Abstract

Somewhat unexpectedly, given the weighty baggage of anything-goes relativism that long trailed him, a central concern in work on Richard Rorty since his passing in 2007 has been his normativity.1 Rosa Calcaterra's Contingency and Normativity is the most ambitious and most illuminating effort to date in this vein. The book helps us better understand Rorty's pragmatism by using his challenges to us as the basis for an inquiry into epistemic and moral normativity in the wake of the critique of foundationalism and rise of "contingentism," which Calcaterra understands as "a conceptual net tied to the criteria of indeterminacy, ambiguity, uncertainty and randomness". Ultimately, Calcaterra's contribution is the...