Exploring Essentialism and Pragmatism: The Case of Water

On "Universality and Truth" and "Pan-Relationalism," which are lectures 3-5 in Richard Rorty's Pragmatism As Anti-Authoritarianism.

How do we justify democracy? Rorty says we don't have to refer to transcendent Truth or Good to do this. He also denies the disinction between essential and accidental properties, and in fact between substance and property: Everything is just described in terms of its relations to other things, and which relations are important are not intrinsic to the thing, but a matter of a speaker's purposes.

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