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Friday, May 25, 2012

Obama, Education aAd The End Of The American Dream

Introduction

Richard Rorty (1998), the American pragmatist philosopher, begins his book "Achieving Our Country" with the comment, "National pride is to countries what self respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self improvement" (p. 3). He provides a narrative re-crafting of the dream in pre-Vietnam America by reference to Walt Whitman and John Dewey. According to Rorty, Whitman and Dewey shaped the secular dream of America based on the notion of exceptionalism without reference to the divine - a society where all Americans would become mobilized as political agents in the cause of democracy. He argues that, for Whitman and Dewey, the conjunction of the concepts "America" and "democracy" is an essential part of a new description of what it is to be human. Rorty's success as a philosopher is related to his ability to tell a new story about America and the American Dream, to re-describe the past using a different vocabulary and to highlight how a new philosophical history can make us feel differently about who we are and who we might become. Rorty offers us a "philosophy of hope," a philosophy based on the narrative of cultural invention, self-discovery and national self-creation

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

1. Rorty is a third rate philosopher.
2. John Dewey was an evil evil man. He is responsible for the American Public school system being the piece of crap that it is. His whole idea was to make unthinking drones out of immigrants to be placed in factories. That's why your kids don't know anything.