Rorty uses the private–public distinction as a conceptual tool to uphold the ideal of self–creation (Romanticism) simultaneously to the ideal of solidarity (Enlightenment liberalism). The difficulty of accommodating these two apparently opposing ideals has led Rorty to make inconsistent and contradictory claims about the private–public distinction. This article suggests a way of easing the tension that exists around Rorty’s formulations of the distinction. It does so by turning to the thematic of “self–enlargement” to be found in Rorty’s later writings. By (...) presenting self–enlargement as a common feature of self–creation and solidarity, this reading opens up a way of reconciling these two ideals and mitigating some of the difficulties in Rorty’s private–public distinction. (shrink)

Philosophy becomes speculative when it raises questions about the ultimate nature of being and thought. What does it mean to be? What does it mean to think? How are being and thought related? What does it mean to ask these questions? These questions have occupied a central place in philosophy throughout history, but have led a shadow existence in twentieth-century thought, which has cut the tie between reason and these fundamental questions, leaving the questions in the twilight, and reason instrumentalised. (...) A.N. Whitehead (1861-1947), one of the founders of analytic philosophy and co-author (with Bertrand Russell) of Principia Mathematica, is one of the few contemporary thinkers to have developed an explicit speculative philosophy. Unsurprisingly, his philosophy has played a marginal role in academic debates. In this study, the methodological foundation of Whitehead’s speculative thought is reconstructed. On the basis of a systematic and historical examination of the nature of the question of being, Whiteheads ontology of the event as the passage into novelty emerges in its full scope, allowing the reader to understand why and to what extent Whitehead has walked a different path than other contemporary thinkers. His philosophy contains a conception of reason that is not alien to newness and creativity while being more than procedural or pragmatic, and a mode of understanding existence that brings out the acuteness of freedom, value and legitimacy, as well as the unity of things, of thought and nature. In order to show what is really happening in this philosophy, the received interpretation of Whitehead’s ontology is radically dismantled. The central thought, that to be means to happen, is explained in a process of reiteration and gradual clarification, examining traditional philosophical problems in metaphysics and epistemology (on topics like: nature and matter, knowledge, categorical structure, freedom and necessity, truth and meaning, modality) from its perspective. What emerges is a philosophy in which the temporality of being, when taken seriously, changes the status of familiar problems and dualisms and offers possibilities for thought, which previously did not exist. Whitehead “hears” the classical questions of philosophy in a new way. Beyond the trenches of twentieth-century philosophy, Whitehead’s speculative thinking contains many elements that will be of value to those studying the foundations of thought today and looking for new directions. In a time when the dualism of nature and man is maintained cynically in our economies and dismantled, but only in a biologistic fashion and therefore only seemingly, as a cover-up, in science and philosophy, Whitehead’s new and creative way of hearing, and answering, old questions about ultimate concerns, when understood properly, is more up to date than ever before. (shrink)

Reading numerous readings of Jacques Derrida made by Richard Rorty during the period of the last twenty years or so, one can get the impression that Rorty admires French deconstructionist without reservations, presenting him as an example of a new way of practising philosophy - a way which is private, idiosyncratic and publicly uncommitted, which is original, but publicly useless, which, finally, leads to individual autonomy. A way leading to self-creation, getting out of the influence and power of one’s precursors (...) by way of a para-Oedipal struggle of a son with a father. Derrida in Rorty would be supposed to break with Heidegger in the way Heidegger tried to overcome Nietzsche, and Nietzsche struggled with Plato. And just like Nietzsche wished to be a new figure of a philosopher who "philosophizes with a hammer", but in Heidegger’s reading turned out to be merely "the last metaphysician" and "inverted Platonic", similarly Heidegger in the eyes of Derrida is not - despite the former’s assurance and unshakeable self-confidence - the first post-metaphysical thinker, but precisely the "last metaphysician", the last figure from the "ontotheological tradition" being destroyed or from the tradition of the "metaphysics of presence". Derrida overcomes Heidegger, Rorty reminds us, when he is trying to be the first post-metaphysical philosopher e.g. when he says that "there will be no unique name, even if it were the name of Being", about which, incidentally, he already spoke as a broader project in a volume of interviews entitled Positions, telling his interviewer that he is attempting to locate in Heidegger’s texts "the signs of belonging to metaphysics". But philosophical search for fame - and hence immortality - leads to an infinite number of recontextualizations and redescriptions, to new readings fighting with old ones, and the characters of philosophical stories being told are philosophers who are closer and closer to us. And just like Jacques Derrida was not willing to leave Heidegger in peace until he overcame him, putting himself in a new light, similarly Richard Rorty relentlessly bites in his own way Derrida’s philosophizing. (shrink)

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)

Following Quine, Davidson, and Dennett, I take mental states and linguistic meaning to be individuated with reference to interpretation. The regulative principle of ideal interpretation is to maximize rationality, and this accounts for the distinctiveness and autonomy of the vocabulary of agency. This rationality-maxim can accommodate empirical cognitive-psychological investigation into the nature and limitations of human mental processing. Interpretivism is explicitly anti-reductionist, but in the context of Rorty's neo-pragmatism provides a naturalized view of agents. The interpretivist strategy affords a less (...) despondent view of constructive philosophical activity than Rorty's own. (shrink)

Is Richard Rorty a philosophical quietist? We consider different stances Rorty has assumed toward philosophy, arguing that on the face of it there is no conflict between them. However, Rorty's extensive writing on the topic of truth suggests a tension between Rorty's own recommendation of “benign neglect” of metaphysics and his actual philosophical practice. The topic of truth actually serves Rorty's philosophical purposes well, allowing him to change the direction of conversation from a concern with the nature of concepts to (...) a direct concern with human practice. The switch Rorty envisions is captured in the emblematic figure of the ironist, and we consider the ironist variety of quietism accordingly. For Rorty, we conclude, quietism is a contingent, conditional, strategic stance. Rorty's aim is to change the direction of a strand of philosophical conversation, not to free us from philosophical illusion or to bring philosophy to an end. (shrink)

Argues that out of the confrontation between Rorty and Habermas may be found a new way to answer the question of what kind of politics do we need today.

As a professional philosopher that has participated in public philosophy forums for several years, I attempt to determine the character and value of public philosophy. To do this I adopt the perspective of Deweyan pragmatism, which I argue provides an effective theoretical framework for this purpose. Thinking particularly about relatively small, person-to-person philosophical forums, I argue that they share the main assumptions of the pragmatic method: a prevailing contingency with regard to starting points and conclusions, a willingness to entertain evidence (...) from various sources and disciplines, and a commitment to continuing conversation on a variety of issues for the sake of continued growth and expansion of understanding. I believe it is unlikely that these sorts of conversations will deliver any immediate or obvious results in terms of improved democratic processes at the level of an entire community or nation because of the small scale and relatively narrow appeal. However, as a resource for intellectual growth, public philosophical forums provide an invaluable resource for those individuals willing to participate, professional philosophers included. (shrink)

Rorty's "philosophical life" as a public intellectual was aimed at dispelling the belief that there is a transcendent source of information about what is true and real that humans are obliged to bow down to. From a historical standpoint, his thought can be seen as the culmination of a development of ideas leading to the view that humans determine what counts as real and right. This paper traces this view and also questions whether, in its most robust form, it is (...) tenable. (shrink)

Since representations of social life are rarely separate in their effects from the worlds they aspire to depict, this article argues that as producers of such representations, sociologists are automatically responsible for considering the performative consequences of their work. In particular, it suggests that sociologists have an ongoing normative responsibility to draw out emergent strands of social hope from their empirical analyses. Through a comparison of Rorty, Levitas, and Unger’s different theorizations of social hope, the article argues for a pragmatic (...) model of social hope that is rooted in empirical conceptions of the past and present, but, alive to the transcendent possibilities of the emerging future, refuses to be entirely determined by these conceptions. (shrink)

This article attempts to respond to Simon Critchley's claim in a recent debate with Richard Rorty, that the latter, by not fully recognizing its indebtedness to Levinas, misunderstands the political import of the work of Jacques Derrida. I maintain, pace Critchley, that trying to push the Derrida–Levinas connection too far will not only further compound Rorty's view of Derrida as a thinker devoid of political efficacy, but that it will moreover serve to obscure the significant differences which exist between Levinas (...) and Derrida – differences which cannot be overlooked in any serious discussion of the two thinkers in question. In the second half, I try to convince Critchley that what separates Derrida from Levinas is precisely what hooks him up with Rorty at a political level. Both, I argue, are committed to a civic religion of social hope. In so doing, I try to convince Rorty that his caricature of Derrida as a private writer without political consequence, ought now to be seriously reconsidered. (shrink)

From the perspective of subsequent books and texts by Richard Rorty it can be clearly seen that to have a look at his anti-Platonism and anti-essentialism, it is not enough to read either only Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, or only Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Consequences of Pragmatism and both volumes of Philosophical Papers. For me it turns out that the impression given by various readings of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in Reading Rorty - the first serious (...) collected volume devoted to the American pragmatist - is totally misleading, or at least extremely one-sided. The book, it is claimed there, is merely criticism of traditional epistemology carried out on the grounds of American analytic philosophy not too interesting to a wider public. And yet it can only be seen retrospectively that the book provides most interesting philosophical "foundations" to later, often more metaphilosophical, literary and cultural ideas. To put it in a nutshell: one can find there the idea of solidarity and self-creation, there is the fundamental question about the place of philosophy in culture rather than merely that about the place of epistemology in philosophy; as well as there is a question about the future of the philosopher in culture, about mechanisms of production and collapse of his self-image, there is also the germ of the project of the "post-Kantian culture", "philosophy without mirrors" and criticism of merely cognitive - and derived from Plato - paradigm of human activity. (shrink)

Richard Rorty’s approach to fiction results from its consistently - to use here his own opposition - "solidarity-related" account; the "other side", literary self-creation, remains programmatically and intentionally undiscussed with much seriousness. One can just get the impression that literature, and the novel in particular, has been burdened with heaviness of responsibility... Does in Rorty’s reflections the novel appear as a source of multifarious metaphors, of the whole worlds born out of the writer’s imagination? Is there in it another dimension (...) of the reality in which mundane obligations no longer bind the human being and where one can give rein to usually hidden desires and passions? The answer is in the negative. The world of fiction of which Richard Rorty writes is a pragmaticized one - and fiction itself is supposed first to build, and then to defend a democratic, liberal order as one of utopias feeding that order. On the other extreme, let us hasten to add, there is philosophy with its right to choose self-creation. The situation as outlined by Rorty might be described in the following manner: the writer has to be responsible, the philosopher may indulge in certain irresponsibility - or rather certain irrelevance with respect to social problems. It is as if "poets" are returned back to polis after more than twenty five centuries and made to think about the state and laws, relieving at the same time at least some philosophers from the respectful Platonic duty of "enlightening the darkness" of the world. In today’s intellectual climate it is probably easier to accept a new role for philosophers than to accept putting part of the burden of responsibility for the success of a contingent, like it or not, experiment of liberal democracies on the writer’s shoulders. Rorty thus seems to me to be making both one step forward and two steps backwards, as his pragmatism does not allow for leaving society at the mercy of spiritless technocrats, social engineers of the future, when poets and philosophers no longrr have much to say. (The opposite direction is taken by Jacques Derrida. He accords this "strange institution called literature", as he writes, the right of tout dire, of saying everything, the power of breaking away from existing rules and conventions, of questioning and dislocating them. (shrink)

Speech given by Jürgen Habermas in the occasion of Rorty's Memorial. Stanford University, November 2, 2007.