Quotes from Rorty Richard

The senses give both us and the animals access to the natural world, but we humans have superimposed a second world by internalizing a poem, thereby making the two worlds seem equally inescapable. Outside of the natural sciences, reason works within the second world, following paths that the imagination has cleared. But inside those sciences, nature itself shows the way,

Rationality is a matter of making allowed moves within language games. Imagination creates the games that reason proceeds to play. Then, exemplified by people such as Plato and Newton, it keeps modifying those games so that playing them is more interesting and profitable. Reason cannot get outside of the latest circle that imagination has drawn. It is in this sense, and only in this sense, that imagination holds the primacy.

we are reluctant to admit that the poetic imagination sets the bounds for human thought. At the heart of philosophy's quarrel with poetry is the fear that the imagination goes all the way down—that there is nothing we talk about that we might not have talked of differently.

We need to think of imagination not as the faculty that produces visual or auditory images but as a combination of novelty and luck.

We need to think of imagination not as the faculty that produces visual or auditory images but as a combination of novelty and luck. To be imaginative, as opposed to being merely fantastical is to do something new and to be lucky enough to have that novelty be adopted by one's fellow humans, incorporated into their social practices.

Intellectual and moral progress is not a matter of getting closer to an antecedent goal but of surpassing the past.

nature itself is a poem that we humans have written [...and] the imagination is the principle vehicle of human progress.

Information game into the universe when the first hominids began to justify their actions to one another by making assertions and backing those assertions up with further assertions.

Information came into the universe when the first hominids began to justify their actions to one another by making assertions and backing those assertions up with further assertions.

To reach truth that one cannot be argued out of is to escape from the linguistically expressible to the ineffable. Only the ineffable—what is not describable at all—cannot be described differently.

philosophy and poetry can coexist peaceably if both sides are willing to give up on the attempt to transcend human finitude.