Un-degenerate conversation

Finally spent my Parnassus gift certificates yesterday, on a pair of Hofstadters—Richard, Anti-intellectualism in American Life et al, and Douglas…

One of my purchases was the paperback edition of Daniel Dennett's autobiography I've Been Thinking, published in hardcover not long before his death in 2024. His friend Douglas Hofstadter wrote a nice preface for the paperback on the day Dennett died in April '24.

Despite sharp philosophical differences, Dennett wrote nice things about "my friend Dick Rorty" (who died in 2007). "...[H]e concedes that there is indeed a useful concept of truth that survives intact after all the corrosive philosophical objections have been duly entered... Dick Rorty wasn't always right, but he was always a fine philosopher." 

Rorty wrote this:

"One way of thinking of wisdom ... is to think of it as the practical wisdom necessary to participate in a conversation. One way to see edifying philosophy as the love of wisdom is to see it as the attempt to prevent conversation from degenerating into inquiry, into a research program." — Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

 

All four of these provocatively un-degenerate books now grace my shelves and continue to converse, with themselves and me. We're all better for the exchange, and at least one of us is edified by it.