Theorists, who broadly subscribe to Claude Lefort’s characterization of democracy as the dissolution of the markers of certainty, disagree over the proper enactment of democracy. In this article, I consider the possibility of narrowing the gap by attending to the ignorance advocated by each of the two approaches – the disruptive radical route Jacques Rancière describes and the reformist approach of Richard Rorty. I highlight the attributes and shortcomings of the positive link between practices of ignorance and democracy in the (...) work of the two theorists, and explore how the practices they describe can complement each other in the enactment of democracy. (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)

Critically engages the work of American philosopher Richard J. Bernstein.

This essay offers an account of Rorty's version of pragmatism after the so-called linguistic turn, including his attack on epistemology and metaphysics, his metaphilosophy, his theory of morality, and his political philosophy. Woven into this account of Rorty are some of the most important criticisms made of Rorty, and considerations about how Rorty has responded or could have responded.

Richard Rorty’s liberal utopia offers an interesting model for those who wish to explore the emancipatory potential of a post-foundational account of politics, specifically liberalism. What Rorty proposes is a form of liberalism that is divorced from its Kantian metaphysical foundations. This paper will focus on the gulf that appears between Rorty’s liberal utopia in theory, the political form that it must ultimately manifest itself in, and the consequences this has for debates on pluralism, diversity, and identity, within liberal political (...) thought. -/- The strength of Rorty’s liberal utopia, in his analysis, lies in the fact that with the rejection of philosophy and metaphysics, we can simply get on with the job of reducing cruelty through experimental tinkering with the liberal political system. Instead of trying to develop intellectually sophisticated justifications for why we act, we should just act. Political action, for Rorty, does not require a philosophical or metaphysical justification. However, upon closer critical examination, we can see that whatever potential Rorty’s liberal utopia may have in theory, this is negated by the fact that at the level of political praxis, his re-description of liberalism leaves us with a conception of liberalism that is essentially unchanged. Whilst Rorty has re-situated liberalism from the philosophical to the political, his solution fails to address any internal problems. (shrink)

This article addresses the question whether the model of social criticism as 'connected' or 'loyal' which is advanced by Richard Rorty and Michael Walzer offers an adequate picture of social criticism. Two claims are made. First, it is suggested that loyalty is an internally conflicted concept, with three components: a recognition of situatedness in a particular relationship; an affirmation of that relationship by the loyal agent; a set of values or local principles. Where the third component is prominent, loyalty is (...) more reflective and distanced; where the second component predominates, loyalty slips into unreflective commitment. Second, it is argued that Rorty and Walzer conflate the social critic's recognition of his or her situatedness in contexts of power with the affirmation of that situatedness. It is concluded that the model of loyal social criticism is mislead mg, and that the practice of the critic must be tempered by the operation of the sense of injustice. Key Words: connection • loyalty • Rorty • social criticism • Walzer. (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)

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)

There are several points of interest, several catchwords that evoke the whole complicated heart of the matter: Martin Heidegger in 1933 and later, Paul de Man in the years of 1940-42 and later, Robert Faurisson and the whole group of histo- rians-"revisionists" of the Holocaust in France and in the USA in two recent decades. I would say the following: the material for the discussions that are of interest to me today are the most traumatic events of the twentieth century (...) and the behaviour of the philosopher, or in broader terms, the intellectual, associated with them. We can add to them Sartre’s conception of the "committed literature", Georges Bataille’s fascinations with the war, Maurice Blanchot’s fascist texts from the pre-war "Combat" journal, "maoist" involvements of the French intellectuals in the hot sixties, Michel Foucault’s enthusiasm with respect to the Iranian "spiritual revolution", Noam Chomsky’s basically positive attitude to the "revisionists" who negate gassing in Auschwitz etc etc. If we add that all, we can see a certain complex of questions and issues the penetration of which may be one of today’s "tasks of thinking". (shrink)

Issues relating to diversity and pluralism continue to permeate both social and political discourse. Of particular contemporary importance and relevance are those issues raised when the demands associated with forms of pluralism clash with those of the liberal state. These forms of pluralism can be divided into two subcategories: thin and thick pluralism. Thin pluralism refers to forms of pluralism that can be accommodated by the existing liberal framework, whereas thick pluralism challenges this liberal framework. -/- This thesis is an (...) examination of four forms of political association that may be able to accommodate and support the demands of pluralism. These four models are Rawls’ political liberalism, Crowder’s value pluralism, Rorty’s post-foundational liberalism, and Mouffe’s radical democratic project. What unites these four forms of political association is their capacity to avoid the exclusionary effects of a form of liberalism that I, following Gaus, refer to as Enlightenment liberalism. As the name suggests, this conception of liberalism is anchored in the Enlightenment, and in particular with what may be considered as the Enlightenment view of reason. As such, therefore, Enlightenment liberalism is both universal and perfectionist. In this context, I argue that Enlightenment liberalism is a species of what Berlin refers to as ‘moral monism’. -/- These four forms of political association are ordered in such a way as to chart an intellectual trajectory. Rawls and Crowder are both situated firmly within the liberal tradition, whereas Rorty and Mouffe move beyond this, and embrace a form of post-foundational politics. It is in this trajectory that the second theme of this thesis emerges. This is centred on a paradox: in order to avoid the exclusionary effect of Enlightenment liberalism and embrace a form of political association that meets the demands of pluralism and diversity, the models examined still promote autonomy as the dominant virtue. (shrink)

For pragmatists, the inability to stand outside of the contingencies of human practice does not impede social criticism. However, several pragmatists have argued that Richard Rorty’s position unnecessarily and undesirably circumscribes the scope of social criticism, allowing for nothing more than an appeal to current practices, with no way to challenge or revise them. This article argues against this understanding, showing that on Rorty’s account, social criticism is an interpretive activity in which critics draw on elements within current practices, focusing (...) attention on the ways in which a society’s practices fail to live up to its self-image. In so doing, Rorty’s position is shown to allow for everything that his fellow pragmatists think important, but take him to be denying. (shrink)

My concern in this thesis is with the transcendental question concerning the condition of possibility for social science. I argue that for social scientific knowledge to obtain one must: have a conception of knowledge formation as theoretically mediated and fallible; and, social scientific knowledge claims must be about an object of study which conceptualises social structure as an enablement as well as an external constraint upon agency. This means: arguing for an anti-foundational epistemology, which avoids becoming truth-relativism, by being complemented (...) with a metaphysical realist ontology ; and, using a social realist meta-theory of emergent properties to explain how methodology has a conceptually mediated and fallible access to social reality. Developing a critical examination of the presuppositions of social scientific knowledge also means, afortiori, using realism as an underlabourer. The negative underlabouring role is to proscribe theories based on some form of epistemic immediacy, or being-knowing identity. It therefore means rejecting positivist, empiricist and essentialist versions of social science. The form of essentialism dealt with is called the sociological logic of immediacy, and this pertains to definitive ontologies of social structures or human being. Whereas the use of positivist and empiricist epistemology as a positive underlabourer produces a methodology that conflates the real into the 'actual', the use of an essentialist ontology makes methodology either redundant, or an exercise in arbitrary verificationism. Against this, realist anti-foundationalism can act as apositive underlabourer for the social sciences if it is complemented by a social realist ontology of emergent properties, to act as a metatheory which guides methodology. In developing this argument my chief concern is to show that realism is a more adequate position than post-Wittgensteinian positions which focus on 'practices' and how people 'go on' in 'forms of life'. 'Adequacy' in this sense pertains to epistemological discussions about the status of knowledge, together with ramifications of post-Wittgensteinianism for knowledge of the socio-political realm. This means providing a critique of Rorty and Giddens, after dealing with the issue of empiricism. Although Rorty's critique of 'postmodernism' as essentialist is accepted. Whereas realism can explain how we have a conceptually mediated and fallible knowledge of reality, including social reality, post-Wittgensteinian positions fall into truth-relativism and essentialist conceptions of human being and social structures. (shrink)

In this article I argue that Rorty has three separatearguments for liberalism. The pragmatic-ethnocentric argument for liberalism,as a system which works for `us liberals'', is rejectedfor entailing relativism. The social contract argument results in an extreme formof individualism. This renders politics redundantbecause there is no need for the (liberal) state toprotect poetic individuals, who are capable ofdefending themselves. Even if the less able areharmed, the state could not prevent this, givenRorty''s arguments about discursive enrichment withina language game. Finally, the positivistic-conservative (...) argument legitimisesliberal politics by fiat, and makes normativediscussion about the status quo illegitimate. Herethe argument is that politics is a matter of reactivetechnical piecemeal problem-solving, to restore theharmony of the status quo. As politics deals with`facts'', normative `problematisations'' of thefunctional status quo are illegitimate (in the public/political sphere). So, either anything goes, andpolitics is redundant, or discussion of politics isdepoliticised and confined to the private sphere.Consequently, Rorty has no way to explore issues ofpower, or normative contestation. Therefore he isunable to address issues of social justice withinliberal democracies, such as feminist arguments aboutan ascribed gender status limiting equalityof opportunity. (shrink)

Tragedy and Citizenship provides a wide-ranging exploration of attitudes toward tragedy and their implications for politics. Derek W. M. Barker reads the history of political thought as a contest between the tragic view of politics that accepts conflict and uncertainty, and an optimistic perspective that sees conflict as self-dissolving. Drawing on Aristotle's political thought, alongside a novel reading of the Antigone that centers on Haemon, its most neglected character, Barker provides contemporary democratic theory with a theory of tragedy. He sees (...) Hegel's philosophy of reconciliation as a critical turning point that results in the elimination of citizenship. By linking Hegel's failure to address the tragic dimensions of politics to Richard Rorty, John Rawls, and Judith Butler, Barkeroffers a major reassessment of contemporary political theory and a fresh perspective on the most urgent challenges facing democratic politics. Derek W. M. Barker is a program officer at the Kettering Foundation. (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous proposons une analyse critique du nouveau consensus monétaire (NMC) d’un point de vue méthodologique, afin d’évaluer sa pertinence. Bien que les mantras du consensus ne soient pas contestables en tant que tels, nous soutenons l’idée que les fondements méthodologiques du NMC expliquent son échec paradigmatique à prévoir la crise financière de 2008, et à constituer une source d’inspiration fiable pour les politiques post-crise 2008. Nous mettons particulièrement l’accent sur la nature problématique des modèles pré-crise 2008. Nous (...) concluons que le nouveau consensus monétaire a cessé d’être pertinent plus de dix ans après le début de la crise mondiale. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine how a manifest disagreement between Richard Rorty and Alasdair MacIntyre concerning the history of philosophy is but one of a series of deep and interrelated disagreements concerning, in addition, the history of science, the good life for human beings, and, ultimately, the character of and prospects for humankind as well. I shall argue that at the heart of this series of disagreements rests a dispute with regard to the nature of rationality. And this disagreement concerning (...) the norms of rationality, despite its theoretical and practical importance, is one which is, or so I argue, irresolvable. Moreover, the series of disagreements which I examine in the context of the debate between Rorty and MacIntyre is not peculiar or idiosyncratic to them. Their dispute reflects presumptions common to contemporary analytical philosophy. And while analytical philosophers have not made discussions of human nature one of their characteristic concerns, I indicate that such concerns do play a central role in the controversy which I examine. Differences of opinion concerning the political and social nature of human beings are reflected up and down the philosophical line. My argument is in no way concerned with issues of psychological priority or causality (e.g. whether having certain views disposes one psychologically to accepting other views). What I establish are the logical relations, and the points of philosophical contention, among certain epistemo logical and political theses. In Part I, I rehearse Rorty's epistemological views and examine how these views are connected to his views on morality and human nature. In Part II, I begin with MacIntyre's position concerning the virtues and modern moral philosophy and then reconstruct, ex pede Herculem, his views on rationality. Part III examines the prospects of reconciling the perspectives discussed in the first two sections. (shrink)

Richard Rorty, with his tendency to shock, to provoke, and to seize on Continental fashions, might be thought an unlikely liberal. Nevertheless, Rorty illustrates very well some of the characteristic weaknesses of contemporary liberalism. To the extent that he draws upon postmodern and deconstructionist sources, he highlights, and radicalizes, the liberal urge to break out of frozen identities and to destabilize static roles and fixed stations in life. His distinctive version of pragmatism yields a way of drawing liberal boundaries between (...) private and public, culture and justice. And his antifoundationalism helps to legitimize a typical liberal reluctance to engage in any very ambitious social criticism. What distinguishes Rorty's liberalism is its higher degree of candor, which at least acknowledges that a liberal vision of things, far from being “neutral” toward rival ideas of the good, is implicated in the defense of a particular way of life. (shrink)

The origins of early German Romanticism and the philosophical contributions of the movement’s most important philosopher.

This article seeks to examine Rorty's contention that literary narrative, not political philosophy, is best able to address the problems of the West. It argues that although Rorty's conception of the novel as a valu able and informative medium is credible, he does not establish it as a valid alternative to political philosophy. Moreover Rorty retains the sort of reasoning that is characteristic of political philosophy, despite his assertions to the contrary.

This article examines a peculiarity dating from Classical times, namely, that democracy may be achieved, in practice, independently of and prior to its articulation as theory. This peculiarity has implications for the way in which the history of democratic theory is understood, and also for the place of the democratic theorist in society. Paul Feyerabend, Richard Rorty, Chantal Mouffe and John Keane are theorists of democracy, but they all depart, first, from the commitment to the universal truth‐claims that underpin other (...) schools of democratic thought, and, second, from the concomitant belief in the priority of theory over practice. In doing so, they make it difficult to theorise how democracy might be brought about, except, circularly, where it already exists. On the one side, Feyerabend, Rorty and, to a lesser extent, Keane, assume that ‘democracy’ already exists, so that its realisation requires no theory. On the other, Mouffe argues that ‘democracy’ does not yet exist in practice, but her attempts to theorise its realisation are not convincing. (shrink)