The hegemony of logical positivism was already on the wane in the 1960s as a result of penetrating criticisms by thinkers both inside and outside the movement. But its legacy continued to exert a formative influence on the less doctrinaire and more diverse varieties of “analytic philosophy” that succeeded it. For one thing, occasional disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding, the physical and formal sciences have continued to exercise a stranglehold on philosophical imagination. This has not excluded the development of more (...) or less intimate relations with linguistics, especially formal linguistics, or a current love affair with cognitive science and artificial intelligence. But it has choked off any deep influence from the arts and humanities, as it has from history and the social sciences. And just because these latter domains have continued to be of central importance for Continental philosophy, we are left with the spectacle of “two philosophies”—analytic and Continental—mirroring the infamous split between the “two cultures.” As part of the same syndrome, analytic philosophy has become increasingly professional and technical and, consequently, largely invisible to the wider culture; whereas Continental philosophy, largely invisible to the wider culture; whereas Continental philosophy, while far from popular, has nevertheless maintained its ties to culture and society at large. The public roles of Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault in France, or of Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas in Germany, have had no equivalent in American philosophy since the death of Dewey. Philosophers here think of themselves as scientists rather than as public intellectuals. Thomas McCarthy is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas . This essay is part of a work-in-progress on philosophy and critical theory. (shrink)

A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding multiculturalism. Charles Taylor's initial inquiry, which considers whether the institutions of liberal democratic government make room--or should make room--for recognizing the worth of distinctive cultural traditions, remains the centerpiece of this discussion. It is now joined by Jürgen Habermas's extensive essay on the issues of recognition and (...) the democratic constitutional state and by K. Anthony Appiah's commentary on the tensions between personal and collective identities, such as those shaped by religion, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality, and on the dangerous tendency of multicultural politics to gloss over such tensions. These contributions are joined by those of other well-known thinkers, who further relate the demand for recognition to issues of multicultural education, feminism, and cultural separatism.Praise for the previous edition. (shrink)

In these eloquent essays, articles and lectures, Rorty gives a stimulating summary of his central philosophical beliefs and how they relate to his political ...

Preface This volume contains essays written during the period 1972-1980. They are arranged roughly in order of composition. Except for the Introduction, ...

In this 1989 book Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable on a private level, although it cannot advance the social or political goals of liberalism. In fact Rorty believes that it is literature not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense (...) of human solidarity. A truly liberal culture, acutely aware of its own historical contingency, would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers. The book has a characteristically wide range of reference from philosophy through social theory to literary criticism. It confirms Rorty's status as a uniquely subtle theorist, whose writing will prove absorbing to academic and nonacademic readers alike. (shrink)