Journal of Philosophical Investigations (Nov 2023)
A Reflection on Rorty's Claim about Religion: religion as a conversation stopper
Abstract
Rorty claims that metaphysicians and religious scholars agree with the separation of the public sphere (politics) from the private sphere (religion). While metaphysicians try to find this goal by discovering the nature of public and private, theorists try to do this by prioritizing public instead of private or vice versa. But Rorty, by creating a dividing line between the private sphere and the public sphere, claims that the political sphere does not need to obtain its foundations from the individual criteria of the private sphere, to which religion also belongs. He removes the centrality of truth from the stage of thought with an epistemological and religious approach and replaces it with dialogue (correlation with different "us") in which no member is more fundamental than another and no member is allowed to Judgment is not about other competence. According to Rorty, religious arguments are viewed as limited knowledge, which is non-negotiable and acts as a dialogue stopper. This is where religion not only becomes a way to reject the authority of the rest of the world, but also acts as a way to block the will of agreement between people. Our assumption is that Rorty's view of religion, which is based on the theory of the primacy of politics over religion, is contradictory to her ideal of a society for which both religious pluralism elites are important and maintaining political solidarity.
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