HACKING, HISTORICAL ONTOLOOGY, PP. 53-54; 59

Hacking pp. 54-55, 59

this is R's historicism = “the theory that social and cultural phenomena are historically determined, and that each period in history has its own values that are not directly applicable to other epochs. In philosophy, that implies that philosophical issues find their place, importance, and definition in a specific cultural milieu.”

“That is certainly Rorty's opinion, and, aside from qualifications, ... , it is mine too.”

(53)

H disagrees with R in this important particular.

H thinks that R believes that “traditional topics , ... , the kit and caboodle of metaphysics and epistemology – had a place in earlier pieces of European history but are now defunct. Philosophy shall absent itself from a post-philosophical age.”

H thinks that R is an old-fashioned historicist who does not pay enough attention to history; he wants a story about history but “pays little attention to the complex interweavings of past and present.”

H is a different sort of historicist, one dedicated to Taking A Look.

How does this work and how is it different from R's view of things?

“The I concepts traditionally of interest to philosophy are not ... timeless objects. Instead, “normalcy,” “chance,” “cause'” “person,” “evidence,” “guilt,” or “abuse,” are structures whose roles and power have been determined by specific histories. This is a local historicism, attending to particular and disparate fields of reflection and action. It discourages grand unified accounts, but it does demand taking a look at a lot of little facts. R's use of history is in contrast global, drawing conclusions about the whole of philosophy and indeed everything else, for chemistry and lit crit are alike ruled part of conversation.”

See page 59, the list of undoing, historicism and progress.

R and Dewey: Undoing, some historicism, and lots of progress.

Analysis of R's kind of undoing: R says H thinks that the ideas of the old dead philosophers were just wrong, “or have come to be wrong because of other historical developments. H sees R,s rejection of past philosophy as a bluff, middle American move that undoes, with great originality, analytic philosophy and its special set of problems inherited from the classical philosophers.

Here is the essential difference on which I would love to comment:

“R's undoing is an undoing by tracing the path of programs and projects in philosophy. “

AND

“He is not much concerned with the concepts and how they are constructed.”

BUT H VERY MUCH IS CONCERNED WITH THESE TWO THINGS – NAMELY THE CONCEPTS PHILOSOPHERS HAVE USED AND THE RULES AND PRACTICES ACCORDING TO WHICH THOSE CONCEPTS WERE “CONSTRUCTED.”

R deals with “the path of programs and projects in philosophy.”

This means that R, in dealing with programs and projects, did not pay attention to either concepts or their construction. H, for his part, must be less than interested in programs and projects.

H sees R as successful because he argued that the analytic phil that had alienated and repressed so many Ami phils was committing suicide.

H shares R's pluralism, but not his interest in phil as conversation and phil as problems.

H then does a riff on R and phil-as-problems, which makes clear that R sees himself as clearing up phil problems in order to make phil irrelevant to the future.

WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN?

H is saying that what interested R is rebelling against the analytic philosophers, in undoing them as the last representatives of people who were trying to solve philosophical problems that were first raised centuries ago. But Rorty, doing what H considers to be Big History, tries to make big claims about philosophical questions and how they were answered, and assumes that philosophy has been passed by by history, because it was a wrong turn in the first place and besides we no longer need those sorts of answers.

Where H differs deeply is made clear in the next section of the essay in which he presents Thomas Kuhn as a model, as a historicist John Locke, or as an empiricist with a sense of history. He wants to say that philosophy still has a job, that is to study styles of reasoning to trace how deeply reflective concepts are developed, how they are produced, and what uses they have. As H sees R, R wants to turn philosophy into conversation, into interminable talk, because he does not appreciate dead philosophers as people who in their time and context made new realities possible.