About this item
Prescient essays about the state of our politics from the philosopher who predicted that a populist demagogue would become president of the United StatesRichard Rorty, one of the most influential intellectuals of recent decades, is perhaps best known today as the philosopher who, almost two decades before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, warned of the rise of a Trumpian strongman in America. What Can We Hope For? gathers nineteen of Rorty's essays on American and global politics, including four previously unpublished and many lesser-known and hard-to-find pieces.In these provocative and compelling essays, Rorty confronts the critical challenges democracies face at home and abroad, including populism, growing economic inequality, and overpopulation and environmental devastation.
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.
