Abstract
As too much tendentious history of philosophy whizzed by too fast and one dubious dichotomy was piled on another, Professor Rorty's lecture left the author with that old, familiar dizzy feeling, an eerie sense of deja lu. For one thing, not all the extravagances of postmodernism are relativist; some would be better described as tribalist, or simply skeptical. For another, not all forms of relativism are self-undermining, or otherwise objectionable; some are harmlessly true. So this isn't a promising avenue to pursue. Maybe such comfortable unanimity is to be found in the rarefied circles of elite academia in which Rorty spent his career; but one need only open the newspaper to see that, elsewhere, it looks a lot as if things are falling apart.