From Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-1960:
The big claims were about the imminence of a final dissolution: ancient knots would be cut, the old metaphysical doctrines hunted to extinction. Once the old detritus was cleared, then the revelation, ‘of a whole world of infinite subtlety and diversity with its own fine and complex structure, a world which had always lain about us to be observed as soon as we ceased straining our eyes towards imaginary grandeurs and simplicities’*. That world would reveal itself once we ceased straining our eyes and tried instead to listen, not least to ourselves.
Remind you of anyone? Now it’s been a long while since I was immersed in Rorty but I don’t recall this ever being part of his intellectual narrative, whereas the ethos of his ironism I now suspect resembles post-war Oxford philosophy much more than, as often alleged, postmodernism. To what extent was this an intellectual juncture reached through multiple pathways or a common ethos which coalesced?
*From Peter Strawon’s post-linguistic thaw
Mark Carrigan 