Richard Rorty - Sense Quotes

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Citizens of a Jeffersonian democracy can be as religious or irreligious as they please as long as they are not fanatical. That is, they must abandon or modify opinion on matters of ultimate importance, the opinions that may hitherto have given sense and point to their lives, if these opinions entail public actions that cannot be justified to most of their fellow citizens.

Richard Rorty

My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have … "an ambition of transcendence."

Richard Rorty

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change – that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.

Richard Rorty