I just underlined a passage from Rorty, and wrote in the margin “D 481 – biography of a head”:

The point of constructing a “truth theory of English” is not to enable philosophical problems to be put in a formal mode of speech, nor to explain the relationship between words and the world, but simply to lay out perspicuously the relation between parts of a social practice (the use of certain sentences) and other parts (the use of other sentences).

Rorty does explicitly say that the use of language is “a fairly small portion of reality” – but still, 262 pages and counting of linguistic tail-chasing that never leaves the study, that never links use of language with use of other non-linguistic tools (like saws, or cars, or petri dishes, or dollars, or particle accelerators), used alongside other people (non-professors, who make their livings not only with their brains and tongues, but with their hands, feet, backs and hearts) in order to deal with non-human entities (including, but not limited to computers — stuff like like rocks, germs, laws, clouds, plants, etc.) is exasperating me and making me long for philosophy abstracted from something other than academics’ own word-soaked lives.

In Daybreak (481), Nietzsche said of Kant and Schopenhauer,

“…their thoughts do not constitute a passionate history of a soul; there is nothing here that would make a novel, no crises, catastrophes or death-scenes; their thinking is not at the same time an involuntary biography of a soul but, in the case of Kant, the biography of a head, in the case of Schopenhauer the description and mirroring of a character (‘that which is unalterable’) and pleasure in the ‘mirror’ itself, that is to say in an excellent intellect… “

I’ve been trying to see the relevance of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, but so far it seems to be little more than the history of some heads.

I love philosophy, but only if that philosophy is a reflection on fully-lived life — not a reflection on a reflection on a reflection on an abstraction.