Priority of the Political Over Philosophy; A Metaphilosophical Approach of Richard Rorty's Pragmatism

Document Type : علمی - پژوهشی

Author

Assistant Professor of Political Science,, Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, University of Tabriz

10.48308/kj.2025.240818.1339

Abstract

Metaphilosophy is a critical reflection and evaluation on the nature of philosophy. In particular, the new reading of pragmatism, emphasizing the issue of language, is placed in this area. In this regard, Richard Rorty reviews the traditional assumptions of philosophy in its general and classical sense and shows how the redefinition of philosophy in recent times has been influenced by various epistemological fields, including empirical science. Here, the vertical relationship between philosophy and other human knowledge has faded and philosophy is placed in a horizontal and interactive relationship with various human knowledges. One of the most important effects of such an approach is particularly visible in political philosophy, where, due to the ground-breaking perspective of new pragmatism, categories such as good, truth, and many other fundamental concepts of philosophy are reinterpreted and fundamentally revised, resulting in the primacy of contradiction and conflict without believing that such a conflict can be resolved and necessarily lead to a new synthesis; instead of eliminating the conflict between competing views, efforts are made to manage them in society by relying on solidarity. All of these cases require the provision of insights for reflection on the function of philosophy in close relation to the field of political and social action, which, by making the sources of contemporary philosophizing more concrete, has taken into account factors such as biological and physical requirements and, in particular, desire, alongside the previous components of philosophy namely free will and reason.

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References

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Shenakht
Volume 18, Issue 2 - Serial Number 90
September 2025
Pages 73-94

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History

  • Receive Date: 24 July 2025
  • Revise Date: 07 September 2025
  • Accept Date: 22 September 2025

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