review of Rorty's collection on evil. Generally admring, but complaining about the disparate phenomena included under the heading. And remarking on the peculiarities of the Enlish word 'evil' not found in other European languages.

This article explores the role of weakness of will in the Indian Buddhist tradition, and in particular within Śāntideva’s Introduction to the Practice of Awakening. In agreement with Jay Garfield, I argue that there are important differences between Aristotle’s account of akrasia and Buddhist moral psychology. Nevertheless, taking a more expanded conception of weakness of will, as is frequently done in contemporary work, allows us to draw significant connections with the pluralistic account of psychological conflict found in Buddhist texts. I (...) demonstrate this by showing how Amélie Rorty’s expanded treatment of akrasia as including emotional response and perceptual classification allows us to recognize that one of the purposes of many of Śāntideva’s meditations is to treat various forms of akratic response. (shrink)

Freud, kendini Kopernik ve Darwin’in de dahil olduğu merkezsizleştirici düşünce hareketi içinde görmekteydi. Ünlü bir pasajında, psikanalizin, “egoya kendi evinin bile efendisi olmadığını, ancak aklında, bilinçten uzak bir biçimde olup bitenlerin kıt bilgisi ile yetinmesi gerektiğini kanıtlamaya çabaladığını” söyler. Kendimizin önemli olduğu hissi veya özdenetim duygumuz, gerçekten kendimize karşı şeffaf olduğumuz inancına mı dayanmaktadır? Bilinç dışının keşfi neden arzularımızın keşfine değersizlik eklemek zorundadır?Freud thought of himself as part of the same “decentering” movement of thought to which Copernicus and Darwin belonged. (...) In a famous passage, he says that psychoanalysis “seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.” Does our sense of our importance, or our capacity for self-control, really depend on the belief that we are transparent to ourselves? Why should the discovery of the unconscious add humiliation to the discovery of the passions? (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the historicity of love requires an appreciation of the irreplaceability of the beloved. I do this through a consideration of ideas that were first put forward by Robert Kraut in “Love De Re” (1986). I also evaluate Amelie Rorty's criticisms of Kraut's thesis in “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds” (1986). I argue that Rorty fundamentally misunderstands Kraut's (...) Kripkean analogy, and I go on to criticize her claim that concern over the proper object of love should be best understood as a concern over constancy. This leads me to an elaboration of the distinct senses in which love can be seen as historical. I end with a further defense of the irreplaceability of the beloved and a discussion of the relevance of recent debates over the importance of personal identity for an adequate account of the historical dimension of love. (shrink)

We revisit an important exchange on the problem of radical skepticism between Richard Rorty and Michael Williams. In his contribution to this exchange, Rorty defended the kind of transcendental approach to radical skepticism that is offered by Donald Davidson, in contrast to Williams’s Wittgenstein-inspired view. It is argued that the key to evaluating this debate is to understand the particular conception of the radical skeptical problem that is offered in influential work by Barry Stroud, a conception of the (...) skeptical problem which generates metaepistemological ramifications for anti-skeptical theories. In particular, we argue that, contra Williams, Rorty’s view that Davidson was offering a theoretical diagnosis of radical skepticism can be consistently maintained with his transcendental approach. (shrink)

Little attention is given to Richard Rorty’s metaethical views. No doubt this stems from the fact that most commentators are more interested in his metaphilosophical views; most see his metaethical views, offered in scattered passages, as just the downstream runoff from higher-level reflection. This article considers Rorty’s metaethics on their own merits, quite apart from whether his global picture works. I ultimately argue that Rorty’s metaethical outlook is attractive but beset by internal difficulties. Specifically, I contend that (...) Rorty does not and cannot remain faithful to the methodological approach to metaethics for which he advocates. At the paper’s close, I gesture at a nearby methodological approach that best approximates Rorty’s metaethical methodology. (shrink)

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)

Una importante amenaza para la comunicación intercultu-ral es el relativismo: la idea de que cada cultura es tan diferente a las demás que resulta imposible entender nada de una de ellas desde cualquier otra. Se trata, de hecho, de una noción que cobró cierto éxito en diversas áreas del saber durante el siglo XX. Para oponerse a ella, los filósofos a menudo han intentado encontrar qué es lo que sí tienen todas las culturas en común, con el propósito de que (...) sirva de punto de apoyo para la comprensión mutua. En este artículo, empero, intentamos mostrar cómo cabe refutar las ideas del relativismo sin tener a la vez que comprometerse con una u otra idea de lo que presunta-mente puedan tener todas las culturas en común. El pensamiento de Richard Rorty será el que nos sirva de guía para ello. Veremos por qué, según este autor, el relativismo puede considerarse en realidad una idea incomprensible y, por tanto, que puede ser abandonada; y por qué, aunque nos confesemos etnocéntricos (como él se confesaba), ello no nos cierra a la comunicación con otras culturas, sino que, bien al con-trario, nos invita a entenderlas y a ampliar con ello nuestra propia comprensión de nosotros mismos. El uso de argumentos filosóficos tomados tanto de la epistemología elaborada por Donald Davidson, como de la historia del liberalismo político, nos resultarán fecundos en ambos empeños. (shrink)

The linguistic turn is a central aspect of Richard Rorty’s philosophy, informing his early critiques of foundationalism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and subsequent critiques of authoritarianism in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. It is argued that we should interpret the linguistic turn as a methodological suggestion for how philosophy can take a non-foundational perspective on normativity. It is then argued that although Rorty did not succeed in explicating normativity without foundations (or authority without authoritarianism), we should (...) take seriously the ambition motivating his project. But taking that ambition seriously may require reconsidering the linguistic turn. (shrink)

Rirchard Rorty has criticized the rigiditiy of the classical ethics of Kant, and he claims that we do not have absolute and universal moral norms.

In this paper I want to show three things. First, that despite some similarities in their analyses of the history of philosophy there are substantial differences in the point or moral that Rorty and Heidegger want to draw. Secondly, that this difference derives from substantial differences, again despite some similarities, in their understanding of what it is to be human and in their conception of what philosophy is. Thirdly, as a consequence of these differences Heidegger should not be understood (...) as supporting Rorty’s proposals for the future of philosophy; and moreover, that from a Heideggerian perspective on philosophy we should be deeply suspicious of Rorty’s pragmatism. (shrink)

In texts such as “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn” Jürgen Habermas defends a theory that associates, on the one hand, the truth-claim raised by a speaker for a proposition p with, on the other hand, the requirement that p be “defendable on the basis of good reasons […] at any time and against anybody”. This, as is known, has been the target of criticisms by Rorty, who−in spite of agreeing with Habermas on the central tenet that the way of (...) evaluating our beliefs must be argumentative practice−declares that the only “ideal presupposed by discourse” is “that of being able to justify your beliefs to a competent audience”. We will consider two texts from 1971, -surprisingly neglected in most approaches to the debate-, in which Habermas did include such a “competence condition” to elucidate the notion of truth. We will discuss whether there are good reasons to relinquish such a condition and to refer, instead, only to the formal or procedural properties of argumentative exchanges, as Habermas does in presenting the notion of “ideal speech situation”. As we will try to argue, there are no such good reasons. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin and Richard Rorty are sometimes thought to be diametrically opposed philosophers, particularly in their approach to foundational questions in moral thought. Dworkin is a champion of truth and objectivity in morality. Rorty, by contrast, is a great pragmatist who subscribed to a deflated vision of truth and unambiguously renounced objectivity, in favor of what he called “solidarity”. If their stated -isms and alliances were not evidence enough of discord, they also criticized one another in print, particularly (...) on these foundational, or metaethical, questions. The point of this chapter is to show that things are not what they seem: Rorty and Dworkin largely agree on metaethics. The difference between them is largely a difference in emphasis. (shrink)

Im Beitrag von Geert Keil geht es um das Verhältnis zwischen Philosophie und Naturwissenschaft. Keil geht der Frage nach, inwiefern Rortys frühes Eintreten für den Eliminativen Materialismus mit seinen entspannten Auffassungen zum Status der Wissenschaften vereinbar ist. Allgemein sieht Rorty die Wissenschaften als eine Reihe etablierter sozialer Praktiken an, als Werkzeuge, mit bestimmten Teilen der Welt zurechtzukommen. Dieses pragmatistisch-instrumentalistische Wissenschaftsverständnis steht in auffallendem Kontrast zu der Rolle, die den Naturwissenschaften im Rahmen des Eliminativen Materialismus zufallen soll. Dieser Lösungsvorschlag für (...) das Geist/Materie-Problem ist eine Reaktion auf die begrifflichen Schwierigkeiten einer Reduktion mentaler auf physische Phänomene. Der Eliminative Materialismus propagiert eine Abschaffung der alltagspsychologischen Rede von mentalen Zuständen und ihre Ersetzung durch neurowissenschaftliche Theorien. Es liegt eine gewisse Ironie darin, daß diese szientistische Extremposition in den 60er Jahren gerade von den Anything goes-Kulturalisten Rorty und Feyerabend auf den Weg gebracht wurde. Doch Keil zufolge liegt in der Ironie eine Wahrheit: Wer wie Rorty und Feyerabend voraussagt, daß das materialistische Idiom sich nicht aufgrund besserer Argumente, sondern aufgrund außerwissenschaftlicher Faktoren (Propaganda und Gewöhnung) kulturell durchsetzen wird, erwartet von der Wissenschaft keinen Erkenntnisfortschritt, sondern eine Kulturrevolution. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the relationship between Rorty's pragmatist philosophy and his view of literature and literary writing. It begins by examining the relationship between philosophy and literature, construed by Rorty in terms of the opposition between “normal,” professionalized, argument‐centered philosophical discourse and the kind of cultural criticism which emphasizes human finitude and contingency, seeking through the use of irony and literary inventiveness to transform our prevalent visions of what it means to be human. This humanist side of (...) class='Hi'>Rorty's argument is further developed through the discussion of the role that literature plays in intellectual self‐formation and moral edification, by educating moral sensibility and providing transformational shifts of conceptual perspective. These dynamics of literary innovation are then shown to dovetail nicely with Rorty's naturalistic, evolutionary conception of cultural development as well as his views regarding the indispensable role of the personal, the private, and the unshared in producing genuine cultural innovation. (shrink)

This article offers a review of Richard Rorty’s attempts to come to terms with the role of religion in our public and intellectual life by tracing the key developments in his position, partially in response to the ubiquitous criticisms of his distinction between private and public projects. Since Rorty rejects the possibility of dismissing religion on purely epistemic grounds, he is determined to treat it, instead, as a matter of politics. My suggestion is that, in this respect, (...) class='Hi'>Rorty’s position is best construed as that of a humanist rather than a post-modernist. Ultimately, it appears that, in his view, the positive element of religion—i.e. the idea of religion as a social gospel—has been absorbed and transformed into a utopian striving which humanists associate with the ideal of democracy. Hence, in this regard, religion can be considered obsolete. Yet, without explicitly invoking the usual epistemic grounds, Rorty’s arguments for excluding religion from the public sphere remain rather thin, and an interest in reforming rather than excluding religion would have been more consistent with his general outlook. (shrink)

Richard Rorty's rejection of prevailing interior-mirror understandings of the presumed relationship between “minds” and “nature,” along with his promotion of nonrepresentational accounts of knowledge, truth, and science, participates in a rich tradition of jointly pragmatist and constructivist views that spans the twentieth century. This contribution to the symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?” considers Rorty's complex and ambivalent relation to that tradition, particularly to the work of his American pragmatist predecessors, William James and John Dewey, and to (...) subsequent pragmatist-constructivist antirepresentationalism in contemporary science and technology studies (STS) and “4E” (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive theory. A final section on Nicholas Gaskill's contribution to the symposium questions his sense of Rorty's rhetorical recklessness and suggests that his worries over relativism, in Rorty's texts and more generally, are misplaced. (shrink)

This paper is a detailed and critical report of the debate between Rorty and Habermas (published in R.Brandom(ed.),"Rorty and His Critics", Blackwell, Oxford 2000) about the importance of truth and epistemic justification in communicative practices. They here present two different versions of the idea of communicative reason. I try to compare them and to evaluate their vices and virtues.

The aim of this article is to outline a pragmatist image of science following Rorty’s discussions and critics of epistemology and to develop some consequences of it in the philosophical analysis and its relations to culture. I will deal with some aspects of how scientific practice is construed and understood, and also outline the shift in Philosophy of Science from epistemological to ethical-political concerns that are implied in his proposal. I will contend that this perspective suggests an interesting way (...) of analysing scientific practices, theories, and public policies of it. Furthermore, I will suggest that it successfully connects the most interesting proposals of contemporary scientific views in philosophy. Finally, I will use some examples in physics and biology to illustrate my assertions. (shrink)

This article engages Richard Rorty’s controversial concept of ethnocentrism with the help of Randolf (Randy) S. David’s writings. The first section defines Rorty’s concept of ethnocentrism and responds to the general criticisms of relativism and divisiveness that have been made against it. The second section suggests a conceptual replacement for Rorty’s notion of a vicious ethnocentrism: egotism. Egotism is a kind of cultural ethnocentrism that is resistant to openness, creativity, and social transformation. Inspired by David’s work, the (...) third and final section suggests how the concepts of ethnocentrism and egotism might be of some use as conceptual tools for articulating contemporary social issues in the Philippines. (shrink)

This paper revisits some of the arguments in Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, twenty years after the book first appeared. Not only are many of Rorty’s diagnoses and predictions eerily prescient in the wake of the rise of Donald Trump to the US presidency, but there is also perceptive political advice in Rorty’s book that I argue the contemporary American Left would do well to heed. While many post-election commentators have tended to read Achieving Our Country as (...) an admonishment of so-called “identity politics” in favor of an “old Left” politics of redistribution and economic justice, I argue that the main distinction on which the analysis in Achieving Our Country hangs is between what Rorty calls “real politics” and “cultural politics”, a conclusion that is confirmed, I argue, by examining the three concrete suggestions for the American Left that together form the core positive argument in Rorty’s book. (shrink)

In response to Professor Rorty’s reaction to Professor Habermas’s paper in this symposium, I confess that I am still not sure I understand Rorty’s hostility to ideals such as the ideal of truth. Such ideals as the ideal of truth -- and ideals like those of reason and morality surely stand and fall with the ideal of truth -- seem plainly to have an enormous pragmatic value. They lure us out of our too-constrained, too-limited ethnocentric or idiosyncratic frames (...) of reference. It is always possible, of course, that such ideals may be abused; they have frequently been deployed, in particular, as clubs used to beat down views and modes of behavior that are threatening or otherwise disliked. But they need not be abused. Their proven and potential value is quite extraordinary. They offer us standards which pay explicit respect to the principle that the criteria we use for evaluating ideas and modes of behavior should be nonethnocentric and nonidiosyncratic. They offer us standards that we can appeal to in luring ourselves or others to step outside of our relatively narrow present points of view here and now and toward a broader perspective that can serve us better tomorrow and elsewhere. (shrink)

What does truth have to do with freedom? That is, what is the relationship between our political and epistemic principles? In this paper, I grapple and reject Rorty's reasons for thinking that the former can't be based on the latter, but offer an alternative argument that supports his over-all conclusion that our epistemic and political values are ultimately intertwined.

Rorty regards himself as furthering the project of the Enlightenment by separating Enlightenment liberalism from Enlightenment rationalism. To do so, he rejects the very need for explicit metaphysical theorizing. Yet his commitments to naturalism, nominalism, and the irreducibility of the normative come from the metaphysics of Wilfrid Sellars. Rorty's debt to Sellars is concealed by his use of Davidsonian arguments against the scheme/content distinction and the nonsemantic concept of truth. The Davidsonian arguments are used for Deweyan ends: to (...) advance secularization and anti-authoritarianism. However, Rorty's conflation of theology and metaphysics conceals the possibility of post-theological metaphysics. The key distinction lies between “metaphysics” and “Metaphysics.” The former provisionally models the relations between different vocabularies; the latter continues theology by other means. Sellars shows how to do metaphysics without Metaphysics. This approach complements Rorty's prioritization of cultural politics over ontology and his vision of Enlightenment liberalism without Enlightenment rationalism. (shrink)

Hesse and Pettit present somewhat different reconstructions of Rorty’s suggestions about the discipline that might survive the collapse of foundationalistic epistemology. They both treat Rorty’s argument very respectfully, as opening the way to an interesting new possibility. I think that they are both too charitable to him; I think that there are a lot of bad arguments in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and a quantity of simple silliness. This is not to say that the openings up (...) of the subject that Hesse and Pettit derive from Rorty are not genuinely attractive. What I would challenge is the suggestion that they are forced upon us by the collapse of the rest of the subject. I see no reason to believe this. (shrink)

This paper examines two contemporary answers to the question of whether moral values and norms are apt for rational criticism and justification: Richard Rorty’s radically contextualist approach—which is centered around the notion of contingency and is characterized by a dismissal of all claims to philosophical justification—and Karl-Otto Apel’s transcendental-pragmatic version of discourse ethics—which encompasses highly ambitious claims to justification and universal validity. Contrasting the key theses of Rorty’s contextualism with those of Apel’s universalist discourse ethics and reconstructing their (...) respective conceptions of moral progress we argue that neither Rorty’s nor Apel’s position is convincing. (shrink)

Among the deeper strata of Rorty’s philosophy is what I call his aversion to normative violence. Normative violence occurs when some specific group presents itself as having a privileged relation to reality. The alternative to normative violence is recognizing that cultural politics has priority over ontology. I trace this Rortyan idea to its origins in Nietzsche and Sellars. Rorty’s contribution is to combine Nietzsche on the death of God and Sellars on the Myth of the Given. However, I (...) conclude with a suggestion that Rorty ultimately goes too far in thinking that avoiding normative violence requires abstaining from metaphysics and epistemology as such. (shrink)

Rorty, Pragmatism, and Confucianism, a collection of twelve essays on the work of Richard Rorty and its relation to Confucian thought, arose out of a conference in Shanghai in 2004, where participants were granted access to several of Rorty’s unpublished manuscripts. In his introduction, the editor Yong Huang states his desire to outline areas of shared interest in Rortian and Confucian thought. He notes, for example, the similarities between Rorty’s view that sentiment is “central to the (...) moral consciousness” (p. 2) and the early Confucian tradition’s stress on the enhancement and appropriate directing of feeling; in Rorty’s words, a more moral world is best created by telling a “long, sad, sentimental .. (shrink)

I try to show that Richard Rorty, although is not a moral philosopher like Kant, nerveless, has moral philosophy that must be taken seriously. Rorty was not engaged with moral philosophy in the systematic manner common among leading modern and contemporary moral philosophers. This paper has two parts: first part, in brief, is concerned with principles of his philosophy such as anti-essentialism, Darwinism, Freudism, and historicism. Second part which be long and detailed, considers many moral themes in (...) class='Hi'>Rorty's thought such as critique of Kantian morality, solidarity, moral progress, cruelty and concept of other, etc. Subsequently, I will try to answer the research question of the article namely, has Rorty a moral philosophy? (shrink)

This article provides a new interpretation of Richard Rorty’s notion of the private-public distinction. The first section of the article provides a short theoretical overview of the origins of the public-private distinction in Rorty’s political thought and clarifies the Rortian terminology. The main portion of the article is dedicated to the critique of Rorty’s private-public distinction, divided into two thematic sections: (i) the private-public distinction as undesirable and (ii) the private-public distinction as unattainable. I argue that (...) class='Hi'>Rorty’s formulation provides plausible answers to the first kind of criticism, but not to the second. Finally, a reformulation of the private-public distinction will be suggested, which both mitigates the second line of criticism and better coheres with Rorty’s general theory. (shrink)

It is often claimed that liberalism is falsely and perniciously universalist. I take this charge seriously, exploring three positions: the communitarians’, Rorty’s, and that of “comprehensive” liberalism. After explaining why universalism is thought impossible, I examine the communitarian view that value is determined within communities and argue that it results in a form of relativism that is unacceptable. I next discuss Richard Rorty’s liberal acceptance of “conventionalism” and explain how, despite his rejection of universalism, Rorty remains a (...) liberal. I then present a defense of universalism, based in part on arguments that parallel Thomas Nagel’s arguments in defense of a “view from nowhere” and Jean Hampton’s objectivist arguments against Rawls’s moves to a “merely political” theory. That defense requires that we can distance ourselves from our ends to make moral judgments shorn of all partialities. (shrink)

This chapter takes a critical look at universities from the perspective of the neopragmatist philosophy of education outlined by Richard Rorty. The chapter begins with a discussion of Rorty’s view of the ends that educational institutions properly serve in a liberal democracy. It then considers the kind of culture that Rorty takes to be conducive to those ends and the kind that is antithetical to them. Rorty sometimes characterizes the latter as a culture of ‘egotism’. After (...) describing the main aspects of such a culture, the chapter uses it as an interpretive key for understanding the ‘dark side’ of the contemporary university. Our thesis is that within a Rortyan, neo-pragmatist philosophy of higher education, the ends that universities are meant to serve in a liberal democracy are vulnerable to frustration and corruption by a culture of egotism. (shrink)

I have spent 40 years looking for a coherent and convincing way of formulating my worries about what, if anything, philosophy is good for. Richard Rorty had an unusually avid interest in metaphilosophy. Again and again he would return to questions about the practical uses (if any) to which philosophy might be put, about philosophy's role in intellectual culture, about what philosophy is or might become. His answers to these questions were famously negative: philosophy's practical uses are few, its (...) cultural role marginal. Philosophy is or will be whatever we make of it. Yet it is one thing to have given up on the idea of Philosophy as a Fach with a naturally occurring canon of problems, or in terms of the closely .. (shrink)

I try to show that Richard Rorty, although is not a moral philosopher like Kant, nerveless, has moral philosophy that it must be taken seriously. Rorty has not engaged with moral philosophy in the systematic manner common among leading modern and contemporary moral philosophers. This paper has two parts: first part, in briefly, is concerned with principles of his philosophy such as anti-essentialism, Darwinism, Freudism, and historicism. second part, will be a long and detailed, considers many moral themes (...) in Rorty''''''''s thought such as critique of Kantian morality, solidarity, moral progress, cruelty and concept of other, etc. subsequently, we will try to answer question of the article (namely, has Rorty a moral philosophy?). (shrink)

After a discussion of the fundamental tropes of Rorty’s philosophy, in and beyond Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and after describing an imaginary conversation between Rorty, Heidegger, Derrida, and Dewey, the paper- a sort of monography in a nutshell- aims to shed new light on the strategic figure of the ironist as developed by Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Who really is the Rortyan ironist? A comparison between the ironist and the Platonic character of Callicles (...) clearly shows that Rorty’s irony does not correspond to Socratic or Platonic irony. From a close reading of relevant texts three ideas emerge: first, one can take an ironic stance despite its ability to support divergent metaphysical premises –Callicles is ironic in tone but foundationalist in metaphysics- while Rorty’s pragmatist appears ironic in tone and anti-foundationalist in metaphysics. Second, Callicles is a sort of public ironist; he feels pathos for the demos and the Athenian popular assembly, while the Rorty’s ironist appears as a private ironist looking for a hypothetical and detached conversation. And third, from the theatrical and literary point of view, Rorty’s ironist lacks the Greek character, the Greek mask, and Greek comicality. (shrink)

My job has been made easier tonight, given that Larry Hickman has already done most of the ‘heavy lifting’ for me. I think his paper is an excellent and convincing intervention into this debate, and one of the problems for me in constructing my talk has been that our discussions have forced me to rethink what I wanted to say. Given my Continental biases, I had expected to come out on Rorty’s side; in writing this paper, however, things have (...) become more complicated. So let me here thank Larry for both at once making my job tonight easier, and much to my chagrin, surprisingly difficult. What I want to suggest, in contrast to what you’ve just heard, is that the neopragmatism of Richard Rorty is not wholly inconsistent with Dewey’s pragmatism – or, at least, with a ‘thin’ version of Deweyian pragmatism. As we shall see, while the differences between Dewey and Rorty on the status of metaphysics are in all probability irreconcilable, Rorty’s reclamation of a ‘thin’ Dewey can be read as consistent with at least the spirit of Dewey’s work. I will try to make the stronger case that this reconciliation is possible according to the letter of Dewey’s philosophy as well, and the interrelated issues of method and social hope will serve as the avenues for this investigation. Given my audience, I imagine that what I’m about to say will be fodder for some interesting conversation, and so, in the spirit of Rorty’s thought, let me get on with my paper. (shrink)

A large part of Richard Rorty’s works focus on criticizing the received view about philosophy. He argues, in his historical reconstruction of philosophical activity, that there has always been a misconception about philosophy in the history of philosophy. This misconception assumes that philosophy aims to grasp the ultimate knowledge, so it desperately engages in an attempt to achieve “truth”. In this view, which he calls representationalism and points to it by the metaphor of the mirror of nature, knowledge aims (...) to represent something out of mind, and the duty of philosophy is to put forward a theory about the representation. According to Rorty, based on this popular view philosophy is a foundational discipline that aims to evaluate epistemological claims of other disciplines. Rorty attempts to criticize and reject this Cartesian epistemological agenda for philosophy. Rorty’s approach to philosophy is therapeutic; that is, he tries to resolve philosophical problems rather than solve them. By adopting a historical method, Rorty seeks to show that “philosophy as epistemology” is a result of the dominance of what he calls the metaphor of the mirror of nature. From a critical rationalist perspective, the present article intends to critique Rorty’s views on epistemology. In this paper, Rorty’s historiographical approach is criticized in several ways. First, Rorty offers a one-sided and biased reconstruction of the history of philosophy to fit the abovementioned metaphor. Secondly, he treats history as rigid data from which it is possible to draw doctrinal conclusions. Whereas, as critical rationalists have said time and again, history by itself has no meaning. Moreover, Rorty’s justificationism is criticized. Rorty maintains that knowledge needs to be justified, and since it cannot be justified through representation, it must be justified by the consent of society. In other words, agreement in a group of people can provide an epistemic authority. Thus, both Rorty’s view and foundationalism, despite their differences, share justificationism in epistemology. That is, they both believe that knowledge needs to be justified. On the other hand, as critical rationalists have shown, justification in any shape and form, whether internal or external, is neither possible nor necessary. We also attempt to illustrate how Rorty’s epistemological approach results in confusion between epistemology and psychology; moreover, his epistemological behaviorism still suffers from some sort of justifications. In conclusion, Rorty expresses his criticism of epistemology with the metaphor of the mirror of nature. According to him, foundationalism is the result of the conflation of the Platonic conception of knowledge as something unchangeable, with the Cartesian mind that seeks certainty. However, his ignorance of the main crux of the matter in epistemology causes his own suggestion of epistemological behaviorism to suffer from the same problem, that is justificationism, which now appears in another form, i.e., social consensus. While, as critical rationalists repeated time and again, justification is neither possible nor necessary and not even desirable. They have shown that a non-justificationist approach to knowledge aimed at truth as a regulative idea could be a better approach. (shrink)

This paper introduces Richard Rorty’s notion of the liberal ironist and his vision of a liberal utopia and explores the implications of these for philosophical questions concerning morality, as well as morality in general. Rorty’s assertions of the contingency of language, society and self are explored. Under the contingency of language, the figure of the ironist is defined, and Rorty’s conception of vocabularies is discussed. Under the contingency of society, Rorty’s definition of liberalism, his opposition of (...) literary culture to materialist and metaphysical culture, and his notions concerning utopian politics are discussed. Under the contingency of self, Rorty’s critique of Kantian and his appropriations of Deweyan and Freudian conceptions of morality are presented. Other key factors discussed are Rorty’s theory of the separation of the private and public spheres of life and his ideas concerning cruelty and human solidarity. In this way, a critical analysis of Rorty’s proposed balance between private, ironic doubt and public, liberal social hope is presented and assessed in terms of its merit as a system of thought suited to the needs of post-metaphysical, liberal societies. (shrink)

In a short exchange published in 2000, Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom differed over the status of “facts” in a world containing no speakers and, hence, no speech acts. While Brandom wanted to retain the meaningfulness of talk of “facts” or “truths” about things—in this case truths about photons —in a world in which there could be no claimings about such things, Rorty denied the existence of any such “worldly items” as “facts.” In this essay the difference between (...) Rorty and Brandom on this issue is used to explore their differing attitudes to modality. Brandom appeals to a Kantian approach of modal realism to support counterfactual claims. However, I argue that when his approach to modality is examined in the context of current debates over possible world semantics, his own “incompatibilist” semantics itself seems incompatible with a Kantian approach to modality. In turn, I suggest that this difference between Brandom and Rorty in their attitudes to modality reveals a difference in their respective attitudes to pragmatism’s relation to philosophy in general. (shrink)