Bérubé's talk will examine one of Richard Rorty’s key rhetorical strategies– the device John Holbo has called “the rhetoric of anticipatory retrospective.”  According to Holbo, Rorty characteristically imagines a post-Philosophical world as “a time when the sorts of people he is disagreeing with will, ex hypothesi, have had their paradigm shifted, so that it will simply ‘no longer occur to them’ to think the thoughts Rorty thinks are not useful to think.”  He will then pair Holbo’s account with that of Amanda Anderson, whose analysis of the pragmatist ethos appears in her most recent book, The Way We Argue Now, in order to suggest that Rorty’s anticipatory retrospective attempts to model the demeanor of a post-Philosophical society in which we have finally learned to stop worrying and love the linguistic turn.