquiry and justification for what it is: an attempt to make the world hang together in some coherent way for the time being. (I'm finding it particularly helpful to think of this hanging together as Quine's web of belief, but perhaps I'm wrong in making the analogy).

What is important is that in the post-Philosophical world, where there is no appeal to authority, or metaphysics or even Truth, it becomes up to the individual to make their world hang together in a coherent way - making changes and adjustments as needed. This is not to say that Rorty would deny the importance of community, at Reanna pointed out. However, fundamentally, all individuals can either join in the community of accepted coherence, or they can try their own way and either break new ground or be declared crazy.

I think you are right that if the philosopher is given the task of seeing if things "hang together" in a coherent sense, that is a pronouncement on a philosopher's efforts, work and expertise. And so, in that way professional philosophers would be different from the common man. However, I was trying to emphasize the creativity and personal responsibility which Rorty is urging every person to take up in the post-philosophical world.

In this way, every person is a philosopher because every new vocabulary they decide to try and every act of self-creation could, in fact, become the new philosophy, the new way things "hang together". Putting new systems of ideas out into the intellectual marketplace would certainly no longer be an exclusively philosophical task although philosophers might be the first to recognize the system for what it is.

Every since we read Dewey's idea that philosopher's should solve the problems of men, and not the problems of philosophers, I have been taken with the idea. But I wonder, how can philosopher's solve the problems of men unless they are men? I would like to see philosophy move away from it's specialized and elitist status in order for it to become something which all people are not only engaging in, but want to engage in.

I want to give philosophical tools (i.e., recognition of the coherent, pragmatic solutions, justification, etc.) to men and watch them create better things, make better policy, gain better insights into what it means to be human. That is what I meant by making every person a philosopher in the post-Philosophic world.