Richard Rorty

Reviews / Votes

This remains an essential volume for engaging with Rorty's work; whether as an initial enquiry or a continuing conversation, it has much to offer on both Rorty's project and his relevance to social and political life. * Political Studies Review Volume 13, Issue 1 * Richard Rorty associated the meliorism of old American pragmatism to a vocabulary or narrativistic philosophical social activism. He also gathered pragmatism meliorism with Nietzschean anti-authoritarianism. This mix of linguistic social activism and anti-authoritarianism is unique. He left us with useful vocabulary tools to deal with the challenges of democracy and humanism. Through essays from well-known scholars this book shows the reader why Rorty's writings, his personal way of telling the history of philosophy, his frank dialogues with a wide spectrum of contemporary philosophers, constitute a pathfinder. His writings represents an effort of showing us how philosophy can affect our private and public spheres in a positive way. This collection is engaging and timely. It is symptomatic of a new wave in the encroaching seas of Rorty commentary. The authors approach Rorty's ideas in an admirably bold, but not uncritical spirit. Moreover, they concentrate on exploring his most challenging insights before developing them in ways that shed welcome light on the wider cultural significance of his unique conception of pragmatist philosophy. This collection provides an insightful analysis Richard Rorty's widely-discussed but often-misunderstood oeuvre, and succeeds, moreover, in showing its continuing relevance. Written by an excellent cast of authors, with such towering figures as Juergen Habermas among them, the essays are fresh, powerful, and inspiring. By discussing Rorty's pragmatism in the context of topics as diverse as epistemic normativity, bodily awareness, the mother-infant dyad, cosmopolitan patriotism, cultural politics, and the like, they do justice to the breadth and interdisciplinarity of Rorty's pragmatism and should be of interest not only to philosophers, but also to social scientists, political theorists, and specialists in feminist, literary, and cultural studies. Highly recommended. /* Style Definitions */ This excellent collection of essays, by young and world renowned thinkers, from across many disciplines, foregrounds Rorty's irreverence against any form of dogmatism, while celebrating the generosity of his thinking. What this collection demonstrates amply and eloquently is that Rorty's entire oeuvre had at its core a profound ethical and political sensibility that made him a philosophical sibling of figures like Socrates, Montaigne, Voltaire, Russell, Sartre, Derrida, de Beauvoir, Chomsky, and Nussbaum. Like them, Rorty exhibited why we are the poetic species. Richard Rorty has done more than any other contemporary philosopher to stimulate interest in pragmatism and to connect it to social and political questions. The essays in this excellent collection are a fitting tribute to pragmatism's most controversial figure, providing insight into his contribution to that tradition as well as suggestions about how that contribution might be taken forward. A rich and affectionate tribute to a great pragmatist -- highly recommended.