Online research in philosophy

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thought, arose out of a conference in Shanghai in 2004, where participants were granted access to several of Rorty’s unpublished manuscripts.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 ..

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.

Bernstein's attempt to identify a convergence in the ethical and political implications of the writings of Gadamer and Rorty is found to be inadequate on two counts. First, by accepting the extreme antifoundationalism in Rorty, Bernstein tends to undermine the humanistic ideals he wishes to defend. And, second, the important differences in the conception of history in Gadamer and Rorty are concealed. It is argued that Gadamer's view of 'effective-history' offers a basis for enduring values which would not be possible given Rorty's conception of history.

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 ..

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.

Abstract Richard Rorty has devised a highly distinctive strategy for resisting what Michel Foucault once denounced as ?the blackmail of the Enlightenment,? according to which one is forced to take a stand either for or against it. Rorty distinguishes between the liberal political values of the Enlightenment, which he embraces ?unflinchingly,? and its universal philosophical claims about truth, reason and nature, which he completely renounces. Rorty argues that Enlightenment values are not sustained by ?Enlightenment? metaphysics, and can therefore survive the loss of faith in those metaphysics. But Rorty implausibly believes that the scope and limits of his ironism can be restricted to realist metaphysics; he fails to qualify his views on the relationship of theory to practice in several decisive ways; and his ?ethnocentric? defense of Enlightenment anti?ethnocentrism is plagued by paradoxes and other problems.

Section I: Anti-Rorty -- Knowledge -- Rorty's account of science -- Pragmatism, epistemology, and the inexorability of realism -- Agency -- The essential tension of philosophy and the mirror of nature or a tale of two Rortys -- How is freedom possible? -- Politics -- Self-defining versus social engineering poetry and politics : the problem-field of contingency, irony, and solidarity -- Rorty's apologetics -- Reference, fictionalism and radical negation -- Rorty's changing conceptions of philosophy -- Section II: For critical realism -- Critical realism in context -- Appendix 1: Social theory and moral philosophy -- Appendix 2: Marxist philosophy from Marx to Althusser.