Tldr: Philosophy is Platonism (and that's bad mkay);<

>>25217111
>more like
and Platonism is art (and that's not bad mkay, but it's not the only source of Truth)

He's not wrong that Truth is like the concept of God; it exists but we typically do not have direct acquaintance with it. We can speak of justifications for things, which may or may not be True, and they hopefully are, but justifications are always relative to the community we're justifying something towards. When we have sufficient justification we call what we've justified "true", but we do not have direct acquaintance with whether it has some attribute called being "True".

We know how to use truth-language, but we don't understand where it comes from outside of providing justifications for the use of the term. His point is that we will never write a "final book", where all "True" statements are defined, thus ending philosophy -- because philosophy is precisely this activity of justifying what we apply the label "true" to. Not that it is any less worthy of attention, but it is not the "queen of the sciences"; one could imagine a world in which metaphysicians are seen more similarly to theologians or mathematicians that foundational-researchers.

It's an open question on if Rorty believed any of this at a more deep level -- he had a tremendous respect and love for the philosophical tradition; but he is also, aside from an insightful logician and analytic philosopher, one of the few philosophers honest enough to at least self-criticize the value of recent developments in their field compared to other humanities fields (poetry, literature, high-art, etc).

Rorty's inheritors, with some exceptions, generally lacked his intellect but inherited his positions, and failed to do anything with it

Start with Philosophy and the Image of Nature if you actually want to understand how Rorty pushed philosophy forward. His other books should come after.

>>25217741
*Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature