About this item
"Provocative and engaging ... The array of urgent questions and crises facing our democracy makes one miss Richard Rorty's voice: insistent, relentlessly questioning, and dedicated to the proposition that we can't afford to let our democracy fail." -- Chris Lehmann, New Republic. "Richard Rorty was the most iconoclastic and dramatic philosopher of the last half-century. In this final book, his unique literary style, singular intellectual zest, and demythologizing defiance of official philosophy are on full display." -- Cornel West. "Coherent, often brilliant, and it presents a clear and timely case for political pragmatism." -- Jonathan Rée, Prospect. "Today, there are few philosophers left whose thoughts are inspired by a unifying vision; there are even fewer who can articulate such a view in terms of such a ravishing flow of provocative, but sharp and differentiated, arguments.
About the Author
Richard Rorty (1931-2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative - a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive - an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The centerpiece of Rorty's critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN) . In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP) , Rorty's principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. Characterizations and illustrations of a post-epistemological intellectual culture, present in both PMN (part III) and CP (xxxvii-xliv) , are more richly developed in later works, such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, hereafter CIS) , in the popular essays and articles collected in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999) , and in the four volumes of philosophical papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991, hereafter ORT) ; Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991, hereafter EHO) ; Truth and Progress (1998, hereafter TP) ; and Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007, hereafter PCP) . In these writings, ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time.
