Online research in philosophy

Richard Rorty's recent death has unleashed a strikingly mixed judgment of his philosophical legacy, ranging from claims to originality to charges of charlatanry. What is clear, however, is Rorty's role in articulating a distinctive American voice in the history of philosophy. He achieved this not only through his own wide-ranging contributions but also by repositioning the pragmatists, especially William James and John Dewey, in the philosophical mainstream. Rorty did for the United States what Hegel and Heidegger had done for Germany—to portray his nation as philosophy's final resting place. He was helped by postwar German philosophers like Jürgen Habermas who were happy to defer to their American conquerors. Rorty's philosophical method can be understood as a sublimation of America's world-historic self-understanding: a place suspicious of foreigners unless they are willing to blend into the "melting pot." In retrospect, the breadth and confidence of Rorty's writing will come to symbolize the moment when the United States, for better or worse, came to be the world's dominant philosophical power. Key Words: Rorty • pragmatism • logical positivism • analytic philosophy.

Arguably the most influential of all contemporary English-speaking philosophers Richard Rorty has transformed the way many inside and outside philosophy think about the discipline and the traditional ways of practising it. Drawing on a wide range of thinkers from Darwin and James to Quine, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida, Rorty has injected a bold anti-foundationalist vision into philosophical debate, into discussions in literary theory, communication studies, political theory and education, and, as public intellectual, into national debates about the responsibilities of America in the modern world. The essays in this volume offer a balanced exposition and critique of Rorty's views on knowledge, language, truth, science, morality and politics. The editorial introduction presents a valuable overview of Rorty's philosophical vision. Written by a distinguished roster of philosophers, this volume will have an unusual appeal outside philosophy to students in the social sciences, literary studies, cultural studies and political theory.

This is an extremely frustrating study. At a basic level it is a competent intellectual biography of Rorty. The writing in the biographical parts of the book is fluent and clear. The historical research in the papers of Rorty and his family is impressive. Although Gross is a sociologist, he has used to his advantage interviews with many people, including Rorty himself before he died. The reader interested in Rorty will find the biography a mine of information, and will in addition get a good sense of how Rorty thought and where his ideas came from. Yet this biographical material, which the author himself describes as straightforward narrative, occupies only 200 of the 360 pages of the text. The other 45% of the ..

This article addresses recent claims made by Richard Rorty about antirepresentationalist theories of meaning. Rorty asserts that a faithful rendering of the core antirepresentationalist assumptions precludes even revised pieces of representationalist semantics like "refers" or "true" and epistemological correlates like "answering to the facts." Rorty even asserts that such notions invite reactionary authoritarian elements that would impede the development of a democratic humanism. I reject this claim and assert that such notions (suitably constructed) pose no greater threat to democratic humanism than the alternatives and in fact are crucial to its maintenance and continuing success. These notions (suitably constructed) reflect a metatheoretical stance that I call "openness," which I believe lies at the heart of both democratic humanism and the pragmatism from which Rorty claims to take his inspiration.

Rorty, Pragmatism, and Confucianism, a collection of twelve essays on the work of Richard Rorty and its relation to Confucian thought, arose out of a conference in Shanghai in 2004, where participants were granted access to several of Rorty’s unpublished manuscripts. In his introduction, the editor Yong Huang states his desire to outline areas of shared interest in Rortian and Confucian thought. He notes, for example, the similarities between Rorty’s view that sentiment is “central to the moral consciousness” (p. 2) and the early Confucian tradition’s stress on the enhancement and appropriate directing of feeling; in Rorty’s words, a more moral world is best created by telling a “long, sad, sentimental ..

In recent years, a renascent form of pragmatism has developed which argues that a satisfactory pragmatic position must integrate into itself the concepts of truth and objectivity. This New Pragmatism, as Cheryl Misak calls it, is directed primarily against Rorty's neo-pragmatic dismissal of these concepts. For Rorty, the goal of our epistemic practices should not be to achieve an objective view, one that tries to represent things as they are 'in themselves,' but rather to attain a view of things that can gain as much inter-subjective agreement as possible. In Rorty's language, we need to replace the aim of objectivity with that of solidarity. While the New Pragmatists agree with Rorty's 'humanist' and ..

This volume collects a number of important and revealing interviews with Richard Rorty, spanning more than two decades of his public intellectual commentary, engagement, and criticism. In colloquial language, Rorty discusses the relevance and nonrelevance of philosophy to American political and public life. The collection also provides a candid set of insights into Rorty's political beliefs and his commitment to the labor and union traditions in this country. Finally, the interviews reveal Rorty to be a deeply engaged social thinker and observer.

Although Richard Rorty has done much to renew interest in the philosophy of John Dewey, he nonetheless rejects two of the most important components of Dewey's philosophy, that is, his metaphysics and epistemology. Following George Santayana, Rorty accuses Dewey of trying to serve Locke and Hegel, an impossibility as Rorty rightly sees it. Rorty (1982) says that Dewey should have been Hegelian all the way (p. 85). By reconstructing a bit of Hegel's early philosophy of work, and comparing it to Dewey's metaphysics and epistemology we can see that Dewey was indeed Hegelian all the way and that Rorty has constructed a false dilemma. We also gain some interesting insight into Dewey's philosophy by viewing it in terms of labor, tools and language.

To engage constructively with aspects of his writing sometimes given short shrift, in this paper I contend that Rorty can be fruitfully approached as a political theorist concerned with promulgating a new picture of the political world. Situating his recent thought as a political intervention aimed at revitalizing a moribund left allows us to take seriously his antirepresentationalist claims and evaluate his thought in terms of its political effects rather than accuracy of representation. By reading Rorty’s notion of ‘metaphorical redescription’ through Sheldon Wolin’s conception of political theory as a kind of ‘vision’, I highlight the value of imaginatively constructing new perspectives on our world as a prelude to changing it. Yet even as it authorizes the creative power of imaginative language, Rorty’s antirepresentationalism limits the critical potential of his project by severing his redescriptions from political reality. Where Rorty seeks to alter our vocabularies, the great political theorists sought to alter the world. Key Words: antirepresentationalism • Dewey • Habermas • imagination • Kuhn • redescription • Rorty • utopia • Wolin.

This article considers the validity and strength of Richard Rorty’s pragmatist theory of interpretation in the light of two ethical issues related to literature and interpretation. Rorty’s theory is rejected on two grounds. First, it is argued that his unrestrained account of interpretation is incompatible with the distinctive moral concerns that have been seen to restrict the scope and nature of valid approaches to artworks. The second part of the paper claims that there is no indispensable relationship between supporting Rorty’s pragmatist theory of interpretation and the important place that is attached to literature in the liberal society outlined by him. A reading of Donald Davidson’s texts on literary language and interpretation implies that an intentionalist theory of interpretation can accommodate those features that Rorty values in literature as well.