Like _Beyond All Appearances_,_ _which it supplements, Paul Weiss’s new book is a fundamental work which faces all the hard issues which are not only at the heart of philosophy but at the core of our entire culture. Readers of Mr. Weiss’s phenomenology of religion will need no introduction to this new work which expands and clari­fies many of the issues raised in _Beyond All Appearances. _However, no knowl­edge of Paul Weiss’s previous books is required to understand and appreciate this (...) brilliant new exposition. Weiss’s plain style makes his ideas accessible to all intelligent readers, whether or not they have been trained as professional philosophers. Here in _First Considerations _Mr. Weiss addresses himself to such topics as actuality, internalization, evidence, names, substance, being, natures and possibilities, existence, unity and the cosmos—issues which have engrossed him as a moral philosopher and meta­physician throughout his distinguished career. In his progress through the ideas and issues expounded in this new book Mr. Weiss is concerned with the human condition distinctive of this species of ours. Rigorously applied, his moral philosophy is as complete and thorough as that of any of the major thinkers, and provides as complete a guide as, for example, that of Buddhism. A highly original work, no doubt well in advance of current trends in philosophy, _First Considerations _will provoke further thought and discussion and will be regarded as a seminal work in modern philosophical approaches. (shrink)

This landmark collection of essays by six renowned philosophers explores the implications of the contentious realism/antirealism debate for epistemology. The essays examine issues such as whether epistemology needs to be realist, the bearing of a realist conception of truth on epistemology, and realism and antirealism in terms of a pragmatist conception of epistemic justification. Richard Rorty's essay provides a critical commentary on the other five.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

In this essay Rorty argues that care or concern alone is inadequate for dealing with problems of Third World poverty; neither is there likely to be a convenient technological fix. There is no evading the hard decisions that global poverty will require of the rich nations, and there is no way past E. M. Forster’s dictum, in Howard’s End, that “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable and only to be approached by the statistician or (...) the poet.” Most of Rorty’s essay focuses on works of Forster demonstrating that, in Rorty’s words, “tenderness only appears... when there is enough money to produce a little leisure, a little time in which to love.... The cash value of the Christian ideal of universal brotherhood has, for the last two centuries, been the conviction that once science and technology have produced enough wealth—and enlightened, unselfish political initiatives have redistributed it—there will be no one left who is incapable of tenderness. All human beings will live in the light; all of them will be possible characters in novels.”. (shrink)

Freud, kendini Kopernik ve Darwin’in de dahil olduğu merkezsizleştirici düşünce hareketi içinde görmekteydi. Ünlü bir pasajında, psikanalizin, “egoya kendi evinin bile efendisi olmadığını, ancak aklında, bilinçten uzak bir biçimde olup bitenlerin kıt bilgisi ile yetinmesi gerektiğini kanıtlamaya çabaladığını” söyler. Kendimizin önemli olduğu hissi veya özdenetim duygumuz, gerçekten kendimize karşı şeffaf olduğumuz inancına mı dayanmaktadır? Bilinç dışının keşfi neden arzularımızın keşfine değersizlik eklemek zorundadır?Freud thought of himself as part of the same “decentering” movement of thought to which Copernicus and Darwin belonged. (...) In a famous passage, he says that psychoanalysis “seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.” Does our sense of our importance, or our capacity for self-control, really depend on the belief that we are transparent to ourselves? Why should the discovery of the unconscious add humiliation to the discovery of the passions? (shrink)

Bazen bana politik spektrumun iki ucundaki eleştirmenler tarafından görüşlerimin saçmalığa varacak şekilde tuhaf olduğu söyleniyor. İnsanları etkilemek için her şeyi söyleyebileceğimi, herkesle çelişerek kendimi eğlendirdiğimi düşünüyorlar. Bu beni rahatsız ediyor. Bu nedenle takip eden sayfalarda şu anki pozisyonuma nasıl geldiğim, felsefeye nasıl girdiğim ve daha sonra nasıl kendimi başlangıçta aklımda olan amaç için felsefeyi kullanamaz halde bulduğumla ilgili bir şeyler söylemeye çalıştım. Belki böyle bir otobiyografi, politika ve felsefe arasındaki ilişkiye dair görüşlerim tuhaf olsa da, saçma gerekçelerle bu görüşleri benimsemediğimi (...) açıklığa kavuşturacaktır. (shrink)

En el siguiente artículo intentaremos mostrar cómo la definición de Contingencia individual, dentro del discurso de Richard Rorty, genera ciertos problemas. Este autor menciona que debemos deslastrarnos de las siguientes dicotomías conceptuales: objetivo-subjetivo, moralidad-prudencia, apariencia-realidad, esencia-accidente, absoluto-relativo, entre otras. A todo esto Rorty propone un nuevo concepto: Contingencia, el cual sería una definición útil que lograría justificar la desaparición de las concepciones como algo que petrifica el conocimiento y lo hace inútil para entender la realidad, es decir, (...) el conocimiento no sería útil en el momento en que intenta “representar” la realidad porque la vacía. Luego de un recorrido por algunos autores representativos en lo concerniente a la conceptualización de “esencia”, nuestra conclusión es que la definición de Contingencia rortyana es una nueva petrificación de la realidad, es decir, Contingencia también termina “representado” lo que es “real”. Is Contingency an essence? A review of the theory of Contingency in Richard RortyIn the following article, it is shown how the definition of individual Contingency, within the discourse of Richard Rorty, produces certain problems. This author mentions we should put an end of the following conceptual dichotomies: objective-subjective, morality-prudence, appearance-reality, essence-accident, and absolute-relative, among others. To all this Rorty proposes a new concept: Contingency, which could be a useful definition which would achieve the justification of the loss of conceptions as something that petrifies knowledge, and renders it useless for understand reality, i.e., knowledge is not useful in the moment you try to "represent" reality because simply empties it. After a tour of some representative authors with regard to the conceptualization of "essence", our conclusion is that the definition of Rorty's Contingency is a new petrifaction of reality, i.e., Contingency also ends "representing" what is "real.". (shrink)

A critique of Rorty's own provocative political philosophy, as well as an in-depth look at both the issues concerning the relationship between the public and the private, and arguments on the role of reason in liberal political discourse generally.

The passing of Richard Rorty is an event to mark in the annals of American philosophy - the passing of a spirit-guide to some, and of a dark shadow to others, but certainly that of an original, iconoclastic thinker who brought classical American pragmatism back into the contemporary philosophical conversation, and who got philosophers telling stories of achieving a long-loved dream of democracy. I outline a twelve-point agenda for productive future philosophical wrangles with Rorty, highlighting his metaphysical (...) nominalism, antireligious ironism, and "Western bourgeois liberal democracy.". (shrink)

Virtue liberalism holds that the success of liberal politics and society depends on the citizenry possessing a set of liberal virtues, including traits like open-mindedness, toleration, and individual autonomy. Virtue liberalism is thus an ethically demanding conception of liberalism that is at odds with conceptions, like Rawlsian political liberalism andmodus vivendiliberalism, that attempt to minimize liberalism’s ethical impact in order to accommodate a greater range of ethical pluralism. Although he claims to be a Rawlsian political liberal, Richard Rorty’s (...) pragmatic liberalism is best understood as a version of virtue liberalism that, in particular, recommends a controversial civic virtue of irony for good liberal citizenship. Indeed, Rorty ultimately joins Dewey in conceiving of liberal democracy as a “way of life,” rather than merely a set of political relations that have a minimal effect on our characters or on the shape of our private commitments and projects. (shrink)

One way in which the characteristic gestures of philosophy and criticism differ from each other lies in their involvements with disillusionment, with the undoing of our naivete, especially regarding what we take ourselves to know about the meaning of what we say. Philosophy will often find less than we thought was there, perhaps nothing at all, in what we say about the “external” world, or in our judgments of value, or in our ordinary psychological talk. The work of criticism, on (...) the other hand, frequently disillusions by finding disturbingly more in what is said than we precritically thought was there. In our relation to the meaningfulness of what we say, there is a disillusionment of plentitude as well as of emptiness. And no doubt what is “less” for one discipline may be “more” of what someone else is looking for.In recent years, metaphor has attracted more than its share of both philosophical and critical attention, including philosophical denials of the obvious, as well as critical challenges to the obviousness of the ways we talk about metaphor. In this paper I discuss a problem of each sort and suggest a complex of relations between them. The particular denial of the obvious that I’m interested in is the claim recently made by Donald Davidson that “a metaphor doesn’t say anything beyond its literal meaning ,” nor is it even correct to speak of metaphor as a form of communication.1 There’s disillusionment with a vengeance; and even if not strictly believable, it is still not without its therapeutic value, as we shall see. 1. Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks , p. 30; hereafter abbreviated “WMM.” Davidson’s view has found supporters among both philosophers and literary theorists. It is, for example, important to the early argument of Richard Rorty’s recent book. See his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity , p. 18. Richard Moran is an assistant professor of philosophy at Princeton University. He is currently working on a book on subjectivity and contemporary concepts of personhood. (shrink)

Eschewing conventional candidates, like Plato's Republic or Machiavelli's Prince, Richard Rorty praises Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as "the best introduction to political philosophy," because it shows us "what sort of human future would be produced by a naturalism untempered by historicist Romanticism, and by a politics aimed merely at alleviating mammalian pain."1 Huxley's celebrated dystopia is thus a poignant warning to our modern utilitarian political projects. Yet Rorty also suggests that utopian literature can play a positive (...) and inspirational role for liberal politics, and even dubs his own political ideal, "liberal utopia." Rorty's liberal utopia is not an impossible society bereft of political .. (shrink)

Richard Rorty sacrifices high art on the altar of freedom, tolerance, and equality, although novelists like Dickens awaken his hope for the greatest possible improvement in our cultural well-being. Essentialist artists and philosophers of misery strike him as loathing ordinary humans and their foibles. His populist aesthetics owes to his belief in pragmatism as redemptive “knowledge about how things really are.” Still, he rejects some progressive works as artistic failures while embracing other art forms that ignore culture altogether. (...) Rorty’s advocacy of art for the common good situates him in an ethical aesthetic tradition imbued with many of the ironies presented by Plato, although in the final analysis his progressive neo-pragmatism safeguards all forms of art. (shrink)

La centralitÀ della categoria temporale del futuro e la preminenza della "conversazione umana" sono gli aspetti basilari della versione rortiana del pensiero democratico americano e della filosofia pragmatista. Nel rinnovare gli assunti di base del migliorismo statunitense, Rorty chiama in causa le consonanze tra autori come John Dewey e William James e le istanze anti-fondazionaliste provenienti dall'Europa, in vista di un ripensamento radicale della pratica filosofica. Essa va intesa non piů alla stregua di una ricerca dei fondamenti ultimi della (...) realtÀ ma piuttosto come un impegno edificante basato sul criterio della Social Hope. Gli autori del pragmaatismo sono frequentati con disinvoltura da Rorty, che condivide con James e particolarmente con Dewey la fiducia nella capacitÀ costruttiva dell'intelligenza umana e nella cooperazione sperimentale degli individui, accantonando invece Peirce e la sua importante nozione di "infinite hope". (shrink)

Richard Rorty is rightly considered one of the most interesting authors in the field of intellectual pursuits. This vague formulation also indicates that Rorty’s thinking and writing cannot simply be classified as philosophy, although by and large they seem to be part and parcel of the pragmatist tradition. For Rorty clearly confronts a number of traditional problems of philosophy, even when he suggest getting rid of the problem by redescribing the issue or changing the perspective. There (...) is... (shrink)

Richard J. Bernstein, who has played a leading role in "the pragmatist turn" in contemporary philosophy, replies to twelve younger critics in a lively conversation about pragmatism's past, present, and future as a guiding paradigm for philosophy and related fields.

Virtue liberalism requires democratic citizens to possess certain ethical character traits, like open-mindedness, toleration, and autonomy. This puts it at odds with theories, like Rawlsian political liberalism, that seek to minimize liberalism’s ethical demands to accommodate a greater range of ethical pluralism. Although Rorty endorses Rawls’s theory, his pragmatic liberalism is best understood as a version of virtue liberalism that, in particular, recommends a controversial civic virtue of irony for good citizenship. Indeed, in contrast to Rawls, Rorty joins (...) Dewey in conceiving of liberal democracy as a “way of life” that deeply affects our characters and our private commitments and projects. (shrink)

This essay originated as a reply to Richard Rorty's ”Habermas, Derrida, and the Functions of Philosophy“. In it, I contest Rorty's deployment of the categories of private selfcreation and the collective political enterprise of increasing freedom, first developed in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, to demonstrate that the philosophical projects of Habermas and Derrida are complementary rather than antagonistic. The focus of my critique is two-fold: firstly, I contend that so-called critiques of metaphysics are always simutaneously engaging with (...) some form of social domination or disintegration (e.g. nihilism or societal rationalization); secondly, I argue that the fault-line in Rorty's thought that structures his categories is his, Davidson inspired, naturalized philosophy of language. This philosophy of language falls afoul of Heidegger's analysis of the present-to-hand. (shrink)

In this brief introduction to part 2 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?” the journal’s editor asks why Rorty was dependent on Thomas Kuhn, rather than Paul Feyerabend or the then-rising stars of “science studies” (such as Bruno Latour), for science-centered arguments to support his own philosophical neopragmatism. The editor cites a letter from Rorty sent to him in the early 1990s, suggesting that the differences between Feyerabend and himself were temperamental more (...) than philosophical. Rorty enjoyed referring to himself and others like him as “we atheists,” by which he seems to have meant “those of us repelled by extravagant or overheated claims and absolutes.” His tendency was thus to pull back in what might seem to be bored alarm from treatments of science as superior, perilous, or in any essential way different from other forms of intellectual discourse. Rorty’s understanding of these approaches to science as temperamentally religious appears lately to have been vindicated by the emergence of the primeval goddess “Gaia” in the rhetoric of science studies. (shrink)

“There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.” Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism I. Introducción: ¿es Richard Rorty el hombre que mató a la verdad? En el año 2003, apenas cuatro años antes (...) de la muerte de Richard Rorty, la cadena BBC emit... (shrink)

Of articles which are submitted for publication in Philosophy, a surprisingly large proportion are about the views of Richard Rorty. Some, indeed, we have published. They, along with pretty well all the articles we receive on Professor Rorty, are highly critical. On the perverse assumption that there must be something to be said for anyone who attracts widespread hostility, it is only right to see what can be said in favour of Rorty's latest collection of papers, (...) entitled, Truth and Progress,. (shrink)

Of articles which are submitted for publication in Philosophy, a surprisingly large proportion are about the views of Richard Rorty. Some, indeed, we have published. They, along with pretty well all the articles we receive on Professor Rorty, are highly critical. On the perverse assumption that there must be something to be said for anyone who attracts widespread hostility, it is only right to see what can be said in favour of Rorty's latest collection of papers, (...) entitled, Truth and Progress,. (shrink)

Of articles which are submitted for publication in Philosophy, a surprisingly large proportion are about the views of Richard Rorty. Some, indeed, we have published. They, along with pretty well all the articles we receive on Professor Rorty, are highly critical. On the perverse assumption that there must be something to be said for anyone who attracts widespread hostility, it is only right to see what can be said in favour of Rorty's latest collection of papers, (...) entitled, Truth and Progress,. (shrink)

Of articles which are submitted for publication in Philosophy, a surprisingly large proportion are about the views of Richard Rorty. Some, indeed, we have published. They, along with pretty well all the articles we receive on Professor Rorty, are highly critical. On the perverse assumption that there must be something to be said for anyone who attracts widespread hostility, it is only right to see what can be said in favour of Rorty's latest collection of papers, (...) entitled, Truth and Progress,. (shrink)

Of articles which are submitted for publication in Philosophy, a surprisingly large proportion are about the views of Richard Rorty. Some, indeed, we have published. They, along with pretty well all the articles we receive on Professor Rorty, are highly critical. On the perverse assumption that there must be something to be said for anyone who attracts widespread hostility, it is only right to see what can be said in favour of Rorty's latest collection of papers, (...) entitled, Truth and Progress,. (shrink)

Of articles which are submitted for publication in Philosophy, a surprisingly large proportion are about the views of Richard Rorty. Some, indeed, we have published. They, along with pretty well all the articles we receive on Professor Rorty, are highly critical. On the perverse assumption that there must be something to be said for anyone who attracts widespread hostility, it is only right to see what can be said in favour of Rorty's latest collection of papers, (...) entitled, Truth and Progress,. (shrink)

Beitrage von Ludwig Nagl, Richard Heinrich, Arthur C. Danto, Barry Stroud, Peter F. Strawson, Herbert Hrachovec, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Hubert L. Dreyfus und Stuar E. Dreyfus, Kurt R. Fischer und Franz M. Wimmer.