The kind of appropriation of other writers and thinkers that Rorty performs will at times seem to do violence to the views and intentions of the protagonists. His heterodox reading of Dewey and his generally dismissive attitude toward Peirce has also meant that Rorty found few friends among the keepers of the pragmatist tradition in the American academy.
W: Sleeper, ; as well as the essays in Langsdorf and Smith, For Rorty, the key figure in the American pragmatist movement is John Dewey, to whom he attributes many of his own central doctrines. In particular, Rorty finds in Dewey an anticipation of his own view of philosophy as the facilitator of a humanist politics, of a non-ontological view of the virtues of inquiry, of a holistic conception of human intellectual life, and of an anti-essentialist, historicist conception of philosophical thought.
Instead of aiding us in our aspiration to govern ourselves through rational thought, Rorty weakens our intellectual resilience and leaves us even more vulnerable to rhetorical seduction.
When Rorty abandons the notion of objectivity, Misak argues, he also dispenses with the capacity for normative critique Misak, Rorty, from this perspective, ends up with a pragmatism of subjectivity in the tradition of William James.
Rorty is sometimes portrayed as a renegade, as someone who went through a transformation from bona fide analytical philosopher to something else, and then lived to tell a tale of liberation from youthful enchantment. So, too, is his relation to analytical philosophy in particular. This way of stating the lesson, however, appears to leave open the possibility that certain philosophical problems eventually may legitimately be taken seriously — that is, at face value in the sense that they require constructive solutions — provided the assumptions which sustain their formulation stand up to proper critical scrutiny.
But the full force of the lesson Rorty learned emerges only with the view that this notion of proper critical scrutiny is questionable. For Rorty, to legitimate the assumptions on which a philosophical problem is based would be to establish that the terms we require to pose that problem are really mandatory, that the vocabulary in which we encounter the problem is in principle inescapable.
To hold that no vocabulary is final is also to hold that no vocabulary can be free of unthematized yet optional assumptions. Hence any effort to circumvent a philosophical problem by making such assumptions visible is subject to its own circumvention. Accordingly, the fact that Rorty often distances himself from the terms in which he earlier framed arguments and made diagnoses is in itself no reason to impose on him, as some have done, a temporal dichotomy.
Rorty designates this faith Platonism an important theme in CIS. Characterizations of pragmatism in terms of anti-foundationalism PMN , of anti-representationalism ORT , and of anti-essentialism TP are all explicitly parasitic on constructive efforts in epistemology and metaphysics, and are intended to highlight the various ways these efforts remain under the spell of a Platonic faith in ideal concepts and mandatory forms of descriptions.
Many — some gleeful, some chagrined — have read PMN as a purported demonstration of the bankruptcy of one of the two contemporary main streams of Western philosophy. Forty years later, however, it seems unwise to superimpose the analytic-continental divide onto the message of PMN, or onto Rorty.
In PMN, his central point is that philosophy needs to break free from the metaphor of mind as a medium of appearances, appearances that philosophy must help us sort into the mere and the reality-corresponding ones. Rorty made this point in a vocabulary that was developed by Anglo-American whether by birth, naturalization, or late adoption philosophers in the course of the preceding half-century.
Nor is it his intention to do so. The analytic style is, I think, a good style. However, while Rorty apparently bears no prejudice against analytic philosophy in particular, the very reason for his tolerance — his antiessentialist, historicist view of philosophy and its problems — has for many critics been a point of objection.
After his faint praise, Rorty goes on:. The normal form of life in the humanities is the same as that in the arts and in belles-lettres; a genius does something new and interesting and persuasive, and his or her admirers begin to form a school or movement CP, — If his critique has bite specifically against analytic philosophy, this may be because of a lingering faith in philosophical problems as lasting intellectual challenges that any honest thinker has to acknowledge, and which may be met by making progress in methodology.
Rorty himself, however, nowhere says that this faith is part of the essence of analytical philosophy. On the contrary, it is clear that pioneering analytical philosophers, people like Sellars, Quine, and Davidson, provided Rorty with indispensable critical tools in his attack on the epistemological legitimation-project that has been a central concern in philosophy since Descartes.
It is true that Rorty, as a professor of the humanities at the University of Virginia, found a larger intellectual audience outside philosophy departments, as he increasingly turned to literary theory and to political thought.
However, while drawing on sources outside the analytic tradition and also outside the field of philosophy, Rorty never ceased to engage with analytic philosophy, and he retained a significant audience among Anglophone philosophers critical of the resurgence of metaphysics brought on by the seminal work of Saul Kripke.
A slow but persistent resurgence and rearticulation of pragmatic naturalism beginning in the s, gaining force after the turn of the millennium, provided new perspectives on Rorty and on the dialectical role of his metaphilosophical critique. The tone of these critical appraisals is generally different from the frequently harsh responses to the slayer of representationalist epistemology that appeared during the s.
Biographical Sketch 2. Against Epistemology 2. Cultural Politics 3. Rorty in the Conversations of Philosophy 4. While Quine casts doubt on the notion of structure or meaning which linguistically-turned epistemology had instated in place of mental entities, Sellars, questioning the very idea of givenness, came at the distinction from the other side: …Sellars and Quine invoke the same argument, one which bears equally against the given-versus-nongiven and the necessary-versus-contingent distinctions.
Cultural Politics Taking epistemological behaviorism to heart, Rorty urges, means that we can no longer construe the authority of science in terms of ontological claims.
Rorty writes, The moral tasks of a liberal democracy are divided between the agents of love and the agents of justice. In his words, Our loyalty to … larger groups will, however, weaken, or even vanish altogether, when things get really tough.
Rorty opens Achieving Our Country by writing, National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement. New York: Penguin Books. Voparil, C. Bernstein eds , Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Leach, S. Tartaglia eds. New York: Cambridge University Press. Voparil eds. Hahn eds. Balslev, A. Brandom, R. Malden: Blackwell. Collini, S. Festenstein, M. Thompson eds. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Huang, Y. Kulp, C. Lewis-Kraus, G. Mendieta, E. Mouffe, C. Niznik, J and J. Sanders eds. Westport: Praeger Publishers. Nystrom, D. Puckett eds. Rorty, R. Lee, and A. Mourelatos, eds. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum. Vattimo, , The Future of Religion, S. Zabala ed. McCuaig trans. New York: Columbia University Press. Saatkamp, H. Nashville and London: Vanderbilt University Press. Other Works by Rorty Rorty, R. Bieri, R. Hortsman, and L. Kruger eds. Rorty, J. Schneewind, and Q.
Skinner eds. Rorty argues that philosophy has unduly relied on a representational theory of perception and a correspondence theory of truth , hoping our experience or language might mirror the way reality actually is. In this he continues a certain controversial Anglophone tradition, which builds upon the work of philosophers such as Quine, Sellars, and Donald Davidson. When it first appeared in , Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature hit the philosophical world like a bombshell.
In it, Richard Rorty argued that, beginning in the seventeenth century, philosophers developed an unhealthy obsession with the notion of representation: comparing the mind to a mirror that reflects reality. Rorty's book is a powerful critique of this imagery and the tradition of thought that it spawned. Today, the book remains a must-read and stands as a classic of twentieth-century philosophy. Its influence on the academy, both within philosophy and across a wide array of disciplines, continues unabated.
This edition includes new essays by philosopher Michael Williams and literary scholar David Bromwich, as well as Rorty's previously unpublished essay "The Philosopher as Expert. Seeing philosophy as conversation with a number of fruitful avenues of discourse, Rorty seems to be caught in limbo, unwilling to follow through or commit himself to any particular line of discourse for fear of closing himself off to alternative discourses.
One implication of such a position is that despite its holder's claims that he or she will at least attempt to incorporate abnormal discourses of all sorts, the conversationalist will not be able to consider seriously a number of types of discourse.
In it, Richard Rorty argued that, beginning in the seventeenth century, philosophers developed an unhealthy obsession with the notion of representation: comparing the mind to a mirror that reflects reality. Rorty's book is a powerful critique of this imagery and the tradition of thought that it spawned.
Today, the book remains a must-read and stands as a classic of twentieth-century philosophy. In 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature' Richard Rorty presented his provocation and influential vision of the post-philosophical culture, calling upon professional philosophers to accept that epistemology is dead, that the analytic method is a myth, and that philosophy and science are merely forms of literature. Richard Rorty is one of the most influential, controversial and widely-read philosophers of the twentieth century.
In this GuideBook to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Tartaglia analyzes this challenging text and introduces and assesses: Rorty's life and the background to his philosophy the key themes and arguments of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature the continuing importance of Rorty's work to philosophy.
Rorty and the Mirror of Nature is an ideal starting-point for anyone new to Rorty, and essential.
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