This is my response to the following Twitter thread:

This essay is my response to the following Twitter thread:

[Edited: 2022–10–07 Major thanks to Paul Hunt for his comment, which triggered a significant edit to the tl;dr and the conclusion!] This is a quick summary of Rorty’s discussion of the sublime in his Preface to Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism. It was sparked by this twitter thread: It’s fair to…

This essay was sparked by this Twitter thread: [Sadly, I just discovered that one of the participants in the discussion deleted their account, and another deleted their tweets, so there’s only my replies left. NG 2022–12–05] I’m delighted two Rorty stans are disagreeing on a Rortian issue — it’s…

I found another, early, Rorty passage regarding the 'point' of human existence. It is a passage in "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" discussing the point of philosophy. But I think it can be fairly read more broadly: «To see keeping a conversation going as a sufficient aim of philosophy…

This is a slightly ordered collection of passages from The Good of Activity, Part Four, Section One, of John Dewey’s book Human Nature and Conduct. It was a revelation for me. I’d never seen such a sustained and evocative description of the kind of non-cumulative, retrospective meliorism that I am…

I'd open up your paperback analogy a bit. Not only paperbacks fell into a standardized format/template during the heyday of the "web of print". So did newspapers, catalogs, magazines, etc. A small percentage of these types of print publications broke the "template" prevailing at the time, but they remained niche…

Though it’s not original with me, I’ve long embraced the melioristic principle of “try to make things suck less” (even before I knew what meliorism was). My more polite label for “suck less” meliorism is “retrospective meliorism”. …