Book Description
In this book, major American philosopher Richard 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 but it cannot advance Liberalism's social and political goals. In fact, Rorty believes that it is literature and not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense of human solidarity. Specifically, it is novelists such as Orwell and Nabokov who succeed in awakening us to the cruelty of particular social practices and individual attitudes. Thus, a truly liberal culture 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. Rorty uses a wide range of references--from philosophy to social theory to literary criticism--to elucidate his beliefs.
Customer Reviews:
The Call of Philosophy.......2007-03-31
Richard Rorty's work has caused waves in the philosophical community for decades. He challenges the views that have driven philosophy for over two millenniums in a way that will appeal to anyone interested in the questions of philosophy. His pragmatism is a very idiosyncratic version of it, and he wouldn't have it any other way. His approach to philosophy is deeply historical and he almost takes a stance similar to Thomas Kuhn's view of science in regards to all of philosophy and culture.
Still, Rorty's work is original and for those trained in the analytic tradition he offers a great entry-point for beginning study of the continental figures (they aren't that different!). His views of Wittgenstein and Heidegger are quite similar and any scholar of either could take a great deal away from this book, regardless of their views of his conclusions. His views on Derrida and Davidson are similarly enlightening. He engages with a great deal of philosophy and literature in his study, and the studies of Nabokov and Orwell are worth their weight in gold: any fan or student of their literature will be amazed by Rorty's analysis of them.
His method precludes him from arguing strongly (irony), and so if you fit into his Kantian mold you will definitely be forced to think quite differently. Those who sense something wrong with the philosophical enterprise as such will resonate with his arguments, though not necessarily agree with them (I'd argue that there are still philosophical problems, even if I think that his ideas are compelling and useful). He doesn't ask that you agree, but that you listen and continue the conversation without discriminating against thinkers.
The political contents are deeply integral, and in many of his other non-political works his language is still political. Such a sensibility is refreshing in philosophy and it seems that his idea of philosophy as political begins here. Conservatives will cringe at his lighthearted ironism, and liberals will fail to see the point in his writing. He isn't writing for a primarily political audience, but at a philosophical one who is rarely engaged in politics.
Rorty's work begins and ends well, showing us why he is one of the best thinkers around, trying to free us of the presumptions of metaphysics that have taken root again in the latter-half of the twentieth century via philosophers like Saul Kripke and Jean-Paul Sartre. This should be read by anyone trained or interested in the topics of philosophy, but especially by students of philosophy as it can provide a way to liberate yourself from the presumptions of academic philosophy. Even if you disagree, his questioning is invaluable and will provoke much thought in many quarters.
A stimulating opportunity..........2006-08-23
I've noticed a trend that various reviewers on philosophy books use this cyberspace as an opportunity to display their understanding and mastery over the work in question. This is, in ways, an interesting and useful phenomenon, but it can also be misleading. This is especially the case for thinkers like Richard Rorty, whose work is often read with the prejudice of traditional, less radical philosophical thought. I am in no way asserting that there is one true way of interpreting this text (a suggestion Rorty himself would abhor). I merely recommend that if you have an interest in contemporary analytic and continental philosophy, or even an interest in literary criticism, you should purchase this very stimulating book. It is stimulating because, like Kant and the other metaphysicians Rorty will challenge, he offers a vocabulary and set of terminology unique (at least in organization and inter-relation) to this work. To master Rorty's somewhat idiosyncratic use of words like "vocabulary" or "irony" or "metaphysics" one has to place oneself in a bit of a hermeneutic circle. Only then will one acquire and master this particularly useful, fecund philosophical language. Many of the reviews here seem written from outside that language, which is discouraging. This is an active read so don't be afraid to get more than your toes wet. This is an important book and is very useful for understanding the desire for autonomy as well as for solidarity. I hope Rorty's poignant writing will be as useful in your life as it has been in mine.
Truth in Moral Solidarity.......2006-07-28
Probably the best thing about "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" is that it is written so well. Like Rorty's other books it has a way of making philosophy less arcane than it otherwise appears. Other raters here have outlined his project better than I can and illustrate how Rorty builds upon his ideas in the book "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature." I only want to add the observations that, (1) it is no surprise Rorty feels he has to address religion's influence in this book, and that (2) philosophical objection to Rorty appears quasi-religious in nature. Philosophical critics of both books who are consumed with the nagging perception that physical facts of reality seem indeed to hold up well to the correspondence theory of truth are steeped in a Western religious world view.
That world view and its implications for Rorty's concept of solidarity carries critical import for understanding his project. For many of his critics that world view seems to be validated by epistemology. As some have pointed out, we do the math and the rockets fly. So some correspondence is working, apparently. In the realm of ethics, the same relationship of language to reality has apparent truth as well. In assigning verbal names to these correspondences, we superimpose a chimerical essence we call "Truth," if Rorty is right. But that "Truth" we assign has no real correspondence to what is out there in the world, in his argument. This "Truth" constitutes an unverifiable relationship because we do not know how reliable the "mirror" is, our cognitive door to perception, and this reliability is the crux of philosophical disagreement with Rorty and Dewey and other pragmatists.
It is the old debate about the relationship between fact and truth on a new level, with Nietzsche's "mobile army of metaphors" winning if you assert there can be no "truth" without words, without language, and there is therefore no "Truth." Rorty is saying the resulting epistemological uncertainty is never going away even though there is no doubt about the practical efficacy of science and phenomenology.
I disagree with critics who think he is espousing moral relativism. Epistemological uncertainty about ethics does not translate into moral relativism. Rorty, like Dewey before him, is saying moral values have to be ultimately pragmatic because there is no epistemological absoluteness about them as there is none about physical facts, even when the rockets work properly. It is a meta-ethical claim, not a claim about the truths of morality. So the assertion that Rorty's concept of solidarity amounts to espousing moral relativism makes no sense. Some critics want to label him "dangerous" in the same way Russell called Dewey's pragmatism "dangerous." Dangerousness does not make them wrong.
Regarding this dangerousness, Rorty does not think theorizing about what level or lack of epistemological surety underlies moral values changes our interaction with them, at least not in a morally or politically detrimental way. He's saying epistemology is never going to get us to certainty, so there is no point trying to mold the polis on the assumption we do know. What works is not only good enough but also it's all that we have.
So pragmatists like Dewey and Rorty are "dangerous" in the same way Nietzsche was dangerously misunderstood by ignorant Nazis. Some are inclined to exclaim "this cannot be" because they want absolute ontological certainty, the moral clarity of solidarity not being strong enough for us. That impulse arises from a psychological approach produced by a world view (the "mirror" at work) grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition (as Genesis says "and God saw all that he made") and Plato's "forms" as the ultimate "True" reality ("seeing" the Truth of forms when emerging from the Republic's metaphorical cave). At its core Plato's theory is as religious as Genesis. These two traditions represent the bedrock of Western epistemological and scientific thinking.
Not everyone thinks that way though, which is why I think Rorty was on to something when he left philosophy. In the East people do not use ocular metaphors as a first resort, for instance, and they have no trouble with the idea that fact is somehow ontologically independent of truth. The Taoist roots of Zen existentialism may be more "scientific" in the pragmatist's perspective (to continue with the habit of ocular metaphors) because those ideas stress bare awareness without reflection as apprehending what we call "Truth," not seeing it and naming it so. The ultimate exact relationship between fact and truth, as Rorty suggests, is likely ineffable, but that doesn't mean we do not know facts of reality exist. That is an idea with which the Taoists, most famously Lao-tzu or Chuang-tzu, would readily agree. Rorty is sure enough about the facts of cruelty to write what he does, but that doesn't mean he or anyone else possesses moral certainty---to me "moral certainty" sounds like a dangerous quasi-religious idea. I think I'd rather have a pragmatist at the helm of the polis than someone who thinks he has recevied the holy Truth.
Amazing, Pragmatic ... just one small problem.......2006-06-26
Richard Rorty remains my personal favorite of American philosophers. Although, he is with some reluctance refered to as a philosopher since writing this book; he is now given up on metaphysics. If you read this book, you will understand the reason for his abandonment of the disipline.
Rorty outlines the problems with language, largely a reiteration of Nietzsche's famous writing on this. The problem with language? There is no connection to language and the world out there. Language works because we accept it. Therefore, truth, a part of language is then not "out there." Rather: it is a "property of sentences"...and "since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths" (p.21). Rorty continues that objectivity is illusory, and that all things--language, selfhood, and community--are contingencies. Truth does not exist but has been made up as language. Just as if a tree falls in a forest and no ears are there to hear it, the sound remains only in waves and vibrations and there is no actual experience of sound ...so too are truths necessary to be made into sentences. A truth cannot exist without a sentence.
Language then, according to Rorty, is just a tool, which we use because it works, not because it is an accurate reflection on the way things really are. For the first three chapters alone, the book is worth your money.
Rorty suggests that we must give up on truth and create a public and private sphere, a reinterpretation of course of Plato. The worst thing one can do in our liberal world is be cruel to another. Rorty expands on what it means to be cruel. The problem of course is that Rorty says language isn't accurate in describing truth, how then can he say cruelty is really wrong without putting it into a sentence. So comes the problem with "theoryzing irony." As soon as you say that one should give up on metaphysics and embrace a non-cruel outlook on life, it starts sounding like you're making truth-claims. This sort of "meta-Rortian" discussion gets confusing, so just buy the book for yourself and realize the language is little more than description.
Rorty is pragmatic in the sense that he thinks one should give up being cruel ... this I suppose is his solution on ethics. Overall, a must read if you're interested in 21st Century Ethical Theory ...or pragmatism. I recommend Rorty over other philosophers like MacIntyre, Habermas, and Lyotard because he comes closest to offering solution. But then again, he's not really a philosopher anymore ...
big ideas, clear writing, with only a few gaps.......2005-07-31
Rorty's book is an articulate and very clearly written attempt to deal with one major modern philosophical question, namely:
"If nothing (or everything) is true (or real), what grounds are there for developing a system of values?"
Rorty starts by summarising the problems of modern philosophy (relativism rules, or "nothing is true"). He then moves into a discussion of how-- in the absence of God, or of concrete proof of the value and meaning of scientific research-- values might be articulated. Rorty's answer (which he takes to some extent from Sartre) is that it is literature (and the arts in general) which allow us to imagine the human context of ideas. Through this imagining we can create the title's "solidarity" with others against ideas (or governments) which are cruel.
Rorty's book is forceful, well-written and clear. Anybody without a philosophy background can get his ideas. There are a few gaps. Rorty, of the blank-slate ("nurture") school of human nature, ignores much evidence from neuroscience, anthropology and other disciplines which basically says that, no, there ARE inherent human universals. We aren't jsu tcreated by culture, and we cannto simpy adopt ANY set of social ideas and build a society around them. It would be interesting to see Rorty argue ethics with, say, Steven Pinker. Rorty also takes relativism one step too far. As Allan Bloom put it, he makes the mistake of turning epistemological relativism into MORAL relativism (in human language, that means he starts with "we don't know anything for sure" and uses that to argue "there is no way to have moral standards").
Those interested in this book would also enjoy the following--
Charles Taylor's THE SOURCES OF THE SELF. A history of how Westerners came to see themselves (in philosophical and political terms). Opens with a fascinating indirect rebuttal to Rorty. Taylor writes beautifully for an educated but non-specialist audience.
Steven Pinker's HOW THE MIND WORKS. The first half is the computational theory of mind; the second looks at gene-based human universals and makes a fascinating counterpoint to Rorty.
Book Description
What is truth? What value should we see in or attribute to it?
The war over the meaning and utility of truth is at the center of contemporary philosophical debate, and its arguments have rocked the foundations of philosophical practice. In this book, the American pragmatist Richard Rorty and the French analytic philosopher Pascal Engel present their radically different perspectives on truth and its correspondence to reality.
Rorty doubts that the notion of truth can be of any practical use and points to the preconceptions that lie behind truth in both the intellectual and social spheres. Engel prefers a realist conception, defending the relevance and value of truth as a norm of belief and inquiry in both science and the public domain. Rorty finds more danger in using the notion of truth than in getting rid of it. Engel thinks it is important to hold on to the idea that truth is an accurate representation of reality.
In Rorty's view, epistemology is an artificial construct meant to restore a function to philosophy usurped by the success of empirical science. Epistemology and ontology are false problems, and with their demise goes the Cartesian dualism of subject and object and the ancient problematic of appearance and reality. Conventional "philosophical problems," Rorty asserts, are just symptoms of the professionalism that has disfigured the discipline since the time of Kant. Engel, however, is by no means as complacent as Rorty in heralding the "end of truth," and he wages a fierce campaign against the "veriphobes" who deny its value.
What's the Use of Truth? is a rare opportunity to experience each side of this impassioned debate clearly and concisely. It is a subject that has profound implications not only for philosophical inquiry but for the future study of all aspects of our culture as well.
Customer Reviews:
Truth, where's Rorty?.......2007-08-24
Rorty doesn't argue his (actually very subtle and complex) positions. Just responds with a bunch of generalitions that wouldn't suffice in a relatively sophisticated undergtrad course.
Excellent book for people studying Rorty's view on truth.......2007-07-12
Very systematic approach of the concept of truth - both in what Engles' view and Rorty's is concerned.
Short, expensive, and inessential.......2007-06-29
There are far better books available for those wanting a good insight into Richard Rorty's writing on truth: Philosophy and Social Hope is an outstandingly readable, engaging collection of essays which sets out his views in much more clarity than this volume, which takes the form of a rather pedantic argument between Pascal Engel, a former "continental philosopher" (believing in relativism and all those wacky gallic notions) who has seen the light of analytic truth and Rorty, a former analytical philosopher who famously became persuaded that there isn't actually a light and who adopted a pragmatist view (which is a polite way of saying he ended up believing in "cultural relativism" and all those wacky gallic notions).
Like Rorty, I have trouble seeing any way round objections to the correspondence theory of truth, so I'm firmly in his camp (wacky though it may seem): There's no correspondence between sentences and reality, the marginal utility of a statement being "true" (and not just "useful") is minimal and we should instead satisfy ourselves for descriptions of the world we find to be useful without caring how, whether or why they map onto some intangible external thing called reality.
Engel's arguments strike me as technical and implausible, since his first move is to surrender a large part of the ground by conceding there are real problems with correspondence - I doubt I do him justice, but he's reduced to saying things like 'correspondence or no, we *do* talk in terms which assume there is such a truth, and that mode of discourse in itself has some essential value and meaning which would be lost were we to relegate ourselves to merely finding sentences useful'.
I'm not persuaded, and Rorty's brilliant writing elsewhere (especially Philosophy and Social Hope and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) heaps grist to his wacky gallic mill.
Lastly, this book is short - it's about an hour's read, partly comprises a book review by Rorty of Engel's book on truth which is available online, and the copy I purchased was absurdly expensive.
One day the world may be turned on to (the recently deceased) Richard Rorty, but this isn't the book to do it.
Olly Buxton
A Debate on Truth.......2007-05-10
This recent short book, "What's the Use of Truth?" (2007) consists of the text of a debate held between two distinguished contemporary philosophers, Richard Rorty and Pascal Engel, at the Sorbonne in 2002. Rorty began his career as an analytic philosopher who edited a collection of texts in a book called "The Linguistic Turn." (1967) But, in his book "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (1979) and many later writings, Rorty became disillusioned with analytic philosophy and, indeed, highly skeptical of the philosophical project as traditionally conceived. Rorty became a self-styled "pragmatist" in the tradition of John Dewey. Pascal Engel, in contrast to Rorty, began as a European philosopher steeped in Heidegger. He has since tried to bring European thought closer to the techniques and questions of analytic philosophy.
The subject of the Engel-Rorty debate is the nature of truth and whether the concept of truth is philosophically important. Rorty argues for a "deflationist" account of truth, and maintains that there is little benefit to be gained from studying the conundrums that philosophers have erected around the concept. Rorty claims to adopt the pragmatist maxim of William James that "if a debate has no practical significance, then it has no philosophical significance." To simplify greatly, Rorty rejects an approach in which true statements are thought to bear a relationship of correspondence to an independent reality. True statements are those accepted by a community under standards used by that community whether the statements be scientific, artistic, technical, political, religious, ethical what have you. There is no metaphysical entity called Truth for Rorty, and to say, for example, that ""The cat is on the mat" is true" is, in most circumstances, only to say "The cat is on the mat."
In the debate, Pascal Engel agrees with Rorty on some important points. Notably, he rejects any metaphysical notion of "the Truth" and he also rejects representationalism for the most part. But while Rorty claims to be a follower of James and Dewey, Engel is closer to the earlier American pragmatist, Charles Peirce. Engel argues that the concept of the truth as an important regulatory role to play in human thought by setting a goal and limiting condition of human inquiry. Engel discusses what he describes as the assertion-belief-truth triangle by which he endeavors to show that the question of the acceptability of a particular statement by a group cannot be reduced to the question of the truth of that statement.
Following the statement of their basic positions, Rorty and Engel engage in a brief discussion which grows increasingly heated.
As is often the case, Rorty states his position eloquently and rhetorically, with references to himself and those who think with him as "we pragmatists", "we quietists" and the like. It is difficult to take a good hard look at Rorty's views. Rorty does not seem to me entirely consistent in his pragmatism and anti-metaphysical orientation, as he slips, in places in his discussion, into a philosophical naturalism with no place for any form of theology. In other places, his approach seems to be of the breadth to allow theological discourse, just as any other discourse, as long as it serves a human need. Engel works hard in the debate to establish the importance of a limited concept of truth, but I was struck by how much the contours of philosophical debate have shifted towards a position much influenced by Rorty.
This book is short, lively, and provocative. I think it too brief and too concentrated to make a good introduction to the issues it addresses. This book will be of interest to serious students of philosophy and to those interested in the claimed death of or at least reformulation of this venerable discipline.
Robin Friedman
What is the use of brief discussions about truth?.......2007-04-12
I give this 3 stars because it is not a very good addition to the literature already on Rorty, but it is a decent discussion (considering its brevity) on some important philosophical themes.
At less than 80 pages, this discussion of truth is much more precise, fruitful, and inspiring than a similar short book on truth - Harry G. Frankfurt's On Truth.
This book is actually the text of a public debate held at the Sorbonne in November 2002. The topic is the role that truth plays both linguistically and socially. Rorty has written for over 20 years on his view that the notion of truth as Truth is an unnecessary addition (and epistemological quandary) to the notion of justification within a given community.
The book consists of a main statement by Pascal Engels who, though finding commonalities with Rorty, differs with Rorty importantly. Next, Rorty responds with his main statement. Then a discussion ensues with shorter critical responses. The appendix is actually a reprint of Rorty's book review of Pascal Engel's book Truth(this actually adds to the discussion, though not much). Part of my disappointment in this book is that Rorty has addressed every one of Engel's objects (except for the one I relay in the next 2 paragraphs) somewhere else in his writings - especially his Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers (Philosophical Papers, Vol 1).
Where to begin when discussing Truth? The point of departure here is Rorty's previous writings on Truth. Engel spends time presenting Rorty's view then offering a fairly nuanced approach to truth which he proposes against Rorty. Engel is sympathetic to Rorty's critic of truth as correspondence or the "Mirror of Nature" which goes back to Rorty's 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature but Engel will not follow Rorty all the way. Engel says, "I do not believe that, because the correspondence theory of truth encounters difficulties that are perhaps insurmountable, it follows that we must surrender any realist conception of truth, nor...that we can totally rid philosophy of oppositions between realism and antirealism in every field. I also think that truth is a norm of inquiry" (pg. 12). Engel proposes a belief-assertion-truth triangle which turns truth from its epistemological foundations (and its ethical consequences) to a normative concept. So Engel writes, "It is therefore necessary to make a sharp distinction between the conceptual thesis, according to which truth is a constitutive norm within the belief-assertion-truth triangle, and the ethical thesis, according to which it is an intrinsic value and must be respected and sought under all circumstances; and between these two and the epistemological thesis according to which it is the goal of inquiry, the supreme value" (pg. 26).
Rorty responds, "I am not sure I understand Engel's use of normative concept. If he simply means that we should try to have only true beliefs, then we do not disagree. If, on the other hand, he means that truth is an intrinsic good, that it possesses an intrinsic value, then the question seems to be undiscussable. I do not have the faintest idea how to go about determining which goods are the intrinsic ones and which are the instrumental ones. Nor do I see the point in raising the question. Intrinsic is a word that pragmatists find it easy to do without. If one thinks that sincerity and exactness are good things, I do not see why we should worry about whether they are means to something else or good in themselves. Which reply one gives to such questions will have no bearing on practice. Trying never to have anything but true beliefs will not lead us to do anything differently than if we simply try our best to justify our beliefs to ourselves and to others" (pg. 44).
Although the discussion section is riveting for its staccato style, it does not bring out anything in Rorty that has not already been published a dozen times.
This book is small in size, large in print, and less than 80 pages. It can be read in one sitting without a break. Both Engel and Rorty write accessibly and it is a decent introduction to some contemporary themes in philosophy. There are more arguments presented here than I have summarized which makes it a decent introduction to Rorty's thought. However, Rorty's best writing on Truth is his essays in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers (Philosophical Papers, Vol 1).
Book Description
This volume presents a selection of the philosophical papers which Richard Rorty has written over the past decade, and complements three previous volumes of his papers: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Essays on Heidegger and Others, and Truth and Progress. Topics discussed include the changing role of philosophy in Western culture over the course of recent centuries, the role of the imagination in intellectual and moral progress, the notion of ‘moral identity’, the Wittgensteinian claim that the problems of philosophy are linguistic in nature, the irrelevance of cognitive science to philosophy, and the mistaken idea that philosophers should find the ‘place’ of such things as consciousness and moral value in a world of physical particles. The papers form a rich and distinctive collection which will appeal to anyone with a serious interest in philosophy and its relation to culture.
Customer Reviews:
Reviewing 'Philosophy as Cultural Politics'.......2007-03-20
In the work of Richard Rorty, I have found great support for my own treatment of important matters in philosophy. Had I not thought, as I do,that
realism is just so much well-entrenched sci-fi, I might not have gone back to Rorty and Rorty's et alia (in Truth and Progress and Consequences of Pragmatism) However, having said this much, I should add that if one wants Rorty in depth, read something else, but do not ignore this work. For those who, like myself, are unfamiliar with many of Rorty's invited guests, the work is simple and important. We owe Rorty a debt.
More fantastic essays.......2007-03-13
More fantastic essays by the wordsmith who says everything just as beautifully as you would say it if only you had thought of it first.
Highly recommended.......2007-02-16
This is Rorty in his later years. It makes for at wonderful summing up. Because he has said the same things again and again, there is a delightful lightness to his tone. The many ramifications of his cumulative research have become clearer. I think Rorty is almost hated by some of his professional colleagues. I am not a professional philosopher, so I cannot comment on his many sins. But as a working psycholgist I love his work. He has made many of my "epistemological sins" clear. And over the years reading his books has changed me. I think this book along with "Philosophy and Social Hope" give the easiest access to his work. Highly recommended.
More of the same Rorty, but that may not be a bad thing.......2007-02-14
This is the 4th volume of Rorty's Philosophical Papers, and the 1st volume since his retirement from Stanford University. This 4th collection is not as summoning as his 3rd, and although it is as diverse in topics as the 3rd collection it is not as specific in its topics compared to the 3rd or 2nd collection.
Rorty has etched out his place in contemporary philosophy by arguing much to the same critique of philosophy for over 20 years. But he has had many interesting ideas (with their inherent controversies). What has increased is the diversity of the subject matter that he considers relevant to his overall themes, and also, he writes more elegantly and simply than he used to write (compare this volume with the collection in Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980).
I will give a summary of each argument in each essay by finding the most representative quote within each essay....If these arguments do not interest you, but you're still interested in Rorty, I would suggest Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (a critique of representationalism), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Rorty's infamous "liberal ironist"), and Achieving Our Country : Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Rorty's political manifesto). Or, check out the book list I created on Amazon entitled "Richard Rorty"
CULTURAL POLITICS AND THE QUESTION OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
"I want to argue that cultural politics should replace ontology, and also that whether it should or not is itself a matter of cultural politics" (pg. 5).
PRAGMATISM AND ROMANTIC POLYTHEISM
"You are a polytheist if you think that there is no actual or possible object of knowledge that would permit you to commensurate and rank all human needs. Isaiah Berlin's well-known doctrine of immensurable human values is, in my sense, a polytheistic manifesto. Polytheism...is pretty much coextensive with romantic utilitarianism....no way of ranking human needs...Mill's `On Liberty' provides all the ethical instruction you need" (pg. 30).
JUSTICE AS A LARGER LOYALTY
"Should we describe such moral dilemmas as conflicts between loyalty and justice, or rather, as I have suggested between loyalties to smaller groups and loyalties to larger groups?" (pg. 44).
HONEST MISTAKES
"Honesty and honorableness are measured by the degree of coherence of the stories people tell themselves and come to believe" (pg. 68).
GRANDEUR, PROFUNDITY, AND FINITUDE
"The main reason for philosophy's marginalization...is the same as the reason why the warfare between science and theology looks quaint - the fact that nowadays we are all commonsensically materialist and utilitarian....further reason...the quarrels which, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, gradually replaced the warfare between the gods and the giants - the quarrels between philosophy and poetry and between philosophy and sophistry - have themselves become quaint" (pg. 87).
PHILOSOPHY AS A TRANSITIONAL GENRE
"We think that inquiry is just another name for problem-solving, and we cannot imagine inquiry into how human beings should live, into what we should make ourselves, coming to an end. For solutions to old problems will produce fresh problems, and so on forever" (pg. 89).
PRAGMATISM AND ROMANTICISM
"...imagination is the source of freedom because it is the source of language...Nothing at all was obvious, because obviousness is not a notion that can be applied to organisms that do not use language...imagination is not a distinctively human capacity...But giving and asking for reasons is distinctively human, and coextensive with rationality. The more an organism can get what it wants by persuasion rather than force, the more rational it is" (pg. 114-115).
ANALYTIC AND CONVERSATIONAL PHILOSOPHY
"I am suggesting we drop the term `continental' and instead contrast analytic philosophy with conversational philosophy. This change would shift attention from differences between job requirements imposed on young philosophers in different regions of the world to issues I just sketched: that there is something that philosophers can get right. The term `getting it right'...is appropriate only when everybody interested in the topics draws pretty much the same inferences from the same assertions" (pg. 124).
A PRAGMATIST VIEW OF CONTEMPORARY ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY
"...we should be neither realist nor antirealists, that the entire realism-antirealism issue should be set aside" (pg. 133). "In the sort of culture I hope our remote descendants may inhabit, the philosophical literature about realism and antirealism will have been aestheticized in the way that we moderns have aestheticized medieval disputations about the ontological status of universals" (pg. 137).
NATURALISM AND QUIETISM
"Most people who think of themselves in the quietist camps, as I do, would hesitate to say that the problems studied by our activist colleagues are unreal. [Rather, we divide philosophical problems] into those that retain some relevance to cultural politics and those that do not" (pg. 149; my brackets).
WITTGENSTEIN AND THE LINGUISTIC TURN
"I shall divide three views of Wittgenstein, corresponding to three ways of thinking about the so-called `linguistic turn in philosophy'" (pg. 160). These views include "naturalists," "Wittgensteinian therapists," and "pragmatic Wittgensteinians." (Rorty is in the third camp). Rorty argues 2 things: "there is no interesting sense in which philosophical problems are problems of language,...and the linguistic turn was useful nevertheless, for it turned philosophers'' attentions from the topic of experience toward that of linguistic behavior. That shift helped break the hold of empiricism - and, more broadly, representationalism" (pg. 160).
HOLISM AND HISTORICISM
"[If you are like a holist] you will try...to explain how certain organisms managed to become rational by telling stories about how various different practices came into being. You will be more interested in historical change than in neurobiological arrangements" (pg. 176).
KANT VS. DEWEY
Against the moral philosophers in the Kantian tradition and in support of the Deweyian, Rorty writes, "To say that moral principles have no inherent nature is to imply that they have no distinct source. They emerge from our encounters with our surroundings in the same way that hypotheses about planetary motion, codes of etiquette, epic poems, and all our other patterns of linguistic behavior emerge" (pg. 192).
Book Description
A superb introduction to one of today's leading and most provocative thinkers.
Since Plato most philosophy has aimed at true knowledge, penetrating beneath appearances to an underlying reality. Against this tradition, Richard Rorty convincingly argues, pragmatism offers a new philosophy of hope. One of the most controversial figures in recent philosophical and wider literary and cultural debate, Rorty brings together an original collection of his most recent philosophical and cultural writings. He explains in a fascinating memoir how he began to move away from Plato towards William James and Dewey, culminating in his own version of pragmatism. What ultimately matters, Rorty suggests, is not whether our ideas correspond to some fundamental reality but whether they help us carry out practical tasks and create a fairer and more democratic society.
Aimed at a general audience, this volume offers a stimulating summary of Rorty's central philosophical beliefs, as well as some challenging insights into contemporary culture, justice, education, and love.
Customer Reviews:
Richard Rorty, great philosopher, died in June 2007.......2007-07-25
I was reading this book when Richard Rorty passed away recently. I regret that this man is gone. The world needs more open minded thinkers. I'm glad that he left behind this and other works. His thinking is very progressive. I feel he provided the world a way out of pointless ideological warfare. If you are able to set aside your own intellectual biases and really listen to what he says in this book, he points a way to tolerance in a multicultural world and hope for a better future.
Great!.......2007-02-22
As a teacher of Philosophy courses, I have a preference for this excellent American writer. This volumn clearly marks Rorty's pragmatic move toward politics and society. It is not only this practical application of Philosophy that interests me, but his re-vitalization of Philosophy on the terms of Pragmatism and radical (non-reductionist) empiricism.
Today's word is "panrelationalism".......2006-05-22
Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, though excellent, is dense, and assumes a lot of knowledge of Western philosophical traditions. This book, by contrast, is pretty straightforward, and has excellent prose. Rorty argues once again for social constructionism, which, contrary to what rabid critics say about it, is neither nihilistic nor relativistic. Rorty is persuasive and straightforward, and does an excellent job of suggesting ties between the philosophy which he advocates and the politics of "social hope" which he stands for.
By dividing this apologia for social constructionism into several short chapters (most of them originally published as stand-alone essays), Rorty provides responses to many objections which have been made to his previous work. Some of these essays are pretty useless for most readers (e.g., an essay on Derrida's Specters of Marx), but most are models of simple and well-formed expository writing.
Sort of disappointing.......2006-01-04
I started this book with very high expectations, which may be part of why I was disappointed. I thought that I would be convinced by his arguments about the nature of knowledge and morality, since I think social constructionism has some value and don't like metaphysics. Ultimately, Rorty didn't convince me that we could do away with metaphysics, which was a disappointment.
Chapters 2 and 3 are hard reading if you're not familiar with the following authors, because Rorty does a lot of detailed comparisons between their ideas: Plato, John Dewey, Immanuel Kant, Walt Whitman, Martin Heidegger, Emerson, James, Nietzsche, Donald Davidson, Witgenstein, and Willard van Orman Quine. I'd heard of all of them but Davidson, and had some vague sense of what they did, but was overwhelmed by these chapters because I couldn't keep up. The good news is that if you get past these chapters, the rest of the book is easy.
Politically, I think that Rorty attacks the right problems, but he doesn't defend centralized democratic socialism from critiques by people like Hayek and Popper, who argue that such planning is always authoritarian. He just asserts that it will work.
Overall, I think it's a decent read, but I wouldn't recommend it for people that haven't taken a class that covers most of the philosophers I've mentioned above or done some reading on them on their own. Rorty's arguments are important, but I don't think they're as convincing as they could be.
Passionate advocacy of freedom and humanity in a time of uncertainty.......2005-11-01
About Philosophy and Social Hope by Richard Rorty
I will be brief: There is no contradiction between being a passionate proponent of liberalism or democratic socialism and being a reserved pragmatist who denies the possibility of absolute truth (absolute conformity of our mental constructs with reality) within the confines of a human head. Richard Rorty has a right to believe and defend what he finds justifiable and worthy of his personal support. He does so with the full knowledge that others may disagree and that his ideas can only obtain socially or gain momentum at the political level (where social change becomes possible) to the extent that they are persuasive enough to generate a consensus among a majority of individuals. He knows pluralism as a fact, something that we may not necessarily wish but must nevertheless acknowledge, as social beings intent on living with others in the most harmonious way, despite a plurality of individual differences. And this harmony entails mutual respect and a willingness to live by democratic rules, according to which the only legitimate political power is that which has the free support of the people under it.
Yes, Richard Rorty is right, absolute truth is socially irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that we agree on how we plan to live together on this earth, which seems discontent with our human presence as a dog with flees. And efforts like John Rawls' to define some basic principles of social organization that we can all agree on are invaluable.
Book Description
This volume collects a number of important and revealing interviews with Richard Rorty, spanning more than two decades of his public intellectual commentary, engagement, and criticism. In colloquial language, Rorty discusses the relevance and nonrelevance of philosophy to American political and public life. The collection also provides a candid set of insights into Rorty's political beliefs and his commitment to the labor and union traditions in this country. Finally, the interviews reveal Rorty to be a deeply engaged social thinker and observer.
Customer Reviews:
Very prcatical volume.......2007-07-12
this is an excellent volume for Rorty researchers; I usually do not have a lot of consideration for interview volumes, when we are talking about huge thinkers, such as Rorty, but this one would clear your views on one of the paradigmatic philosophers.
What you get in this volume are almost axiomatic statements about Rortianism - it will deffinitely be a great instrument should you want to read more complicated works of Rorty's.
A Thought-Provoking Read.......2006-05-03
It's easy to find paradoxes in Richard Rorty's thinking. He's an academic philosopher who has no faith in philosophical systems, a thinker who rejects the label "relativist" but disbelieves in the idea of absolute Truth, a liberal social observer who has Utopian hopes for humanity but rejects radical social change, a moralist who believes we can discover more about ethics and the vagaries of human conduct in a Henry James novel than in a Sunday church sermon or a philosophical treatise on ethics, and an ironist who claims that we must put irony aside when confronting social issues.
With admirable cogency, this book takes on most of these paradoxes and transforms them into highly readable food for thought. Most passages, as is true of several other recent Rorty works, are accessible to an educated layman who reads little or no academic philosophy. Those who are either mystified or irritated by the arcane jargon that dominates much academic philosophy will be enlightened by Rorty's take on the subject, and by his distinction between what he calls narrative and analytic philosophy. Though analytically trained, he favors the narrative thinkers, his major influences being the American pragmatists, William James and John Dewey. He is also clearly inspired by two Continental European thinkers, Nietzsche and Heidegger, but displays mixed feelings about both of them. He claims in this book-and I think justifiably-to distill solid and inspired pragmatist thinking from the work of both men, while discarding the chaff of Nietzsche's pro-aristocratic, anti-democratic perspective and Heidegger's fascist inclinations and pronouncements. Meanwhile, readers of this book who also happen to be admirers of Jurgen Habermas will find that he and Rorty have many points in common.
This book takes form as a series of interviews conducted by various interlocutors, and headed with a helpful overview of Rorty's thinking by editor Eduardo Mendieta. Occasionally, one or another of the interviewers asks a show-off question with inflated rhetoric, but Rorty has a good-natured way of deflating the jargon and bringing both question and questioner gently down to earth. Where passages occasionally lapse into predictability, the fault lies not with Rorty, but with unimaginative or clich? questions posed by an interviewer. For instance, when asked the old chestnut about whether or not the U.S. thrust into Afghanistan was an appropriate response to 9/11, his reply is no different from the opinions of the rest of us who consider ourselves reasonably informed onlookers. He remarks that even allowing for Washington's habit of lying to the American people, it simply made good sense to go to Afghanistan and root out the terrorist bases and training camps. But more often than not, the book's questions are more provocative, and Rorty is more than equal to the task of answering them.
A witty romp, well worth a read.......2006-02-03
Rorty has become a cultural phenomenon unto himself, standing (with Chomsky and a few others) as one of America's most famous intellectuals (so it's more than a bit distressing to discover here that he's convinced we're headed for nuclear annihilation! Why must major American intellectuals be Cassandra figures?) The Introduction by Mendieta is nicely written and illuminating, if a bit hagiographic (and the picture on the cover is priceless!). Whatever you think of Rorty's philosophical views (I find myself agreeing at most half the time -- and what fun is it to read someone you completely agree with?), he is incredibly clever. He's got the wit of a 18th century French moralist, reincarnated for the 20th century. This collection of selected interviews showcases his great talent for the moody one-liner, the quick rejoinder, the ever-clever repartee; one almost feels sorry for the interviewers on whom he frequently sharpens his tools. Rorty is a masterful stylist, and, while I think his most highly developed medium remains the essay, for those of us who have read so many of his essays that they start to seem formulaic, the interview makes for an interesting change of pace. This book helps give one a sense of Rorty's full philosophical voice, his thoughts about his own remarkable intellectual trajectory, and, in the end, his rather depressing vision of our future.
Book Description
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature hit the philosophical world like a bombshell. Richard Rorty, a Princeton professor who had contributed to the analytic tradition in philosophy, was now attempting to shrug off all the central problems with which it had long been preoccupied. After publication, the Press was barely able to keep up with demand, and the book has since gone on to become one of its all-time best-sellers in philosophy.
Rorty argued that, beginning in the seventeenth century, philosophers developed an unhealthy obsession with the notion of representation. They compared the mind to a mirror that reflects reality. In their view, knowledge is concerned with the accuracy of these reflections, and the strategy employed to obtain this knowledge--that of inspecting, repairing, and polishing the mirror--belongs to philosophy. Rorty's book was a powerful critique of this imagery and the tradition of thought that it spawned. He argued that the questions about truth posed by Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and modern epistemologists and philosophers of language simply couldn't be answered and were, in any case, irrelevant to serious social and cultural inquiry. This stance provoked a barrage of criticism, but whatever the strengths of Rorty's specific claims, the book had a therapeutic effect on philosophy. It reenergized pragmatism as an intellectual force, steered philosophy back to its roots in the humanities, and helped to make alternatives to analytic philosophy a serious choice for young graduate students. Twenty-five years later, the book remains a must-read for anyone seriously concerned about the nature of philosophical inquiry and what philosophers can and cannot do to help us understand and improve the world.
Customer Reviews:
Smashing the Mirror of Nature.......2007-09-19
"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" is Richard Rorty's magnum opus, his manifesto for a new philosophy and a new philosophical language. Taking aim at some thousands of years of philosophical tradition, Rorty argues that the concept of representation ought to be given up entirely, and with it all epistemology and all metaphysics.
A big part of the book consists of a very in-depth discussion of the traditions in epistemology and metaphysics (including ontology), and where the idea of the point of epistemology comes from in the first place. Our intuitions of our minds as "Mirrors of Nature", reflecting the Real out there in whatever imperfect way it impresses itself upon us, are traced by Rorty to the Cartesian revolution in philosophy. The whole ensemble of philosophical thought from Descartes (but inspired already by Plato), via Locke, Spinoza, Kant all the way to Frege, Russell and the early Wittgenstein and modern "analytical philosophy" is to blame for this popular view, but Rorty launches a convincing and masterfully written attack on precisely this view. Epistemology, the 'linguistic turn', ontology, and so on, Rorty argues, have never given an adequate answer to what it means exactly to say that an idea or meaning "represents" reality, nor how we would know this; and, what's worse, the problem itself is really a non-problem, since we can simply do entirely without talk in terms of truth and representation, and we will be just as able to solve the problems confronting us in daily life.
Much of the book is particularly focused on attacking the concept that the linguistic turn in philosophy has provided or can provide us with a better 'foundation for truth' than earlier attempts (Kant, Hegel, etc.). This is a highly abstract and technical discussion, where Rorty relies strongly on the counter-tradition of Quine, Sellars, and the late Wittgenstein. Thorough knowledge of all these writers and the issues in philosophy of language are required to understand this, though if you do, it is very rewarding.
Rorty subsequently goes on from his conclusions on the redundancy of the linguistic turn to found on this a general "pragmatist" approach to philosophy. Working with Davidson's concept that a majority of things we know cannot be false (since our concepts of true and false rely on context), as well as Dewey's dictum that whatever is not a problem in reality cannot be a problem in philosophy, he passionately and intelligently shows that we can do without ANY foundation for truth at all. Moreover, this also entails that the special position of philosophy as guardian of 'truth' or 'rationality' or the 'a priori synthetic' or other ways to formulate the "permitted ways of talking" disappears entirely, hopefully ending these philosophers' self-delusions so carefully constructed since Kant. Instead, Rorty proposes that we see philosophy as just another way of talking about problems we face in life, similar to and equal with poetry, literature, but also the social and physical sciences.
Indeed, one of the criticisms often made of Rorty is that he ignores the way in which the natural sciences 'work', and that this proves that it must in some way be 'in contact with reality'. Similarly, many people have felt threatened that if we do away with truth 'out there' and representation entirely, there will be no basis on which to decide what is true and what is not, and how we will separate the scientific from the every-day. Rorty is fortunately aware of these issues and counters them, stating that there is in fact no practical difference between saying that "science works because it's true" and "science is true because it works". The latter is just a more practical way of saying it, since truth is whatever we feel is warrantedly assertible at any time, given what we think works. Rorty therefore wants to do away with the special status of science as such as well, seeing no reason to see physical sciences as more "real" than social ones, nor sciences altogether as an a priori more "real" description of the world than any other (though it may of course well be a more practical way to talk about things for all sorts of purposes). This is especially interesting since a lot of people who feel called upon to defend the importance of Truth tend to view the physical sciences as paradigmatic, and this is also the case with the tradition of analytical philosophy, which tries to model philosophy after those sciences. Rorty himself started off as one of those, but halfway an already succesful academic career, he changed his mind entirely.
Overall, Rorty's attack on 'realism' of various kinds in philosophy of science as well as epistemology, metaphysics, and all a priori talk in general is as powerful as it is intelligent, and fans of the late Wittgenstein (like me) will feel that peculiar sensation of a suffocating cloud of ancient philosophical problems and dualisms being finally lifted, letting fresh air and sunlight in. Dissolving problems rather than solving them is Rorty's purpose, and he succeeds admirably.
The book is at a high level of abstraction, assumes thorough knowledge with at least 20th century philosophical writing as well as a reasonably strong knowledge of the history of philosophy, and is certainly not easy reading. Nevertheless, Rorty is in my view one of the most revolutionary philosophers of the 20th Century, together with Wittgenstein, and since this book is his primary formulation of his views, it is a must read.
Focus on the Family Resemblance.......2007-02-21
Richard Rorty is not exactly an obscure figure; and although his time of maximum exposure is probably a decade past, "Rortian" ideas still inform much of the educated world's understanding of philosophy and its relation to other fields of inquiry and culture. *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* is interesting today, perhaps *in spite* of the Rorty fad, because it contains much which will surprise the person with a casual acquaintance with such tropes. This is not the work of a social-democratic Nowhere Man attempting to resurrect dead cultural and political standpoints, but someone with a lively understanding of *la conjoncture* in analytic philosophy: the book successfully and elegantly engages with analytic programs that were most contemporary at the time of its writing, and remain influential even today.
In this it notably builds on Rorty's period of "normal science", the essays in philosophy of mind he wrote during the '60s (which helped establish the position of "eliminative materialism"). Here Rorty reassesses this work in light of what has since come to seem like an inescapable revolution in analytic philosophy, the metaphysical conclusions derived from modal logic by Kripke and others. Rorty's treatment of Kripkeanism is one of the most exciting parts of the book, but there is some competition from his charitable and capable assessment of Fodor's philosophy of psychology and its consequences for our philosophical practice generally. Rorty is also a talented expositor of Donald Davidson, who figures as an ally in this book for pursuing a "pure" research program with fewer "metaphysical" consequences than the work of Putnam: Davidsonianism, like much else, receives a relatively effortless yet suitably careful treatment, making this a suitable work for someone who wants to learn more about the general layout of analytic philosophy.
Someone familiar with the book, or with thumbnail sketches of Rorty, might object to this assessment: surely the point of the book is its sweeping pragmatist metaphilosophy, vindicating "antifoundationalist" positions on everything from phenomenal consciousness to human rights. Well, as mentioned in the book much of this ground was already covered by others (Dewey's *The Quest For Certainty* is an especially notable precursor), and in my opinion the concluding argument that philosophy ought to move from technical work to an Oakeshottean "conversation" about what is important to us as a culture is somewhat of a comedown after the able and exciting argumentation of the rest of the book. This section presages much of the way Rorty would continue on, but there is really no reason at all to throw bad money after good; a suitable understanding of this fine book should relieve you of the need to "advance" to Rorty's tiresome cultural politics.
Interesting, challenging and should be required reading..........2005-06-30
...for any philosophy student or grad student. I say this not because I think the book is the final word or the solution to every philosophical problem, but because it is a classic of philosophical writing. Rorty writes well, and what he writes is interesting. The writing is precise when it deals with technical or thorny issues and masterfully clear when expositing over large swathes of our philosophical history. Every philosophy student should be asked to read Rorty and Bertrand Russell to see that prose stylists can write technical philosophy.
The range of the book is sweeping, bringing in so many of the heroes of analytic philosophy, but placing them in a synthetic account that gives a real thrust and continuity to their work. Whether that story is correct or not is open to quibbling (see the other reviews for many of those quibbles) but it is nice to read an actual work of philosophy that sketches out the broad concerns and overall landscape, and shows us our path through that landscape, rather than just the technical tidbits.
That said, you should already know much of what is in this book. You need to have a familiarity with Quine and Wittgenstein, as well as Kuhn and Feyerabend, and Locke, and... If you have never encountered the philosophy of language or philosophy of mind before, then this book is going to be confusing and meaningless--it is an actual philosophy book, and aimed at philosophers. Don't read it expecting an introduction to the people discussed; read it if you want to see what kind of work can be done with the tools of our analytic tradition. But it shows that the analytic tradition doesn't just have to dissolve long-standing errors and misconceptions, like Wittgenstein thought--but technical, cold, dry and humorless analytic philosophy can be used to discuss our condition as Human Beings that know, think and care as well, and much less confusedly and obtusely, as can the continental philosophy tradition.
A strange and wonderful book.......2004-08-26
I read this book cover to cover back in 1979 when it first came out. I was 21 and an upper-level philosophy undergrad at the University of Houston. Bredo Johnsen led a seminar in which we discussed the book, some of whose arguments were already legendary from the world of "samizdat" philosophy publishing and academic gossip.
I was deciding at the time that I liked philosophy and wanted to do it for a living if somehow I could, but I didn't really like the way that the American mainstream was heading. This was the time of Kripke and Putnam version 4.0, metaphysical realists who backed up their essentialism with logical proofs--though Putnam was already showing signs that he was about to switch to a new operating system. The philosophers I had liked best in my undergrad studies had been the ancient Skeptics, the pragmatists (neo- and paleo-), and the later Wittgenstein. Those figures presented what seemed to me understandable, stylish, ingenious, and above all practically helpful ways of thinking about knowledge, humanity, and morality. But neo-medievalists like Kripke were fighting those ideas as hard as they could, providing backup to all the sticks-in-the-mud who had never liked that all arty Quine and Goodman stuff anyway. American philosophy was going to stay logical and technically difficult; it would remain a professional field separate from--and, by and large, of little importance to--other kinds of inquiry.
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature disturbed the peace of the cloister. It dealt with all the formidable logical issues in a way nobody expected: namely, historically. It showed how much of the difficult logical reasoning in the philosophy journals was careful reinvention of . . . well, I almost said reinvention of the wheel, but that's not the right metaphor. The wheel is actually good for something. (I'm kidding! A little. Sort-of.)
Rorty showed the origins of the modern mind-body, fact-value, and language/non-language distinctions in larger historical moral and political battles. He showed how pointless those distinctions were apart from those long-since-concluded struggles, and he reminded academic philosophers how those distinctions had already been thoroughly criticized by pragmatic and other historically-minded thinkers.
Rorty is criticized as a relativist and an "anti-realist," but this is precisely wrong. What he is above all is realistic--about where philosophical problems have come from and what we have to do to be rid of them.
PMN focuses our attention on the local, the contingent, and what changes and has changed over time; and by doing so it has become a book of long-lasting value. Twenty-five years and counting. That's short in philosophical terms, but I suspect that in the end the value of this book will be more enduring than that of most reasoning about eternal necessity.
Unable to Withstand Peter Munz's Critique.......2002-11-30
In this influential book, Rorty argues that the history of Western philosophy over the past few hundred years reveals a quest for immutable foundations for knowledge that has finally been shown to have been futile and wrongheaded. Rorty believes that a number of 20th Century philosophers (but most prominently Ludwig Wittgenstein) have demonstrated that all knowledge consists of nothing more than the beliefs of a particular speech community, as embodied in linguistic rules used by that community, and that it is impossible to go outside the closed circle of one's speech community to acquire or validate knowledge.
The most compelling critique of Rorty's thesis that I have read is contained in a little-known but highly enlightening and learned book by Peter Munz entitled "Our Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge." Munz is a historian and philosopher who has the apparently unique distinction, at least among living scholars, of having been a student of both Karl Popper and Wittgenstein (in the 1940's). Munz acknowledges in his 1985 book that Rorty's book offers "the most sustained and reasoned defense of closed circles" yet written. Munz contends, however, that a careful reading of the book reveals that Rorty has implicitly treated Wittgenstein's own intellectual biography -- i.e., Wittgenstein's move from the "picture theory of meaning" of the "Tractatus" to the closed circle philosophy of his "Philosophical Investigations" -- as representative of the history of philosophy in the last four centuries. Rorty's use of this particular paradigm for his history is misguided, Munz says, because, among other things:
1) "Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus,' far from being symptomatic of mirror philosophy, is the only mirror philosophy ever put forward." Descartes and Kant, who are presented as the "two great anti-heroes" in Rorty's account, were not "mirror philososphers at all," according to Munz. Indeed, Munz says, one of Kant's central tenets was that our minds distort the ultimate reality (the "thing in itself") and therefore preclude any "mirroring" of that reality; and
2) Because there are many possible alternatives to the picture theory of meaning, the proper rejection of that theory cannot prove the validity of the closed circle theory of knowledge. In embracing the closed circle, Wittgenstein (and Rorty) are postulating a false dichotomy. Moreover, Wittgenstein's modest attempt to demonstrate the validity of the closed circle philosophy is circular. (Ernest Gellner's scholarly but witty 1974 book, "Legitimation and Belief," offers similar criticisms of Wittgenstein's position.)
Munz also points out other problems with Rorty's closed circle philosophy, including: Rorty's implicit adherence to the longstanding view that knowledge must be "justified" in order to be valid; his inability to distinguish various kinds of knowledge from one another (e.g., witchcraft from modern physics) according to their respective explanatory power, or to account for (or even recognize) progress in human knowledge; and his complete failure to even consider the nature of human knowledge from a biological and evolutionary/adaptive standpoint (as the later Karl Popper did). See also Gellner's short and rather humorous critique of Rorty's cognitive relativism in "Debating the State of Philosophy" (Niznik & Sanders, eds.), pp. 79-84.
Amazon.com
Beginning with a historical survey by editor Morris Dickstein of the 20th-century revival of pragmatism in American philosophical circles, this collection of academic essays continues with a typically bold assertion from pragmatism's most prominent modern advocate, Richard Rorty. "Mill's On Liberty provides all the ethical instruction you need," he writes, "all the philosophical advice you are ever going to get about your responsibilities to other human beings." Other contributors consider the influence of pragmatism on social thought, law, and culture. While most of the writers share to some degree the enthusiasm with which federal judge Richard A. Posner elaborates upon the notion of "pragmatic adjudication," there are some naysayers. Richard Weisberg, for example, in his proposal for a countertradition of "codifiers," suggests, "The challenge for us is to develop and perfect our own private beliefs and, if they are good enough, to make them public." And, in his concluding remarks, literary critic Stanley Fish throws some cold water on the fire:
Some people do philosophy, some people (lots more) don't and those who do have not ascended to some rarefied realm of reflection or critical self-consciousness from which they bring back the news to their less enlightened brethren; they merely have the knack of doing a trick some others can't do and the competence they have acquired travels no further than the very small arenas in which that trick is typically performed and rewarded.
The Revival of Pragmatism is an intriguing collection of essays that manages for the most part to achieve clarity of prose equal to its rigor of intellect. --Ron Hogan
Book Description
Although long considered the most distinctive American contribution to philosophy, pragmatism—with its problem-solving emphasis and its contingent view of truth—lost popularity in mid-century after the advent of World War II, the horror of the Holocaust, and the dawning of the Cold War. Since the 1960s, however, pragmatism in many guises has again gained prominence, finding congenial places to flourish within growing intellectual movements. This volume of new essays brings together leading philosophers, historians, legal scholars, social thinkers, and literary critics to examine the far-reaching effects of this revival.
As the twenty-five intellectuals who take part in this discussion show, pragmatism has become a complex terrain on which a rich variety of contemporary debates have been played out. Contributors such as Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Nancy Fraser, Robert Westbrook, Hilary Putnam, and Morris Dickstein trace pragmatism’s cultural and intellectual evolution, consider its connection to democracy, and discuss its complex relationship to the work of Emerson, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. They show the influence of pragmatism on black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, explore its view of poetic language, and debate its effects on social science, history, and jurisprudence. Also including essays by critics of the revival such as Alan Wolfe and John Patrick Diggins, the volume concludes with a response to the whole collection from Stanley Fish.
Including an extensive bibliography, this interdisciplinary work provides an in-depth and broadly gauged introduction to pragmatism, one that will be crucial for understanding the shape of the transformations taking place in the American social and philosophical scene at the end of the twentieth century.
Contributors. Richard Bernstein, David Bromwich, Ray Carney, Stanley Cavell, Morris Dickstein, John Patrick Diggins, Stanley Fish, Nancy Fraser, Thomas C. Grey, Giles Gunn, Hans Joas, James T. Kloppenberg, David Luban, Louis Menand, Sidney Morgenbesser, Richard Poirier, Richard A. Posner, Ross Posnock, Hilary Putnam, Ruth Anna Putnam, Richard Rorty, Michel Rosenfeld, Richard H. Weisberg, Robert B. Westbrook, Alan Wolfe
Customer Reviews:
Comprehensive, yet complex overview.......2007-08-09
The revival of pragmatism, which can largely be traced to Richard Rorty's work provides an important framework for a variety of problems ranging from philosophical, through legal, cultural and literary. For someone who wants a good overview of the debates around pragmatism, this volume provides a good introduction.
The variety of essays provides a good selection of the span of modern pragmatist thought. It includes excellent articles by both Rorty and Putnam, who have very different philosophical takes on pragmatism. A few excellent survey articles on the history of pragmatism and articles that engage specific applications of pragmatist thought. As might be expected, the summary article by Stanley Fish is sure to infuriate some readers.
This is a book for someone who has a background understanding of pragmatism, but wants to learn more the uses to which it is being put.
important.......1999-02-11
This is an excellent and important book of well-written positions from a variety of perspectives. A fan of pragmatism may be turned off by the 2nd through the 6th essays, but of the following 25 at least 23 or 24 are well worth reading. The section on law debates the question of whether philosophy influences or "supports" law. I came away, as I'd been before, convinced that moving to pragmatism in philosophy is likely to have a good effect on legal opinions and that Rorty is absurdly unfair to the value of his own work by stressing that law can get on without traditional philosophy. Of course it can, but what needs to be said is that we would be better off if it did. The concluding essay by Stanley Fish is wonderful and makes a point I've been trying to find someone to agree with for years, namely that religious tolerance is a contradiction in terms; tolerance is a restriction on religion.
Book Description
The limits of interpretation--what a text can actually be said to mean--are of double interest to a semiotician whose own novels' intriguing complexity has provoked his readers into intense speculation as to their meaning. Eco's illuminating and frequently hilarious discussion ranges from Dante to The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, to Chomsky and Derrida, and bears all the hallmarks of his inimitable personal style. Three of the world's leading figures in philosophy, literary theory and criticism take up the challenge of entering into debate with Eco on the question of interpretation. Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler and Christine Brooke-Rose each add a distinctive perspective on this contentious topic, contributing to a unique exchange of ideas among some of the foremost and most exciting theorists in the field.
Customer Reviews:
Dense material in a very compact, readable form.......2003-02-10
When reading a text, how much does what the author intended count for, if anything? Is there any way to tell what a text "really" means, or can it be read however you like for whatever purpose you like? Simple as they seem, these are the fundamental questions this book is concerned with, and it is Eco's task to explain why he thinks there should be limits to interpretation - against the prevailing opinions of many modern critics and thinkers.
The book is laid out in eight sections. The first is the Introduction, which is substantial. If you're in the habit of skipping the introduction I would advise against it here, unless you consider yourself thoroughly familiar with the subject - it's helpful.
The next three sections consist of a series of lectures Eco gave on this subject, where he establishes his main points. It's quite accessible to the layman, and in the few places where the terms get a bit obscure you can usually figure out what he's talking about from the context. He uses several historical examples which keep things interesting, and his arguments are interesting whether you find them convincing or not.
Essays by Rorty, Culler and Brooke-Rose in response to these lectures make up the next part. Rorty, a self-described "pragmatist", makes the argument that we shouldn't concern ourselves with what makes a "valid" interpretation, and instead just use texts as they come before us for whatever purpose suits us best. Culler, coming from the side of the deconstructionists, argues that what Eco calls "overinterpretation" has a value of its own and reacts strongly to the implication that there should be any limits whatsoever imposed upon the critic. Brooke-Rose's piece on "palimpsest history" is not uninteresting but somewhat tangential, and you really have to stretch things to relate it to the argument going on between Eco, Rorty and Culler.
The wrap-up section is a response from Eco, mostly addressing Rorty's points though dealing somewhat with Culler's objections. There is no clear "winner", and you may not be swayed to Eco's point of view if you found one of the others more compelling, but there is ample food for thought.
Even for the non-academic, a great insightfull book.......2000-03-27
I don't have much background in literary theory, but I still found Eco's writing very accessible and very enjoyable. I think the topic would interest anyone that has ever tried to appreciate literature: up to what point can we take events in a book/play/poem to be significant to the idea the writer is trying to get across?
This book constructs its arguments from the ground up, although at times the approach to interpretation taken by Eco is radically different from how one would be accustumed to reading a book.
I believe that eventually one gets used to the different approaches suggested -- or better, exemplified -- by Eco, and the initial difficulties in understanding his point of view are overcome to open a great new horizon of ideas and literary enjoyment.
Book Description
Though coming from different and distinct intellectual traditions, Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo are united in their criticism of the metaphysical tradition. The challenges they put forward extend beyond philosophy and entail a reconsideration of the foundations of belief in God and the religious life. They urge that the rejection of metaphysical truth does not necessitate the death of religion; instead it opens new ways of imagining what it is to be religious -- ways that emphasize charity, solidarity, and irony. This unique collaboration, which includes a dialogue between the two philosophers, is notable not only for its fusion of pragmatism (Rorty) and hermeneutics (Vattimo) but also for its recognition of the limits of both traditional religious belief and modern secularism.
In "Anticlericalism and Atheism" Rorty discusses Vattimo's work Belief and argues that the end of metaphysics paves the way for an anti-essentialist religion. Rorty's conception of religion, determined by private motives, is designed to produce the gospel's promise that henceforth God will not consider humanity as a servant but as a friend. In "The Age of Interpretation," Vattimo, who is both a devout Catholic and a frequent critic of the church, explores the surprising congruence between Christianity and hermeneutics in light of the dissolution of metaphysical truth. As in hermeneutics, interpretation is central to Christianity, which introduced the world to the principle of interiority, dissolving the experience of objective reality into "listening to and interpreting messages."
The lively dialogue that concludes this volume, moderated and edited by Santiago Zabala, analyzes the future of religion together with the political, social, and historical aspects that characterize our contemporary postmodern, postmetaphysical, and post-Christian world.
Customer Reviews:
What the Gospel can Become.......2005-12-21
"Religion may resume its role without masks or dogmatism."
Has the Enlightenment forever darkened religion's light? When metaphysics has been thoroughly deconstructed, is religion a relic or might it have a viable future?
Addressing these questions in a reasonably accessible way is The Future of Religion, a short book featuring an exchange of ideas between American Richard Rorty and Italian Gianni Vattimo. Harnessing the American neo-pragmatism of Rorty with the Continental hermeneutics of Vattimo The Future of Religion develops the contours of an anti-essentialist, post-modern religion.
It no longer works (pragmatism) and is no longer meaningful (hermeneutics) to speak of the true essence of God. Advancing "weak thought" - the kenotic giving up of powerful metanarratives for the reciprocity of charity, solidarity, and irony - the authors promote the giving up of metaphysical structures in favour of attending to the formation of oneself.
Rorty's contribution is in outlining his political - not epistemological - atheism is better called "anticlericalism." The corollary of this radical scepticism of institutional religion is that religion should be privatised. Away with the Science vs. Bible, Reason vs. Belief, dichotomy - "The epistemic arena is a public space, a space from which religion can and should retreat" (36). Religion can be regarded as non-public because it exists on a cultural/emotional/aesthetic plane. Just as a diner needn't offer sophisticated rationale for choosing the fish over the pasta, privatised religion needn't feel compelled to give "objective" reasons for believing.
Vattimo's chapter puts forward the very provocative thesis that the dissolution of metaphysics is the meaning of Christianity. "Postmodern nihilism constitutes the actual truth of Christianity" (47). The "message of salvation consists above all in dissolving the peremptory claims of `reality'" (49). This non-foundational, post-metaphysical philosophy actually means the survival of Christianity for in the termination of all that claims to be objective we understand the only truth beyond the reaches of demythologisation, charity.
The final chapter is a dialogue between Vattimo and Rorty, moderated by the editor Santiago Zabala. This chapter offers a break from essay genre and a chance to "see" these scholars in a different context. The conversation suffers a little from a lack of focus, but that may simply because the prior chapters are so accessible.
If you are already inclined to dispute the contentions of postmodernism you will not be converted here. The chief contribution of The Future of Religion is in detailing the programme necessary for religion's survival in a post-modern age. If you are not on friendly terms with postmodernism, the book will frustrate you to no end. If you are more amicable to postmodernism, you will be challenged to evaluate whether the authors' vision of religion is the best vision. Even though I can identify with their wariness of authoritarian inflexibility in our post-modern world, but wonder if embracing nihilism as the fulfilment of Christianity is going a bit overboard. Either way, in paving a way for religion to "resume its role without masks or dogmatism," Rorty and Vattimo challenge us to evaluate what the gospel can become in the third millennium.
Baptists need not apply.......2005-10-11
The article by Rorty, "Anticlericalism and Atheism" described to a "T" the niche I am familiar with through Unitarian Universalism. Since they are simply an example of a broader set of folks that fit in this niche I am sure it describes a group larger than, say, a million people. I am not sure how much larger a group it fits. I also suspect that in order to fit in this niche, to have a similar enough web of belief that there is sufficient family resemblance that in a language game about grand narratives, what counts for an individual in this niche must go through a lot of the philosophically "bad" questions to come to the conclusion that those were bad questions. We have to start simply, even if not as simply as Augustine might have described it. (So there should always be a market for that.)
So if the topic is the future of religion we should note how small a market is at stake here. Baptists need not apply. There are books being written for larger audiences with titles like, "God's Politics : Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It" by Jim Wallis (number 135 on the Amazon list with 155 reviews compared to "The Future of Religion" (number 400,363 on the Amazon list with 5 reviews.) That comparison was just a shot in the dark.
That being said, Rorty is right on target in describing a niche market I am familiar with and I appreciate the insights. As usual, Rorty says better than I could what I think I thought before I read it. Now I know I think it.
Gianni Vattimo too is interesting: ""If "facts" thus appear to be nothing but interpretations, interpretation, on the other hand, presents itself as (the ) fact: hermeneutics is not a philosophy but the enunciation of historical existence itself in the age of the end of metaphysics." (p. 45) I confess to being attracted to the book because of Rorty but now will be looking into Vattimo's "After Christianity".
Zabala I found a little more difficult but perhaps that was just because he had the harder job to do.
Get a life!.......2005-08-05
I was amused by the review from Jackson K. Eskew, a.k.a. "Faustus infinitus." I was looking at his review and thinking...this, from a person whose various other reviews include: "God and the World," "Salt of the earth, the Church at the End of the Millennium," "Visual Bible: Mathew," and "The Gospel of John." Amongst his favorite musical masterpieces is Mozart's Requiem, and in a way typical of many neo-conservatives and fundamentalists, he even took the time to watch a war movie: The Bridge on the River Kwai! Oh, and he did not like the whistling! Get a grip.
My compliments to David McClean whose review was very insightful.
Overcoming Dualism; Or How To Get to the Market via Mars.......2005-03-31
Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo have given us a work that may be described as an important part of an answer to two important questions that modernity has not yet
General
| Philosophy
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Philosophy and Social Hope
Achieving Our Country : Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America
Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty (Cultural Memory in the Present)
Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers (Philosophical Papers, Vol 1)
