Richard Rorty - The World Well Lost

Richard Rorty's The World Well Lost (1972) is an early article which prefigures some of the themes of Rorty's later works, like Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Criticising the idea of conceptual schemes and its (supposedly) Kantian origin, Rorty argues that Davidson's attack on the scheme/content distinction allows us to drop any realist notion of 'the world'.

Victor Gijsbers teaches philosophy at Leiden University in the Netherlands. This video is part of an ongoing look at various philosophical papers: Philosophical Papers