This article considers the extent to which the debate about animal rights can be enriched by Richard Rorty’s theory of rights. Although Rorty’s work has enjoyed a lot of scholarly attention, commentators have not considered the implications of his arguments for animals. Nor have theorists of animal rights engaged his approach to rights. This paper argues that Rorty’s thinking holds a number of attractions for proponents of animal rights. It also considers some of its drawbacks. It is further argued that (...) Rorty’s thinking about rights avoids many of the problems that animal ethic of care theorists have found in rights discourse being applied to animals. Rorty’s work thus provides a valuable resource for bringing these two major strands within the animal ethics literature into closer theoretical kinship. (shrink)

Partiendo de los análisis de los epistemólogos de la virtud que sitúan la mentalidad abierta como virtud epistémica central el artículo muestra el indisoluble entrelazamiento entre sus dimensiones éticas y epistémicas. Se entiende la mentalidad abierta como virtud de acuerdo con una concepción falibilista de la experiencia y el conocimiento humano en el que se acentúa la capacidad de intervención del agente a través de sus disposiciones y hábitos. Finalmente, la argumentación conduce a una defensa ética del liberalismo político.

The topic of epistemic normativity has come to the fore of recent work in epistemology, and so naturally, theories of knowledge, truth and justification have been increasingly held accountable to preserving normative epistemological platitudes. Central to discussions of epistemic normativity are questions about epistemic agency and epistemic value. Here, our aim is to take up some of these issues as they come to bear on the rather unconventional brand of epistemology that was defended by Richard Rorty. Our purpose is to (...) explore whether Rorty’s epistemology—or perhaps his replacement for epistemology—can preserve these normative platitudes about epistemic agency, responsibility, achievement, and the value of knowledge. Our conclusion is a negative one: that Rorty’s commitments leave him firmly at odds with some of the most plausible assumptions about epistemic agency and epistemic value. (shrink)

This article provides a semantic reading of Tracy Llanera's brilliant book Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism. Llanera is reframing the debate of how to react to the malaise of modern nihilism by proposing a change of metaphor: instead of trying to “overcome” nihilism, we should try to “outgrow” nihilism. This article invites Llanera to shed more light on her project with respect to the semantic categories of realism and representationalism, and with respect to the growing field of conceptual engineering. Can (...) Llanera's project be fruitfully understood as engineering the concepts of “transcendence” and “redemption”? How much of the project hangs on the idea that language does not represent but is rather a tool that helps us fulfill our varying needs? How neat is the entanglement of semantic and existential meaning? (shrink)

The goal of this paper is examine the recent literature on the intersection between philosophical pragmatism and International Relations (IR), including IR theory and IR research methodology. One of the obstacles to motivating pragmatist IR theories and research methodologies, I contend, is the difficulty of defining pragmatism, particularly whether there is a need for a more generic definition of pragmatism or one narrowly tailored to the goals of IR theorists and researchers.