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The Polycentric Perspective: A Canadian Alternative to Rorty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

J. Douglas Rabb
Affiliation:
Lakehead University

Extract

Canadian philosopher Rupert C. Lodge (1886–1961) developed a pluralistic or “comparative philosophy” in which he adopted what I shall call the polycentric perspective. The polycentric perspective recognizes that since philosophical discourse, indeed all discourse, is necessarily linear, “of only one dimension”, it follows that no one metaphysical system, no one philosophical perspective, can ever be considered adequate on its own. In this paper I argue that the philosophy of pluralism, the adoption of the polycentric perspective by Lodge and other early Canadian philosophers, can and does serve as an adequate answer and intriguing alternative to Richard Rorty's challenge to Speculative Philosophy in The Consequences of Pragmatism and Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1989

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References

1 Verney, Douglas V., Three Civilizations, Two Cultures, One State: Canada's Political Traditions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), 54Google Scholar. Verney is discussing the history of thought and makes no reference to Rorty. He does mention the Dewey-Goudge debate about Peirce, 50.

2 The concept “polycentric perspective” was first used in Rosenberg, Philip's The Seventh Hero (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 76CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and again in Rosenberg, John's Carlyle and the Burden of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 44CrossRefGoogle Scholar to describe a narrative technique employed by Thomas Carlyle in The French Revolution to deal with the fact that whereas “all Narrative is, by its nature, of only one dimension; only travels forward towards one, or towards successive points” in actual history, as opposed to written history, “every single event is the offspring not of one, but of all other events, prior or contemporaneous, and will in its turn combine with all others to give birth to new”. In short, history “is an ever-living, ever-working Chaos of Being” whereas narrative is merely and necessarily “linear”. See Carlyle, Thomas, “On History”, in Complete Works, Vol. 27, ed. Traill, H. D. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1901), 8889.Google Scholar

3 Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 360.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., 377.

5 Rorty, Richard, The Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xv.Google Scholar

6 Prado, C. G., “Rorty's Pragmatism”, Dialogue 22/3 (1983), 446.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Rorty, , Mirror of Nature, xiv.Google Scholar

8 Lodge, Rupert C., “The Comparative Method in Philosophy”, in Lodge, R. C., ed., Manitoba Essays Written in Commemoration of the Sixtieth Anniversary of The University of Manitoba (Toronto: Macmillan, 1937), 412413.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., 432.

10 Rorty, , Mirror of Nature, 379.Google Scholar

11 Lodge, Rupert C., Applied Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 209.Google Scholar

12 Lodge, , “The Comparative Method”, 419.Google Scholar

13 Armour, Leslie and Trott, Elizabeth, The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850–1950 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981), 4Google Scholar. Compare Rorty's language of “battle”, note 5 above.

14 I have explored this with special reference to Young, Watson, Crawford-Frost, Stewart and others: cf. my “Canadian Idealism, Philosophical Federalism, and World Peace”, Dialogue 25/1 (1986), 92103Google Scholar; Herbert L. Stewart, Thomas Carlyle, & Canadian Idealism”, Canadian Literature 111 (1986), 211214Google Scholar; “The Fusion Philosophy of Crawford-Frost”, Idealist Studies 16/1 (1986), 7792Google Scholar; and “Reason and Revelation Revisited: A Canadian Perspective”, in Rabb, J. Douglas, ed., Religion and Reason (Winnipeg: Ronald P. Frye, 1983), 219.Google Scholar

15 Armour, and Trott, , The Faces of Reason, 422.Google Scholar

16 Fichte, J. G., The Science of Knowledge with First and Second Introductions, ed. and trans. Heath, Peter and Lachs, John (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 12.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., 147.

18 Ibid., 233.

19 Ibid., 123.

20 Lodge, , “The Comparative Method”, 421.Google Scholar

21 Lodge, , Applied Philosophy, 1.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., 19.

24 Ibid., 214.

25 See for example Rorty, , Mirror of Nature, 362Google Scholar where Rorty suggests that naturalistic descriptions are “on a par with the various alternative descriptions offered by poets, novelists, depth psychologists, sculptors, anthropologists, and mystics”.

26 Lodge, R. C., “Synthesis or Comparison?”, Journal of Philosophy 35 (1940), 433.Google Scholar

27 Armour, and Trott, , The Faces of Reason, 422.Google Scholar

28 See for example my “Lachs on Fichte”, Dialogue 12/3 (1973), 480485Google Scholar; “J. G. Fichte: Three Arguments for Idealism”, Idealistic Studies 6/2 (1976), 169177Google Scholar; “Is Critical Idealism Idealism?”, Idealistic Studies 9/2 (1979), 131138Google Scholar; “Marxism, Existentialism and Fichte's Idealism”, in Hammacher, Klaus, ed., Der Transzendentale Gedanke Die gegenwartige Darstellung de Philosophie Fichtes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1981), 481484Google Scholar; and “Fichte's Early Thought”, Dialogue 21/2 (1982), 261271.Google Scholar

29 Lodge explicitly rejects eclecticism. See Lodge, R. C., “Balanced Philosophy and Eclecticism”, Journal of Philosophy 41/4 (1944), 8591CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Lodge, , Applied Philosophy, 1719.Google Scholar

30 Rorty, Richard, “Heidegger Against the Pragmatists”, unpublished paper cited in C. G. Prado, Rethinking How We Age: A New View of the Aging Mind (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 26.Google Scholar

31 Rorty, , “Heidegger Against the Pragmatists”, 44.Google Scholar

32 Roily, , Mirror of Nature, 371.Google Scholar

33 Some of Rorty's arguments could do with a little counterbalancing. Compare his discussion of the Antipodeans, those creatures from the other side of our galaxy who “did not know that they had minds” (chapter two of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, “Persons without Minds”), with my discussion of those alien beings, the Pseusons (pseudo-persons), who, lacking self-consciousness, did not know that they were not persons. See “Incommensurable Paradigms and Psycho-Metaphysical Explanation”, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy and the Social Sciences 21/2 (1978), 201212Google Scholar; and “The Pseuson Invasion: An Orwellian Nightmare”, in Richardson, J. M., ed., Orwell Times Eight (Winnipeg: Ronald P. Fry, 1986), 93109.Google Scholar

34 Fichte, , Science of Knowledge, 16Google Scholar. I see Rorty as attempting to do to philosophy what Thomas Kuhn attempted to do to science. My response to Rorty is intended to parallel, and to support, my Popperian reply to Kuhn in “Incommensurable Paradigms and Critical Idealism”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 6/4 (1975), 343346.Google Scholar