Abstract

A poeticized or post‐metaphysical culture is one in which the imperative that is common to religion and metaphysics – to find an ahistorical, transcultural matrix for one's thinking, something into which everything can fit, independent of one's time and place – has dried up and blown away. Richard Rorty's neo‐pragmatism aims to replace the hopeless and ancient metaphysical search for “an ahistorical transcultural matrix” – key exemplars of which are Plato's Forms and Immanuel Kant's transcendental conditions of knowledge – with a different self‐image for philosophy. In the history of Western culture, according to Rorty, metaphysics and religion attempted to picture the human as responsible to something nonhuman: “the nature of reality” and God, respectively. The metaphysical problems of traditional philosophy are, for Ludwig Wittgenstein, a product of a misconstrual of grammar whereby features of grammar are reified and projected onto the world.