Rorty and History

Frank Ankersmit
New Literary History, Volume 39, Number 1, Winter 2008, pp.
79-100 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nlh/summary/v039/39.1.ankersmit.html

Access Provided by Universidad Complutense de Madrid at 01/05/11 5:29AM GMT

Rorty and History

Frank Ankersmit
I. Introduction

he topic of Rorty and history is, at first sight, not a very

promising one. Rorty never discussed any of the great historians
from the past and the present, such as Gibbon, Ranke, Burckhardt,
Huizinga, Meinecke, or Braudel.1 He was even less interested in philosophy of history and considered this discipline to be devoid of interest and
significance.2 He never commented on the work of Hayden Whitethe
most influential contemporary philosopher of historythough he must
have been quite well aware of its existence3 and of how close it came to
his own scholarly interests.4
Next, it is true that Rorty wrote quite a lot on political philosophy,
philosophy of culture, and literary theory, all of them fields that are not
too remote from the professional interests of historians and philosophers
of history. But he never felt attracted to the typically historical aspects of
politics, culture, and literary theory. It was Rawls whom he chose for his
main guide in political philosophyhence, the political philosopher who,
with his notorious veil of ignorance, had removed in one fell swoop all
things historical from the political philosophers agenda. Next, Derrida
was Rortys hero for the domains of culture and literary theory. And,
again, Derridas fetishization of the text left no room whatsoever for
the historians traditional concerns. In sum, history, historical awareness,
historians, and historical thought never scored high on the list of Rortys
professional interests.5
However, there is one signal exception to Rortys indifference towards
history. And this is Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature his first book,
and the one that made him famous. Upon publication he became an
intellectual celebrity almost overnight and none of his later works ever
had such a tremendous impact again.6
History is very prominently present in this book. Rorty attacked in it
the core business of contemporary philosophy of languageepistemology.
He argued that epistemology resulted from an improper demarcation
of philosophy from science by seventeenth-century philosophers such

New Literary History, 2008, 39: 79100

80

new literary history

as Descartes and Locke. So epistemology was the intellectual offspring

of some (unfortunate) historical contingency and one that can only be
accounted for historically. Had the historical facts about European intellectual history from Descartes to Kant been just a little bit different,
philosophers would have ended up doing other and probably better
things than presently is the case. Rortys use of the weapon of historical
contextualization was all the more effective since he proved himself to
be an absolutely brilliant historian of philosophy. Moreover, throughout
his book, Rorty took Thomas S. Kuhns recommendation to heart, that
when reading the work of an important thinker, we should preferably
look for the apparent absurdities in the text and then ask ourselves how
a sensible person could have written them.7 This is pure historicism, of
course. Think of the old historicist demand that the historian must come
to a Verstehen of what may, at first sight, seem strange and unfamiliar
to us in the doings and saying of our ancestors.
But even more important is that a most powerful philosophy of history
can be detected in the book. Rorty already implied as much himself by
having the message of the book culminate in its last two chapters on
Hans Georg Gadamers hermeneutics. The suggestion clearly is that if
one follows the history of Western thought since Descartes and extrapolates from there to the future (as Rorty tentatively did himself in these
two last chapters), it will be hermeneutics, hence a philosophy of history,
that we shall end up with. Moreover, the book offered already some
tantalizing insights into what this new philosophy of history might look
like: it would, minimally, apply the technical sophistication of analytical
philosophy of language to the problems traditionally investigated in
philosophy of history.
So philosophers of history (such as myself) eagerly awaited Rortys next
book in the expectation that this would fulfil the promises of the end of
PMN. But, alas, when Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity finally came out in
1989, it was clear that Rorty had abandoned the project he had suggested
at the end of PMN. No sequel to that book would ever be forthcoming
and the watershed of philosophy of language and of history would be
allowed to persist. Hermeneutics, history, and historical awareness are
all absent in what Rorty wrote since PMN.
This may make clear what I hope to do in this essay. Having been invited to write on Rorty and history, I must focus on where Rorty really
came closest to history, hence on PMN.8 References to his later work will
therefore be relatively scarce in this essayand my main aim will be to
give an outline of what philosophy of history is implicit is PMN and how
this philosophy of history might be elaborated.

81

rorty and history

II. Against Epistemology

Rortys main argument against epistemology was that it could only come
into beingand acquire its prominence in Western philosophythanks
to some purely accidental peculiarities of how the philosophical tradition moved from Aristotelianism to the kind of modern philosophy we
associate with Descartes, Locke, and Kant. So epistemology is not the
straight path to philosophical Truth we had always believed it to be, but
an enterprise no less arbitrary than its seventeenth-century origins.
Rorty begins by reminding us that Aristotle had had no use for epistemology. The epistemologists effort to explain knowledge only makes
sense if we think that there should be some gap that needs to be bridged
between the knowing subject and the object it has knowledge of. But for
the Aristotle of De Anima no such gap existed: appealing to the sense of
touch, he believed in a continuity between subject and object of knowledge,
leaving no room for it. Knowledge, being an identification of the subject
with the object, is the nullification of any distance or gap between them.
As typically is the case with pain: who could tell apart subject and object
in the case of the pain that we feel?9
Descartes rejected the Aristotelian account of knowledge, since it left
no room for the distinction between truth and falsity and, hence, for
the question of how to define the instruments and criteria required for
our quest for (scientific) truth. For either we are so affected as Aristotle
suggestsand then there is knowledgeor we are notand then there
is not falsity, but the absence of knowledge, which is something different.
So this is what made Descartes re-package (PMN 56) issues concerning mind and thought and why he radically remodelled the Aristotelian
notion of substance by first cutting its ties with the individual things to
which the notion had traditionally been applied, in order to use it, next,
for creating the ontological opposition of res extensa versus res cogitans. Res
cogitans, thought, now acquired an autonomy of its own at the expense
of the intimate Aristotelian interaction between the subject and object
of knowledge.10 As Rorty sums it all up: [for Aristotle] there is no way to
divide conscious states or states of consciousnessevents in an inner
lifefrom events in an external world. Descartes, on the other hand,
used thought to cover doubting, understanding, affirming, denying,
willing, refusing, imagining, and feeling, and said that even if I dream
that I see light properly speaking this in me is called feeling, and used
in this precise sense that is no other thing than thinking (PMN 4748).
Thus came into being the Cartesian forum internum, where all our claims
to knowledge will have to be presented and argued for, and where truth
and falsity will be separated as inexorably as God will separate the sheep
from the goats at the Day of Judgment. And since nothing is closer to

82

new literary history

the mind than the mind itself, knowledge of objects in the mind will
be prototypical of the most certain and reliable kind of knowledge we
can havehence Cartesian rationalism and its love affair with logic and
mathematics.
In a brilliant exposition Rorty demonstrates next how Locke could
come to similar conclusions even though his point of departure was much
different from that of Descartes. Rorty distinguishes (with Wilfrid Sellars)
between: (1) an impression of a red triangle as a red and triangular item
that is immediately and noninferentially known to exist and to be red
and triangular and (2) an impression of a red triangle as a knowing that
a red and triangular item exists (PMN 14344). And he then goes on to
argue that the tablet metaphor Locke relies upon for explaining how
sense-experience produces knowledge leads him to confuse (1) and (2),
since it will be hard to distinguish between the dents on the tablet of
our mind caused by senseexperience and our awareness of these dents.
The tablet metaphor is neutral with regard to both these two options.
So this is why Locke could imperceptibly shift from (1) sense-experience
to (2) the awareness of something, or to the knowledge that something is
the case. But the shift is a most momentous one for it is the exact (empiricist) counterpart to the Cartesian postulation of the forum internum
as the receptacle of knowledge. Thus the idea idea came into being
as embodying the contents of the mind and against which Thomas Reid
(and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi) would struggle in vain at the end of the
eighteenth century.11
In this way Descartes and Locke paved, in a curiously united effort, the
way for Kant (about whom Rorty is relatively silent). For in his attack on
what he took to be the dogmatism of both rationalism and empiricism,
Kant immeasurably enlarged the responsibilities of the Cartesian and
Lockean forum internum by transforming it into the supreme philosophical
authority for proffering a transcendental explanation of how knowledge
is possiblean issue that had never occurred to either Descartes or Locke
(or Hume). With Kants transcendentalization of rationalism and empiricism, epistemology had taken on the philosophical armour that it has
retained to the present day. Philosophy, that is, epistemology, now began
to emulate the sciences, not only by being no less rigorous and exacting
in its argument than the sciences, but also by its pretension to be even
deeper than the sciences themselves when explaining their possibility.
Philosophy thus became foundationalist, in the sense of exposing the
foundations of the sciences. As Rorty pitilessly comments: the result was
that the more scientific and rigorous philosophy became, the less it
had to do with the rest of culture and the more absurd its traditional
pretensions seemed. The attempt of both analytic philosophers and phenomenologists to ground this and to criticize that were shrugged off

rorty and history

83

by those whose activities were purportedly being grounded or criticized.

Philosophy as a whole was shrugged off by those who wanted an ideology or a self-image (PMN 5). This is how Rorty used history in PMN
for robbing epistemology of its claims to philosophical eminence. Not
philosophy itself (as had still been the case with Wittgenstein), but history
was thus given the honor of being the therapy for the neuroses of
contemporary philosophy.12 Needless to say, this did not endear Rorty
to his history-hating colleagues in the philosophy departments of AngloSaxon universities.13 In fact, the immense success of PMN was to a large
extent un succs de scandale, unredeemed by Rortys own undeniable
genius as a practitioner of the philosophy of language. Or, rather, his
superior command of the techniques of the discipline made things only
really bad for him. Nobody had worried much about Kuhns appeal to
history, since his philosophical blunders made abundantly clear that
he was not an enemy to be feared.14 But this was different with Rorty.
So with PMN Rorty acquired for himself the aura of a fallen angel, of a
Luciferand that is a sin for which no remission exists.

III. Pure and Impure Philosophy of Language

Rorty then went on to investigate epistemologys fate in the 20th century. The main insight is that representation now came to be understood
as linguistic rather than mental (PMN 8).15 Whereas Descartes, Locke,
and Kant had wanted to answer the question of how knowledge is possible by focusing on the mind (and on how what went on in it related
to the world outside), the intuition was now that knowledge is always
expressed in language and that the crucial question therefore is how
language makes knowledge possible. Rorty discerns three stages in the
history of the philosophy of language.
The first stage is that of Gottlob Frege, of the Bertrand Russell of
the Principia Mathematica, of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, and of
Rudolf Carnaps Logische Aufbau, where language is reduced to logic.
The philosophers main task then is to fit the sentences spoken in a
(natural) language into a logical framework. This stage quickly ended
with the demise of logical positivism. Then came the second stage of the
philosophy of language (or analytical philosophy). The problems of truth
and knowledge were now cut loose from logic and investigated, instead,
by analyzing them in the context of how language hooks onto the world.
Language was transcendentalized, in the sense meant by Kant:
[T]he second source for contemporary philosophy of language is explictly epistemological. The source of this impure philosophy of language is the attempt to

84

new literary history

retain Kants picture of philosophy as providing a permanent ahistorical framework for inquiry in the form of a theory of knowledge. . . . Treating philosophy
as the analysis of language seemed to unite the merits of Hume with those of
Kant. Humes empiricism seemed substantively true, but methodologically shaky
because it reposed on nothing more than an empirical theory of the acquisition
of knowledge. Kants criticisms of bad philosophy (e.g. natural theology) seemed
both more systematic and more forceful than Humes. (PMN 25758)

In this way philosophy of language can be seen as continuing the old

transcendentalist Kantian program, though with new and better, that
is, linguistic instruments. So this is what the so-called linguistic turn
was basically about.16
But, as already suggested by the use of the word impure in the passage that I quoted just now, Rorty discerns still a third phase in philosophy of language. That is the phase of pure philosophy of language
(inaugurated by Sellars and Donald Davidson) avoiding the pitfalls of
impure, epistemological philosophy of language and of which he has
the highest hopes.
In order to grasp the nature of Rortys pure philosophy of language,
we had best begin by opposing Truth to truth, Reference to reference,
and Meaning to meaningand by insisting that Rorty has no problems
with truth, reference, and meaning, but only with their counterparts
beginning with a capital letter and standing for how these notions are
used in epistemology. It immediately follows from this that one cannot misunderstand Rorty more than by seeing him as a relativist or as
a historicist skepticist. Rorty is no less sure that most of what we say is
true and based on sufficient and convincing evidence than all of us in
ordinary life, or when we are doing science or writing history. In fact, it is
rather the reverse: his amazing view is that relativism and skepticism will
be hard to avoid as soon as one attempts to discover an epistemological
foundation for truth and knowledge. When we are no longer content
with truth, reference, and meaningthough that is all we needand
aim for Truth, Reference, and Meaning (without having an idea of what
we are looking for), we will first raise a dust and then complain that
we cannot see, to paraphrase Berkeley. It was the Lockeans and the
Kantians who raised this dust by interposing entities like the mind,
the idea idea, or the categories of the understanding between the
knowing subject and what it has knowledge of. But these entities need
to be cut out ruthlessly since they are never more than Wittgensteins
wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it and are,
therefore, not part of the mechanism.
Hence Rortys denunciation of truth as correspondence. Again, this
should not be read as a concession to relativism or skepticism, but,

rorty and history

85

instead, as an attack on the (albeit often unconscious) postulation of a

framework encompassing what we say and what it is about and is claimed
to explain truth (epistemologically) in terms of correspondence. It
must be conceded, though, that Rorty is not wholly consistent here. For
he is in the habit of recommending a conversationalist model of Truth
to replace the correspondence model: our certainty will be a matter of
conversation between persons, rather than a matter of interaction with
non-human reality. . . . We shall be looking for an airtight case rather
than an unshakable foundation. We shall be in what Sellars calls the
logical space of reasons rather than that of causal relations to objects
(PMN 157). The idea here is that Truth is what proves to be the outcome
of the conversation of scientists and historians. The affinities with the
pragmatist, Peircean conception of Truth will need no elucidation,17 nor
those with the coherence theory of Truth. And this should awaken our
suspicions. For does the conversation model not create an encompassing
framework as well? Namely the one enclosing all that we say between
now and the End of History?18
Anyway, we are now in the position to grasp Rortys opposition of
pure versus impure philosophy of language, and why he rejects the
latter. Impure philosophy of language reflects on how truth, reference,
and meaning can be explained epistemologically within the framework
of Truth. This is the position he identifies with linguistic transcendentalism as we may find it in Hilary Putnam, Quine (sometimes), and in the
majority of contemporary philosophers of language. Pure philosophy
of language, on the other hand, is best exemplified by Davidson, and,
especially, by Davidsons notorious attack on conceptual schemesan
attack that Rorty recognizes as the basis and program (I had almost said:
foundation) of his own pure philosophy of language.
In Rortys account, Davidsons overall strategy is to disconnect the
question of how language works from the question of how knowledge works, hence, meaning from truth (PMN 259). And, needless to
say, this hits impure transcendental philosophy where it hurts most,
for there the first question was always expected to answer the latter. In
agreement with this disjunction, Davidson proposes a neo-Wittgensteinian, holistic theory of meaning in which meaning is not achieved by
anchoring language to the world, but by seeing how the meaning of
words and sentences affects those of other words and sentences. And
where holism should not be associated with some closed whole (as
in the case of Kuhns paradigms): it is just a matter of all the sentences
that we happen to useand there is no limit to them.19
The alternative is, indeed, to anchor language firmly to the world by
adopting some theory about where and how language and the world really
hook onto each other. There is a great variety of such theories; one may

86

new literary history

think here of the empiricists conception of experience, of sense-data, of

the idea idea, of the mind, of observation-sentences, of (theories of)
reference, of Saul Kripkes rigid designators, and so one may go on
for quite some time. In fact, only the long history of epistemology will
provide us with the complete list of these theories. And what all these
theories have in common is (1) that they discover in the place where
language and the world meet, so to say, the matrix for all that can, at
a later stage, truthfully be said about the world. This matrix thus is the
scheme for (all) later content. And (2) Truth (in the sense of epistemological
Truth) will be here the basis for, and condition of, Meaning. For outside
the scheme there may be truththe scheme-dependency of Truth does
not exclude the possibility of truths generated by other schemesbut they
will be inaccessible to us; we shall not be able to give them a meaning.
As Rorty puts it:
[T]his picture of holism ceasing to apply at the point where reference is least
problematicat the interface between language and the world where demonstratives do their workis one way to get the scheme-content distinction going. If
we think of language in this way, we will be struck by the thought that somebody
else (the Galactics, say) will have cut up the world differently in their original
acts of ostension and thus given different meanings to the individual words in
the core of their language. The rest of their language will thus be infected by
this divergence from our way of giving meaning to the core of English, and so
there will be no scheme for us to communicateno common points of reference, no possibility of translation. (PMN 304)

The scheme/content distinction thus locks us up in the scheme that we

have happened to opt for and has, for the epistemologist, the particularly
nasty result of generating a truly invincible variant of (scheme-) relativism, as Putnam found out to his dismay (PMN 28485).
Taking all this together, we get the following picture of Rortys opposition between impure and pure philosophy of language. Impure
philosophy of language starts off with the postulation of some all-encompassing framework or scheme, within which to fit all that we can say
(whether the framework or scheme is fixed for eternity as with Kant, or
whether it can develop through time as is the case with Putnams metaphysical or internal realism makes no difference in this context). The
epistemological question is, next, how to tie back again all that we say to
the scheme. In this way Truth, Reference, and Meaning can, allegedly, be
fixed and defined. Because of the great variety of all our truth claims this
is a difficult question and it will require an immense effort to deal with
it. How do the truths of science relate to those of history?to mention
just one example. But more importantly, considering the nature of the

rorty and history

87

task, one may well have ones worries about its glaring circularity. First
one builds an ideal or imaginary structure around our justified true
beliefs, to use Rortys terminology, and then one asks oneself how this
imaginary structure may justify the beliefs that we had already accepted
as justifiably true. What is the use of the whole enterprise? What may
we hope to learn from it? These are even more difficult questions than
those of epistemology itself. . . .
On the other hand there is pure philosophy of languagewhere the
first step is to disconnect truth and meaning. This liberates philosophy
of language from the (arrogant) pretension of competing with the sciences in their aim for truth (by allegedly founding the scientists truth
in Truth). Here the very notion of a conceptual scheme is abandoned
(though there may well be schemes that are internal to science, but these
have no philosophical import). So Davidson and Rorty are happy to assume that most of what we say is trueand we could even not understand
what it might mean to question this, since this could only be done by an
appeal to an alternative scheme than the one we allegedly possess (but
such a scheme would be untranslatable into our own and, hence, not
understandable). This effectively destroys the skepticists case. As Rorty
quotes Davidson: given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality,
we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without
the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course truth of
sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be.
In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the
world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose
antics make our sentences and opinions true or false.20 I emphasize the
phrase reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objectsand to
which I shall return in the section on experience.21
Finally, we must ask ourselves (and Rorty) what will be left to do for
his pure philosophy of language, now that most of contemporary
philosophy of language has been robbed of its purpose and meaning.
It is true that Rorty himself presents in PMN Gadamerian hermeneutics
as the most likely candidate for what a pure philosophy of language
might look like in actual practice. But the arguments he has for this at
the end of his book are deplorably sketchyand he never elaborated
them in his later work. Nevertheless, when coming up with this suggestion, he must have felt that historywhich is what hermeneutics is all
aboutwill, somehow, answer the question of what pure philosophy
of language might look like. So this will be the topic to be addressed in
the next section.

88

new literary history

IV. Pure Philosophy of Historical Language

Rorty says about theories of reference that these are roughly coextensive with what I have been calling impure philosophy of language
(PMN 270). This need not surprise. Reference is a device enabling us
to move from language to the world; so all that is problematic about
epistemology, and impure philosophy of language in general, is likely
to announce itself here most clearly. Next, when discussing reference it
is best to begin, again, by contrasting Reference with reference. Rorty
will be perfectly willing to allow that both in science and in our daily
talk we do often refer to things in reality, in the trivial, nontechnical
sense of talking about. Ordinarily no complications will arise. But
there are problem cases: can we refer to Sherlock Holmes, to God, to
the GNP of France in 1970 (or in 1530), to the morally good, or to aesthetic beauty? Or think of the strings of string-theory. Or of the kind
of entitiessuch as the Renaissance, social class, conservatism, or
trade unionismthat are discussed by historians.
Rortys point of departure when discussing reference is the issue of
sameness of reference. So, if we have different people, using different words,
different texts in different contexts, what legitimates us to say that, under
certain circumstances, they are still speaking about the same referent?
Suppose, for example, that S talks about topic T, but that most of his
beliefs about T are false. Can he then still be said to refer to T? There
are two options, writes Rorty. One may say that S is talking about T all
right (is referring to it), even though practically everything he says about
T is false. The other possibility is to say that since practically nothing
that S says is true of T, S cannot possibly be talking about T (referring
to it).22 To get out of the dilemma, we will appeal to the Searle-Strawson
criterion for reference, rendered by Rorty as follows: that S refers to T
in his use of T if most of his central beliefs are true of T (PMN 288). It
then follows that S can still be said to refer to T if his false beliefs are not
contradicted by these central beliefs mentioned by the Searle-Strawson
criterion, and that there will be no reference, if that would be the case.
Rortys argument here is of interest for the philosopher of history for
several reasons. In the first place, observe that matters of truth and falsity
are the decisive criterion for reference here. However, this will be of little
help for the writing of history, since disagreements amongst historians
can only rarely be rephrased in terms of truth and falsity. When assessing each others work, historians are only rarely interested in the truth
and falsity of what is said at the level of a historical narratives individual
assertions about past states of affairs (and to which the truth/false distinction can only meaningfully be applied). In fact, normally they simply
assume that all that a historian says at that level is true. At that level his-

rorty and history

89

torians are all, unwittingly, Davidsonians, so to say. However, historians

are far more interested in what the Searle-Strawson criterion describes
as central beliefs. Indeed, their discussions ordinarily focus on what
are the central beliefs we have to take into account, if we wish to have
a proper grasp of (some part or aspect of) the past. For example, the
disagreement between the liberal and the Marxist interpretation over the
French Revolution is not a disagreement about the facts of the Revolution, but about whether a proper understanding of the Revolution will
require us to focus on political facts (the liberal interpretation) or on
socioeconomic facts (the Marxist interpretation).
So, where does this leave us with reference? Obviously, the Searle-Strawson criterion can be of no help here anymore. For central beliefs are
there the criterion for deciding about reference and this criterion cannot show us what are and what are not the central beliefs in individual
cases. But there seems to be an easy way out of the problem. We might
saywith William Walsh23that the disagreement between the liberal
and the Marxist about the French Revolution is, from a logical point
of view, no different from the disagreement between someone saying
what a chair looks like if seen from this side and someone else telling us
what it looks like from another perspective. Both may have their good
reasons for looking at the chair from a specific perspective and even
believe their own perspective to be superior to any othernevertheless,
we will always be talking here about one and the same chair. So sameness of reference seems to be guaranteed in these cases, as in the case
of the controversy between the liberal and the Marxist interpretation of
the French Revolution.
Having arrived at this stage I propose to distinguish between biographies (of, for example, Charlemagne or Napoleon) on the one hand
and, on the other, history books on such misty entities as the French
Revolution or the Renaissance. It will then be clear that the Walsh solution works excellently for biographies: if one biographer presents central
beliefs about Napoleon suggesting that he was a benefactor of mankind,
whereas another proposes central beliefs presenting Napoleon as a
proto-Hitler, both biographies will still refer to one and the same personthat is, the human being of flesh and blood who lived from 1769
to 1821 and became Emperor of the French in 1804.
But things are more problematic with these misty entities: what exactly
is the object of reference in the case of the French Revolution or the
Renaissance? All we have here are different histories of these things,
but there are no objects preexisting these histories, that we can refer
to by means of a proper name (such as Napoleon) or an identifying
description (such as the man who was Emperor of the French from 1804
to 1815) and that may serve as a kind of referential or epistemological

90

new literary history

anchor for all the possible histories we will have of them. Surely, we will
all agree that the Revolution began in 1789, that it contains the guillotining of Louis XVI and of Robespierreand so one may go on for
quite some time. But these facts are the merely necessary but not sufficient
conditions for fixing the reference of the term French Revolution. For
the Marxists will drape around these facts quite different additional facts
than the liberal historian, and each will go on to accuse the other of not
really talking about or referring to the French Revolution.
Almost all philosophers (of history) and historians will now be tempted
to say that there must be something wrong with this account. For who
could possibly doubt that there has been a French Revolution, that we
can refer to and that will function as the empirical touchstone for historians in their controversies about that most sublime event in Western
history? So they will now be tempted to yield to what one might call the
referential illusion, hence the idea that the past simply must contain a
referent for the notion of the French Revolution, just as the past contains
referents for proper names such as Charlemagne and Napoleon. Would not all
historical discussion of the French Revolution be the discussion of an
illusion in the absence of such a referent?
What is wrong with the referentialist illusion was made clear in Louis
O. Minks argument against Universal History, that is, the idea that
the past itself is a kind of (still) untold story and that historians try to
copy as closely as possible when writing their own stories of the past. But
though the past may give us all the arguments we need for deciding what
are good and bad histories of the pastMink was no irrationalist!it is
not itself a story (just as nature is not an unwritten physical law itself,
though, again, it may provide the physicist with the data for how to formulate his laws). Mink thus urges us: to abandon the remnant of the
idea of Universal History that survives as a presupposition, namely the
idea that there is a determinate historical reality, the complex referent
for all our narratives of what actually happened, the untold story to
which narrative histories approximate.24 What originally had been a
metaphysical or ontological speculationthat is, a speculative philosophy
of history as formulated in the prophecies of Daniel, or by St. Augustine,
Kant, Hegel, Marx, and so forthsurvived as a referential fallacy, that
is, as the epistemological speculation that the writing of history makes
no sense, unless there is an untold story of the past in the past itself,
and to which all historical narratives refer (although the truth of what
they say in these narratives about this object of reference will always be
subject to historical discussion).
Assuming that Mink is basically right, we may now recognize how very
useful Rortys pure philosophy of language can be for a better understanding of historical writing. To begin with, observe that nobody in this

rorty and history

91

discussion doubts the possibility of true statements (about the past), or

of statements expressing justified true belief, to use Rortys terminology. The disagreement has to do, instead, with the issue of whether the
availability of justified true beliefs is sufficient basis for the claim that
the conditions for reference have been adequately fulfilled. Mink, for
his part, does not think so. And so it is with Rortys pure philosopher
of language when criticizing epistemology for its habit of postulating
referents where they are not. Furthermore, the pure philosopher of
language will be adamant that there is no reason for despair here, and
that precisely the disconnection of truth (that is, of true statements
about a referent) and meaning guarantees that meaning does not go by
the board, if Truth does. Of course, we must carefully distinguish here
between the true statements contained by a historical narrative (and
where truth is trivially present) and the narrative taken as a whole, and
where meaning is given to notions such as that of the French Revolution
or of the Renaissance.
It must strike us, next, that pure philosophy of (historical) language
also gives us a new, and technically sophisticated argument in favor of
the old distinction between historical research (Geschichtsforschung)
and historical writing (Geschichtsschreibung):25 impure philosophy
of language is OK as long as we have to do with truth and reference at
the level of historical research, but pure philosophy of language shows
us why it is wrong when we start to talk about the Truth and Reference
of historical writing. Then meaning is all that is left to us, and the crucial
issue then becomes how the meaning of one set of words, sentences,
and texts may affect that of other words, sentences, and texts. And this
issue can only be handled adequately within a holist conception of this
interaction between words, sentences, and texts.
Rortys pure philosophy of language may give us, first, a new account
of historical changeneedless to say a topic of the greatest interest in
philosophy of history. We must distinguish here between two kinds of
change, one in which we have an unproblematic subject of change and
another in which there is none. Examples of the first kind of change
are biographies of historical personages such as Charlemagne or Napoleonand where these personalities themselves can be said to function
as subjects of change. Nothing of great philosophical interest is at stake
here. This was the model of historical change adopted in the writing of
history until the Enlightenment: historical reality was believed to consist
of a number of entities all remaining substantially the same through
change and to which change could be predicated. This was different
with nineteenth-century historicism where change was believed to involve
the domain of substance as well. Nothing was a priori excluded from
change within the historicist dynamization (Mannheim) of our view of

92

new literary history

the world. Whereas the traditional conception of change left reference

intact, this will be different with historicist change. If A develops into
B and if B is substantially different from A, then reference to A (or B)
must get dislocated somewhere on the trajectory from A to B.
So let us return now to the French Revolution and Renaissance cases
where we have this kind of change involving the substance of the phenomena in question. We have here dramatic changewhat change can be
more dramatic than one from coming into being to ceasing to exist?and
yet there is no subject of change in the sense of some identifiable object
in past reality substantially remaining the same through change and to
which all sentences describing change do refer. Change now lost its referential anchor in past reality itselfnot as an irresponsible concession to
idealismbut because this is how we use historical language when having
to deal with historicist change. The subject of change has emigrated, so
to say, from the past itself to the historians text; the historians language
itself now became the scene upon which these more drastic, historicist
variants of historical change are enacted. Finally, the argument here is
holistic in the sense that the text as a whole, made up of individual
justified true statements, is at stake here. History and historical debate
is holistic in that the universally shared assumption in historical writing
is that only the whole of the text conveys the historians cognitivist message, and to which the parts only contribute.26
Next, there are some fascinating analogies between historical narratives and Gottfried Leibnizs monads as he defined these in his Monadology. Like monads, narratives are windowless insofar as there is no
direct interaction between them; next, the account of the past given by
a historical narrative is closely similar to the entelechies that Leibniz
attributed to his monads:27 both monads and narratives are defined by
the perspective they have on the world. And both are holist in a double
sense: (1) their whole is their identity, and (2) they are the components
of either a narrativist or monadological universe.
Think, then, of each historical narrative as a monad, and assume, furthermore, that the narrativist universe contains not only all the narratives
that have been or will be written on the past, but also all possible narratives. This is in agreement with the Leibnizian rule that the realization
of a full universe is the greatest of all goods. One might then say that
historical reality arises out of these monads just like space and time arise
out of Leibnizs monads.28 Space and time, as the most general properties of the objects of external reality, are the product of how thinking
monads make sense of their perceptions; similarly, historical reality is
how the historical mind makes sense of the true statements formulated
in the past tense.
Obviously, this quasi-Leibnizian claim is wholly in agreement with the
antiepistemological Rortyan argument as expounded above: we should

93

rorty and history

not think of historical reality as the already existing Referent to which

all our narratives refer, but as coming into being only to the degree
that historical discussionconversation as Rorty would have put it
himselfprogresses successfully. The existence of historical reality thus
is a matter of degree: the more agreement there is, the more secure its
existential status will becomewith the ironic implication that historical reality only achieves the status of existence if historical debate has
come to an end and there is nothing left to be historicized. History
then supersedes itself.

V. Experience
In the first half of PMN we shall find a lot of discussion on feelings and
on so-called raw feels such as pain. Though these discussions are part
of Rortys attack on epistemology, they acquire an extra interest if seen
from the perspective of philosophy of history. That will provide me with
the material for this last section of my essay on Rorty and history.
Philosophers with a behaviorist and physicalist cast of mindsuch as
Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Rorty himselfwish to do away with the Cartesian dualism of res extensa and res cogitans as a metaphysical prejudice.
Neo-dualists are ready to see their point and will therefore look for an
alternative justification of their intuitions that there must be, somehow,
somewhere, an ontological and/or epistemological gap between mind
and body. Their first strategy will be to say that we have to do here with
two different vocabulariesone for the mind and another for the body
and material reality in generaland that one commits a categorymistake
when trying to reduce the former to the latter. A large part of Rortys
own argument aims at the defusion of this neo-dualist position. His main
strategy here is that this peaceful coexistence of the two vocabularies is
merely a matter of historical contingence and, more specifically, of some
purely local peculiarities of seventeenth-century philosophical debate.
Since then, Cartesian dualism became a kind of gesunkenes Kulturgut,
so that we now all believe that there must be some truth in the Cartesian
picture, after all, and that it is the philosophers task to find out about
this. Rorty then goes on to show that Aristotle and the whole Aristotelian
tradition had no use for the dualism, and that we can quite well imagine
a community of language-users saying all that we say, but for whom the
dualism of mind and body would be incomprehensible.29 It is here that
Rorty is at his very best as a historian (of Western philosophy).
Rorty emphasizes that the debate between neo-dualists (such as Thomas
Nagel) and behaviorist physicalists (such as himself) will naturally center
around these feelings and raw feels. They are the transition, so to speak,
between body and mind; and neo-dualists will therefore be quick to real-

94

new literary history

ize that if they surrender feelings and raw feels to the physicalist, the rest
will soon follow. So they will insist that there is a mental dimension to
these feelings and raw feels and that cannot be reduced to, or explained
in, purely physicalistic terms without losing something that is essential to
them. But, as Rorty correctly insists, these are matters of strategy rather
than of sound and convincing argument.
Most of Rortys objections against the neo-dualist are reasonable
enough and I have no wish to quarrel with them. But there is a peculiarity in his position that I want to put into question below. Instructive
is the following passage: But suffocation, heat, ecstasy, pain, fire, redness, parental hostility, mother love, hunger, loudness, and the like are
known prelinguistically, or so ordinary speech would have it. They are
known just by being had or felt. They are known without being able to
be placed in classes, or related in any other way to anything else (PMN
184). The idea is (1) that animals and babies may have raw feels such
as pain, or an awareness of red or of loudness, and so forth, and that
if they have such experiences the situation is certainly unlike that of
a photoelectric cell reacting to red light, but (2) that the capacity to
speak meaningfully about them makes no difference whatsoever with
regard to these feelings and raw feels themselves. The funny thing is that
the neo-dualists also insisted on the nonlinguistic character of raw feels
themselves. For precisely this enabled them to maintain against the
physicalists that raw feels, such as pain, are indubitable manifestations of
the mindhence, manifestations of the mind that cannot be explained
away with the argument that language makes us see things (such as the
mind) that simply are not really there. So the nonlinguistic character of
pain and raw feels is a truly indispensable link in the chain of the the
neo-dualists argument.
Now, observe that Rorty unwittingly copies from the neo-dualist the
view that raw feels are basically or necessarily nonlinguistic. Moreover,
since neo-dualists claim that language affects raw feels (a claim denied
by Rorty), Rorty is even more explicit about the necessarily nonlinguistic
character of raw feels.
But we have no reason to go along with this. Why should raw feels
be necessarily nonlinguistic? Think of someone who is told by his GP
that he has terminal cancer and a mere one or two months to live. Or
of someone suddenly realizing that he has made a terrible mistake that
will cast its dark shadow over the rest of his life. In both cases language
and raw feel, that is, the sentence announcing imminent death or the
language of the bitterest self-reproach and certain feelings will inextricably be bound up with each other. Without the one we would not
have the other. Words may be no less real to us than water, fire, or ice.
Or even more so. So both the neo-dualists and Rorty believed that pain

rorty and history

95

(and raw feels) can only be a matter of the body and not of the mind.
But thats mere prejudice: the Romantics were right when insisting that
meaning can be experienced no less than light, sound, smell, or rough
and smooth surfaces. There is an indissoluble continuity between thought
(meaning) and feeling (experience). Or, to put it with Rousseau: sentir,
cest penser.
Surely, one might object now that this experience of language is
enacted on the level of language only, insofar as being informed by ones
general practitioner about ones imminent death will provoke a number
of thoughtsall of them only expressible in language if we are to attribute
any meaning to themand this would tie us to the level of language, as
opposed to that of experience, or that of raw feelings. But this would
be no less dogmatic than maintaining that a raw feel might be causally
related to language but will always be clearly distinguishable from it in
the way that cause and effect are distinguishable. Only dogmatism can
prevent us from recognizing that the realms of experience and language
do interpenetrateand that experience may sometimes be linguistic and
language experiential.
The dogma of the invincible barrier between experience and languagewith the claim that the link between the two of them can never
be more than merely causalhas severely hindered our understanding
of the humanities. The dogma made historyand the humanities generallyinto an exclusively linguistic affair (Derrida being the paradigmatic
example). The main intuition being the fallacy of arguing from the fact
that we can get access only by means of language to what is investigated
in history and the humanities (which is correct), to the claim that
experience has no role to play in them (which is false), or only in the
trivial sense of the experience of reading (hence in the sense that just
anything going on in our life and minds can be labelled experience).
In agreement with the neo-dualist and physicalist prejudice, feelings, for
example, feelings of pain, of pleasure, and so forth, were not only radically cut loose from the language we use for speaking about them, but
also excluded from further analysis. De nobis ipsis silemus. This robbed
history and the humanities of their most natural subject matter and made
them into the dry-as-dust-affair that they so often are nowadays and that
may drive us to boredom and despair.
Rorty ends his book with some musings about the notion of edification, which is the word he proposes for the German Bildung. Bildung evokes associations with formation and of being the product of
a process of formation. Think of the Bildungsroman, such as Goethes
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, showing how and thanks to what experiences
someone came to be the person he or she is. So the idea is that our
(life) experiences do not leave us basically unalteredin the way that a
scientist is not involved in his or her own experiments.

96

new literary history

At this stage it is worthwhile to recall that Aristotle certainly belongs

to the good guys in Rortys account of the history (and emergence) of
epistemology. Admittedly, we will look in vain in Aristotle for the sophisticated behaviorist and physicalist arguments that Rorty marshals against
the epistemologist. But unfortunately, Rorty never asks himself whether
perhaps something could not be learned, after all, from Aristotles antiepistemology avant la lettre. Recall, furthermore, that for the Aristotle
of De Anima the sense of touch is the model for his conception of the
acquisition of knowledge.30 For just as in the sense of touch there is an
immediate contact between the object itself and the sense of touch so
that the sense of touch (our hands, for example) takes on the form of
the object,31 so it is with knowledge in general: the sentient subject, as
we have said, is potentially as the object of sense is actually. Thus during
the process of being acted upon it is unlike, but at the end it becomes
like that object, and shares its quality.32 Knowledge consists in the subject actually becoming like the objectan intuition that is still clearly
present in the old scholastic formula of truth being an adaequatio rei et
intellectus. Rorty is well acquainted with these aspects of Aristotles theory
of knowledge,33 but by the time he expounds at the end of his book his
conception of Bildung and of edification he seems to have wholly
forgotten about them. For what account of knowledge is better suited
to express and to sustain what he wishes to do with these notions than
the relevant passages from De Anima?
Had he returned to Aristotle, there he might have shown how we may
properly be said to be changed and formed (gebildet!) by the object
of knowledge. And he might have gone on to argue that this is exactly
where Aristotles account perfectly fits the facts about our dealing with
the world of history and of the humanitiesand where we can truly be
said to (have) become what we know about that world. Wasnt the historicist basically right when always insisting that we are the products of our
cultural and intellectual history? And in a way that would make no sense
for the historians colleagues in the departments of the sciences?
It then also follows that we should distinguish between two variants of
experience. There is, on the one hand, the kind of experience that we
associate with empiricism, that was always discussed in the philosophy of
the sciences and that occasioned epistemological problems. But there is,
on the other hand, the kind of formative experience that we typically
encounter in history and the humanities and where epistemological worries are as irrelevant and inappropriate as they were already in Aristotles
theory of knowledge. The practice of history and the humanities suggests
here wholly new avenues for philosophical reflectionand from which
we may expect results that will not only revolutionize historical thought
itself, but philosophy of language in general.

97

rorty and history

VII. Conclusion
Rorty sometimes says the weirdest things. For example: but what could
show that the Bellarmine-Galileo issue differs in kind from the issue
between, say, Kerensky and Lenin, or that between the Royal Academy
(circa 1910) and Bloomsbury? (PMN 331). Or think of his notorious
argument about texts and lumps to the effect that there should be no
interesting differences between the humanities (dealing with texts)
and the sciences (dealing with lumps).34 One may then recall Kuhns
recommendation that one should take precisely this kind of pronouncement quite seriously and then ask oneself how a sensible person could
possibly say such weird and patently counterintuitive things.
This may help us reveal the secret of Rortys (early) writings. Epistemology had always been the discourse philosophers relied upon in
their effort to discover the secrets of knowledge and of the differences
between the sciences and the humanities. So taking out epistemology
would have a sudden and unexpected rapprochement of the sciences
and the humanities as its predictable, but unintended side effect. Now
that the traditional epistemological wedge between the sciences and the
humanities had been eliminated with epistemology itself, it might seem
that a time of peaceful coexistence of the sciences and the humanities
had arrived, and this is how Rorty conceived of it. But, obviously, this is
a non sequitur. Even though one argument for distinguishing between A
(i.e. the sciences) and B (i.e. the humanities) has been exposed as useless, there may well be other sound arguments for distinguishing between
A and B. So this may explain how Rorty came to say the kind of silly
things I quoted just now. Those kinds of things are still a hangover of
epistemology. Only someone who still takes epistemology seriously can
claim that avoiding the (big) error of epistemology will automatically
result in new and surprising insights in the relationship between the
sciences and the humanities.
But the situation is, rather, that the blackboard has now been wiped
clean of old and remarkably persistent errors, and that we can now start
anew with our researches. Nevertheless, people who have made us aware
of our oldest and most persistent mistakes are often good guides for the
future as well. And this is certainly true of Richard Rortyas I have tried
to demonstrate in this essay.
Groningen University
NOTES
1 It is true, he occasionally mentions Foucault, but he saw him as a political thinker
rather than as a historian; moreover, apparently he felt little sympathy for him. He thus

98

new literary history

speaks disparagingly about the extraordinary dryness of Foucaults work. See Richard
Rorty, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1991), 173. And in his only lengthier discussion of Foucault, Rorty discusses
(again critically) Foucaults political and moral views, but not his historical work. See Rorty,
Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Foucault, in Heidegger and Others,
19398.
2 Rorty wrote just one essay that could be seen as a contribution to philosophy of history: The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres, in Philosophy in History: Essays on the
Historiography of Philosophy, ed. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 4977. It is one of Rortys less inspired essays and I shall not
discuss it here. Similarly, the philosopher of history electrified by the mere title of Holism
and Historicism is in for a bad surprise: for he will discover that the word historicism
occurs only once in the essay and, moreover, in a context devoid of any interest. Rorty,
Philosophical Papers, vol. 4, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
2007), 17683.
3 The two scholars were good friends when both taught at Stanford at the end of the
1990s.
4 It is much the same with Arthur Dantothat other major contemporary American
philosopher of historyand in whom Rorty might even have found a useful ally in his
attack on the orthodoxies of philosophy of language.
5 The term is Hayden Whites. See White, The Absurdist Moment in Contemporary
Literary Theory, in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), 26182.
6 Part of the explanation undoubtly is that he never again undertook to write a book
with such scope and force as PMN; since then he published mainly articles on AngloSaxon and Continental philosophers, which had the consequence that he remained in
the shadow of those on whose work he commented, however brilliant his comments always
were. The only exception is Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1989), but this book lacks the drive, gusto and bravura that made PMN into such
fascinating reading.
7 See Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 323 (hereafter
cited as PMN), where Rorty approvingly quotes Kuhn on this.
8 Moreover, as far as I can see, Rorty never changed his mind about any topic that really mattered to him. So everything was there alreadyand also in its proper place and
contextin PMN.
9 Thus Rorty quotes Saul Kripke as follows: Thus it is not possible to say that although
pain is necessarily identical with a certain physical state, a certain phenomenon can be
picked out in the same way we pick out pain without being correlated with that physical
state (PMN 79). Both necessarily go together.
10 But that it momentarily lost again with Rousseaus sentir, cest penser.
11 See my forthcoming essay, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Champion of Realism, Father
of Romanticism and Beacon for Our Time, Common Knowledge (Spring 2008), in which I
show what Jacobi and Rorty have in common.
12 Rorty endorses the later work of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey in that it is
therapeutic rather than constructive, edifying rather than systematic, designed to make
the reader question his own motives for philosophizing rather than to supply him with a
new philosophical program (PMN 56).
13 As Rorty emphasizes, analytical philosophy followed the Cartesian and Kantian pattern
when conceiving of itself an an attempt to escape from history (PMN 9).
14 For these blunders, see John H. Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science From Quine to Latour (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004),
5290.

rorty and history

99

15 I am using the term representation here in the sense meant by Rorty; hence in the
way we may say that the sciences offer us true representations of the world. So the term
has no aesthetic connotations here, in the sense that we can say of the work of art that it is
a representation of what it represents.
16 I shall mean by linguistic philosophy the view that philosophical problems are problems which may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understanding
more about the language presently in use. Rorty, Introduction, in The Linguistic Turn:
Recent Essays in Philosophical Method, ed. Rorty (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967), 3.
17 Though Rorty elsewhere expresses his hesitations with regard to Peirce (PMN 296
97).
18 Both Gadamer and Dewey seemed to be happy with this framework, and Rortys sympathy for these two philosophers suggests his failure to recognize their embrace of the
myth of the framework.
19 Davidson partially repudiated Rortys interpretation of his work in Donald Davidson,
The Structure and Content of Truth, Journal of Philosophy 87, no. 6 (1991): 279328. When
discussing Davidsons criticisms, Rorty recognizes what separates him from Davidson: I
am quite willing to withdraw my 1986 claim that true has no explanatory use, which was
a misleading way of putting the point that its true is not a helpful explanation of why
science works or of why you should share my beliefs. Rorty, Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry?
Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright, in Philosophical Papers, vol. 3, Truth and Progress
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 25n. But, at the same time, he upholds the
substance of his own views as recorded here. Apparently, there is a divergence of opinion
between the two. So below I shall present what Rorty ascribes to Davidson as Rortys own
opinions, and leave it to others to decide whether Rorty correctly interpreted Davidson
or not.
20 Davidson, On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, Proceedings and Addresses of the
American Philosophical Association 47 (197374): 20; quoted in PMN, 310.
21 The phrase must remind us of Jacobi whose critique of Kantian epistemology is similar
to Davidsons and Rortys argument, and Jacobi also insisted on the immediacy of our
contact with the world.
22 PMN, 80; I disregard here the distinction Rorty makes between reference and talking about, where the latter term is reserved for speaking about fictional entities, such as
Sherlock Holmes. See PMN, 289, for talking about.
23 W. H. Walsh, An Introduction to Philosophy of History, 3rd ed. (London: Hutchinson,
1967), 107114.
24 Louis O. Mink, Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument, in Historical Understanding,
ed. Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob, and Richard T. Vann (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press,
1987), 202.
25 See Wilhelm Freiherr von Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Berlin: Kniglich
Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1903), 230.
26 See, for a further elaboration of this holism, my Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of
the Historians Language (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1983), ch. 5. Historical conceptssuch as
the Renaissance or the Enlightenment are analyzed here in agreement with Leibnizs
predicate in notion principle. This principle entails: (1) that the meaning of such concepts
can be fixed or defined only by an enumeration of all of its semantic properties, and (2)
that the complete list of all these semantic properties can only be established by reference
to all other uses of these concepts. To put it summarily: historian Hs conception of the
Renaissance can only be identified by means of where it differs from conceptions of the
Renaissance proffered by other historians. Precision depends therefore on the quantity of
other such conceptions: the more conceptions we have of the Renaissance alternative to
the one proposed by H, the more clarity there will be about Hs conception of the Renais-

100

new literary history

sance. So the clarity of Hs conception of the Renaissance is determined by the existence

of alternative conceptions. Hence the holism of historical meaning.
27 See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology (1714), in Philosophical Papers: A Selection,
trans. and ed. Leroy Loemker (Dordrecht, Neth.: D. Reidel, 1969), sec. 18: all simple
substances or created monads might be given the name of entelechies, for they have in them
a certain perfection (echousi to enteles). There is in them a certain sufficiency (autarkeia)
which makes them the sources of their internal actions and, so to speak, incorporated
automata (644).
28 And where historical reality should be strictly distinguished from the past, as what
true sentences in the past tense are true of.
29 See, for this, his argument about the Galactics in Chapter 2 of PMN.
30 Aristotle, De Anima, 435a1213, 435a1819.
31 Recall here my quote from Davidson in note 21.
32 Aristotle, De Anima, 418a36.
33 See especially PMN, 45.
34 Rorty, Texts and Lumps, in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, Objectivity, Relativism, Truth
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 7893.