Anti-Platonism of Rorty’s thought
One can consider right at the beginning whether the so-called
postmodern thought is anti-Platonic, or maybe it is just
non-Platonic, that is to say, whether the thought in question is
created in opposition to Plato, against him, or maybe it just omits
certain questions that are viewed as foundational for philosophical
thinking in general and that determine the course taken by
reflection in the whole, as Rorty calls it, "Plato-Kant sequence". It
might appear, and many commentators of recent cultural
transformations do get such an impression, that philosophical
postmodernism merely abandons traditional issues, abandons
attempts at answering traditional questions as useless, fruitless,
sterile or uninteresting. That is, in fact, the case with many
questions and that is also what one can clearly see in
postmodernists’ general declarations. But it is also the case that
part of those problems ("perennial, eternal problems of
philosophy", as Rorty calls them in the opening section of
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) haunt postmodernists and
even if they do not attack classical answers to certain questions,
they nevertheless question the meaningfulness or usefulness of
questions themselves.
Is thus postmodern philosophy (and let me hasten to explain
that I am using here the term for the sake of convenience, in an
ambiguous, very broad sense, being aware that the word itself
gradually ceases to mean much) "footnotes to Plato"?1 Sure it is,