A Companion to Rorty E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to Philosophy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1440

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

A groundbreaking reference work on the revolutionary philosophy and intellectual legacy of Richard Rorty

A provocative and often controversial thinker, Richard Rorty and his ideas have been the subject of renewed interest to philosophers working in epistemology, metaphysics, analytic philosophy, and the history of philosophy. Having called for philosophers to abandon representationalist accounts of knowledge and language, Rorty introduced radical and challenging concepts to modern philosophy, generating divisive debate through the new form of American pragmatism which he advocated and the renunciation of traditional epistemology which he espoused.

However, while Rorty has been one of the most widely-discussed figures in modern philosophy, few volumes have dealt directly with the expansive reach of his thought or its implications for the fields of philosophy in which he worked. The Blackwell Companion to Rorty is a collection of essays by prominent scholars which provide close, and long-overdue, examination of Rorty’s groundbreaking work. Divided into five parts, this volumecovers the major intellectual movements of Rorty’s career from his early work on consciousness and transcendental arguments, to the lasting impacts of his major writings, to his approach to pragmatism and his controversial appropriations from other philosophers, and finally to his later work in culture, politics, and ethics.

• Offers a comprehensive, balanced, and insightful account of Rorty's approach to philosophy
• Provides an assessment of Rorty’s more controversial thoughts and his standing as an “anti-philosopher’s philosopher”
• Contains new and original exploration of Rorty’s thinking from leading scholars and philosophers
• Includes new perspectives on topics such as Rorty's influence in Central Europe 

Despite the relevance of Rorty’s work for the wider community of philosophers and for those working in fields such as international relations, legal and political theory, sociology, and feminist studies, the secondary literature surrounding Rorty’s work and legacy is limited. A Companion to Rorty address this absence, providinga comprehensive resource for philosophers and general readers.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Blackwell Companions to Philosophy

Preface and Acknowledgments

Contributors

Introduction

1 Background

2 Motivation and Editorial Considerations

3 Structure and Organization

References

Notes

Prologue

1 Reading Rorty

References

Part I: Early Developments

2 Was Rorty an Eliminative Materialist?

1 Introduction

2 Contemporary Eliminative Materialism

3 Rorty’s “Disappearance” Version of the Identity Theory

4 Why Rorty Was Not an Eliminative Materialist

References

Further Reading

3 Rorty’s Philosophy of Consciousness

1 The Odd Physicalist Out

2 Rorty’s Position

3 Assessment

References

Further Reading

4 Rorty and Transcendental Arguments

1 Introduction

2 Verificationism and Transcendental Arguments

3 Parasitism and Conceptual Dependence

4 The Ends of Transcendental Arguments

5 Beyond Im/modesty?

6 Conclusion

References

Part II: Texts

5

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

1 Metaphilosophy

2 The Plot

3 Part One

4 Part Two

5 Part Three

References

Further Reading

6 The Uses of Philosophy after the Collapse of Metaphysics

1 His Most Rortian Book

2 Ironists and Metaphysicians

3 Public and Private

References

7 Rhetoric Between Philosophy and Poetry

References

8 Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism

Part III: Themes

9 Are Pragmatists About Truth True Democrats?

1 Introduction

2 Truth: Substantive or Shallow?

3 The Pragmatists on Truth and Democracy

4 Can We Do Without Realist Truth in Democratic Politics?

5 Conclusion

References

Further Reading

10 Richard Rorty and (the End of) Metaphysics (?)

1 What Was Metaphysics?

2 A Pragmatic Metaphysical Quietist

3 Rorty’s Metaphysical Eggshells

4 The Myth of a Postmetaphysical Culture

Acknowledgment

References

11 Rorty, Pragmatism, and EthicsThe Value of Hope

I

II

III

IV

References

12 The Center and Circumference of Knowledge

1 Romantic Vistas

2 Romanticism and Rortian Pragmatism

3 Pragmatism as Inverted Metaphysics

4 Blake’s Strategy: Romanticism as Ironism

References

13 Rorty and Analytic Philosophy

References

14 Speculative Pragmatism

1 Genealogy and Transvaluative Reading

2 Rorty and Post‐Nietzschean Philosophy

3 Rorty and Speculative Realism?

4 Rorty as Inexistant Transvaluator

5 Inconsequences

References

Part IV: Appropriations

15 Rorty

on Hegel

on the Mind in History

1 Rortarian Redescription and Hegelian Recognition

2 Alternate Paths from Whitehead – Egocentricity Without Metaphysical Egos

3 Hegel on Intensional and Extensional Judgments

4 Conclusion

References

Further Reading

16 Rorty and the Mirror of Nietzsche

1 Songs of the Self

2 Selected Affinities

3 Zarathustra Strikes Back

4 Conclusion

References

Further Reading

17 The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy

1 Introduction

2 Varieties of Difference

3 The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy

4 The Truth of Being and Epochs of Being

5 Conclusion: Heidegger, Rorty, and Appropriation

18 Rorty’s Romantic Polytheism

References

Further Reading

19 Inconvenient Conversational Partners

1 Prologue

2 Language, Self, and Contingency

3 The Pragmatic Dimension

4 Cleverer Selves Inside Clever Animals

5 Pragmatist Qualms

6 Postscript

Acknowledgment

References

20 Rorty and Dewey

1 Introduction

2 Outline

3 Biographical Entanglements

4 “Classical” versus “Neo/New” Pragmatism

5 Rorty’s Approach to Dewey

6 Experience

7 Objectivity and Truth

8 Inquiry and Scientific Method

9 Ethics, Politics, and Democracy

10 Democracy and Politics

11 Conclusion: The Function of Philosophy

References

Further Reading

21 Common Understanding Without Uncommon Certainty

References

Further Reading

22 Rorty, Davidson, and Representation

1 Introduction

2 Davidson and Anti‐Representationalism

3 The Attack on Representation: Epistemic Intermediaries

4 The Attack on Representation: Sentences

5 Two Differences Between Rorty and Davidson

6 Rorty’s Dichotomies

7 Triangulation and Truth

8 Changes in Rorty’s View

9 Conclusion

References

Further Reading

23 The Rorty–Habermas Debate

References

Further Reading

Part V: Culture, Politics, and Religion

24 Rorty and Literature

1 Philosophical and Literary

2 Ethics and the Image of Man

3 Naturalism and Humanism

4 Concluding Remarks

References

25 The Contested Marriage of Rorty and Feminism

1 Rorty and Feminism

2 Reform versus Revolution

3 Rortyan Feminism and Truth

References

26 Rorty and Religion: Beyond the Culture Wars?

1 The Public Square as Epistemic Arena

2 The Social Practical Basis of Authority

3 Religion and Democracy Beyond the Culture Wars

References

27 Rorty’s Philosophy of Religion

1 Introduction

2 Rorty’s General Approach

3 Conversation Stopper

4 Faith, Responsibility, and Romance

5 Religion in the Public Square

6 Romantic Polytheism

7 Cultural Politics

8 On the Future of Religion

Acknowledgment

References

28 Rorty and the Intellectual Culture of Central Europe

1 Introduction

2 Richard Rorty in Czechoslovakia

3 Richard Rorty in Hungary

4 Richard Rorty in Poland

5 Conclusion

References

Further Reading

29 Rorty and Nihilism

1 Rorty’s No to Nihilism?

2 Three Cases of Existential Nihilism

3 Outgrowing Nihilism

References

Further Reading

30 Rorty’s Ethics of Responsibility

1 Early Work to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

2 Contingency, Irony, and Responsibility

3 Self‐Images, “Borderline Cases” and Contingent Obligations

References

Further Reading

Part VI: Coda

31 Poetry as (a Kind of) Philosophy

Internet Resources

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

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A Companion to Rorty

Edited by Alan Malachowski

A Companion to Rorty

Edited by

Alan Malachowski

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication DataNames: Malachowski, Alan, editor.Title: A companion to Rorty / edited by Alan Malachowski. Description: First edition. | Hoboken : Wiley, 2020. | Series: Blackwell companions to philosophy ; 73 | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2019037133 (print) | LCCN 2019037134 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118972168 (hardback) | ISBN 9781118972175 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781118972182 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Rorty, Richard.Classification: LCC B945.R524 C66 2020 (print) | LCC B945.R524 (ebook) | DDC 191–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037133LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037134

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Preface and Acknowledgments

With increasing pressures continuing to be exerted on university funding from all sides, and book purchases generally suffering accordingly, the Wiley Blackwell series of Companions offers important resources for both students and professional academics alike. The present volume was planned and put together very much with that context in mind. Indeed, it aims to provide anyone who has an interest in Rorty’s ideas with sufficient understanding of his approach to philosophy for them to make the most of the writings that stimulated this interest.

Inevitably, given the wide range of authors and topics Rorty explored throughout a long career, and the voluminous writings that reflected these explorations, there are some omissions here. But, the grounding provided by the chapters that have been included should enable readers to both identify those gaps and tackle them should they so wish. It is only in that sense of providing a “grounding” that the Introduction later refers to this project as a “one‐stop resource.”

I would like to thank the contributors as well as the staff of Wiley Blackwell for all their efforts in making this volume possible. I am also grateful to Alta Bridges for her exemplary copy‐editing. The publishers would like to thank both Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press for granting permission to reproduce the following copyrighted material in the volume:

“Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism,” Richard Bernstein; in

Richard Rorty

, Charles B. Guignon and David R. Hiley (Eds.), Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2003, pp. 124–138.

“The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy,” Mark Okrent; in

The Monist

, 64(4), 1981, pp.500–517.

Contributors

Richard J. Bernstein is Vera List professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He is one of Richard Rorty’s most insightful commentators. His books include Philosophical Profiles, The New Constellation, and The Pragmatic Turn. He is the coeditor of The Rorty Reader.

William M. Curtis is professor of political science at the University of Portland. His research interests include theories of liberalism, classical liberalism and the free market, religion and politics, politics and literature, US Constitutional law, and American pragmatism. He is the author of Defending Rorty: Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue.

Pascal Engel is professor of contemporary philosophy at the University of Geneva. He is co‐author (with Richard Rorty) of What is the Use of Truth? His other books include The Norm of Truth and Truth.

Molly B. Farneth is assistant professor in the Religion Department at Haverford College. She works in the areas of American and European religious and philosophical thought (nineteenth century to the present), with particular attention to religion and politics, ethics, ritual studies, and feminist and gender studies in religion. She is the author of Hegel’s Social Ethics: Religion, Conflict, and Rituals of Reconciliation.

Neil Gascoigne is reader in philosophy at Royal Holloway University of London. He is the author of Richard Rorty and Rorty, Liberal Democracy, and Religious Belief.

Serge Grigoriev is associate professor of philosophy at Ithaca College, New York. His recent publications include “A Pragmatist Critique of Dogmatic Philosophy of History” and “Hypotheses, Generalizations, and Convergene: Some Peircean Themes in the Study of History.”

Gary Gutting is a former professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and holder of the endowed chair. Gary was the author of numerous books including French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, What Philosophy Can Do, and Thinking the Impossible.

David L. Hildebrand is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. His publications include Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists and Dewey: A Beginner’s Guide.

Colin Koopman is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is the author of How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person, Genealogy as Critique, and Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty.

Alexander Krémer is professor of philosophy at the University of Szeged. His field of interest includes hermeneutics, ethics, aesthetics, and pragmatism, especially neopragmatism. He is the author of four books including Why Did Heidegger Become Heidegger? and Philosophy of the Late Richard Rorty. He is the editor in chief of Pragmatism Today.

Steven Levine is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He has published articles on classical and contemporary pragmatism as well as more contemporary figures including Sellars, Brandom, McDowell, and Davidson. He is the author of Pragmatism, Objectivity, and Experience.

Tracy Llanera is an assistant research professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut and a faculty affiliate at the UConn Asian and Asian American Studies Institute. She works in philosophy of religion, social and political philosophy, and American pragmatism, specializing on the topics of nihilism, conversion, and the politics of language. Her writings have been published in a variety of journals, including Philosophy and Social Criticism, Contemporary Pragmatism, Hypatia, Analyse & Kritik, and Pragmatism Today. She is currently working on two books: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism and A Philosophical Defence of Nihilism, coauthored with James Tartaglia.

David Macarthur is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney. His main interests include skepticism, pragmatism, philosophy of psychology, history of modern philosophy, Wittgenstein, and aesthetics. He coedited Naturalism in Question.

Danielle Macbeth is T. Wistar Brown professor of philosophy at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and the author of Frege’s Logic and Realizing Reason: A Narrative of Truth and Knowing. Her work focuses mainly on philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, language, and logic. She has also published various essays in the history and philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and pragmatism, among other topics.

Alan Malachowski is a research fellow in the Centre for Applied Ethics at Stellenbosch University. He is author of Richard Rorty, and The New Pragmatism. His edited works include Reading Rorty and The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism.

Steven Michels is professor of political science at Sacred Heart University, Fairfield. His scholarship covers work in theory (Nietzsche, Tocqueville, Sinclair Lewis), higher education, and popular culture. His publications include Sinclair Lewis and American Democracy, and “Neitzsche on Truth and The Will.”

Marjorie C. Miller is professor emirata of philosophy at Purchase College, State University of New York. She has held Fulbright awards in both China and Korea. Her publications include “Rortian Extremes and the Confucian Zhongyong” and “Feminism and Pragmatism”

Isaac Nevo is associate professor of philosophy at the Ben‐Gurion University. His publications include “Richard Rorty’s Romantic Pragmatism” and “In Defence of Dogma: Davidson, languages, and conceptual schemes.”

Carol Nicholson is professor of philosophy at Rider University. Her publications include “Rorty’s Pragmatic Patriotism” and “Education and the Pragmatic Temperament.”

Christopher Norris is distinguished research professor in philosophy at Cardiff University. He is author of numerous books including The Contest of Faculties, Derrida, and Truth and Meaning.

Mark Okrent is professor of philosophy at Bates College. He is the author of Heidegger's Pragmatism as well as numerous articles on intentionality, teleology, and Heidegger.

William Ramsey is professor of philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He works primarily in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and is the author of Representation Reconsidered, “Intuitions as Evidence Facilitators,” and “Must Cognition be Representational?” as well as the coeditor (with Keith Frankish) of the Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science and the Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence.

Paul Redding is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Sydney. He is a leading authority on Kantian and Hegelian Idealism. He is author of Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought and Thoughts, Deeds, Words and World: Hegel’s Idealist Response to the Linguistic “Metacritical Invasion.”

Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński is associate professor of philosophy at Opole University. He is the author of Values, Valuations and Axiological Norms in Richard Rorty’s Neopragmatism and Beyond Aesthetic and Politics.

Elizabeth Sperry is professor of philosophy at William Jewell College. Her publications include “Dupes of Patriarchy: Feminist Strong Substantive Autonomy’s Epistemological Weaknesses” and “Medina on the Social Construction of Agency.”

James Tartaglia is professor of metaphysical philosophy at the University of Keele. He is the author of Rorty and the Mirror of Nature and Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality; editor of Richard Rorty: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers; and coeditor (with Stephen Leach) of Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers and Consciousness and the Great Philosophers: What Would They Have Said About Our Mind‐Body Problem?

Paul Trembath is associate professor in the Department of English at Colorado State University. He teaches critical studies and its philosophical backgrounds, twentieth‐century literatures, and interdisciplinary humanities. He has published widely in critical journals and book editions and is finishing a book that examines the relationship of nonreading to capital process, how ordinary language practices produce unnecessary antagonisms between scientific and discursive materialisms as well as policy‐regulated incompatibility of human behavior and eco‐sustainability.

Anton A. van Niekerk is distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Stellenbosch. has published widely in philosophy. He is editor and coauthor of The Status of Prenatal Life and Aids in Context: A South African Perspective. His published articles include “Pragmatism and religion.”

Emil Višňovský is professor of philosophy at Comenius University, Bratislava. His publications include “Peirce and Rorty: An Attempt at a Reconciliation of Two Versions of Pragmatism” and “Philosophy of Science in Classical Pragmatism.”

Christopher J. Voparil is professor of philosophy at Union Institute and University, where he teaches philosophy and political theory. He is author of Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision and articles in, among others, Contemporary Pragmatism, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. He is coeditor of The Rorty Reader and Pragmatism and Justice, and is founding president of the Richard Rorty Society.

Introduction: Rorty’s Approach toPhilosophy: Time for Reassessment

ALAN MALACHOWSKI

The articles assembled for this collection are self‐standing. They can speak for themselves and should be allowed to do so. Moreover, with a large project such as this one involving a controversial thinker, it is important not to prejudge issues or detain readers too long before they set out to explore its contents. Nevertheless, readers who are new to Richard Rorty’s work may be keen to know something about his background. In addition, it will no doubt be useful for most readers to be aware of some editorial decisions as well as the organizational structure of the volume and the motivation behind it. This will enable them to navigate the geography of the various chapters better according to their interests. The rest of the introduction is therefore brief and deals primarily with those concerns. Those who are familiar with Rorty’s background may wish to skip the next section.

1 Background

Richard McKay Rorty was born on October 4, 1931, into an intellectual family setting that encouraged political and social awareness. His mother, Winifred Raushenbush, who graduated from Oberlin College to study sociology at the University of Chicago, published books as well as articles on political and social issues. His father, James Rorty, was not only a well‐known poet, but also a journalist with a political bent. Both parents were committed leftist activists, cultivating an ethos that Rorty vividly recalled in later life: “I grew up knowing that all decent people were, if not Trotskyists, at least socialists … So, at 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice” (Rorty 1999, 6).1

Having shown distinct signs of precociousness, Rorty was enrolled at the University of Chicago just before his 15th birthday, where he obtained his BA degree within 3 years, and then an MA. After additional graduate studies, this time at Yale, Rorty completed his doctorate in 1956 with a 600‐page dissertation entitled The Concept of Potentiality. It exhibited a broad historical sweep that prefigured his later writings.

In 1960, following a spell with the signal corps after being drafted into the army, Rorty took up a position as an instructor at Wellesley College before swiftly moving to one of the world’s most prestigious philosophy departments at Princeton University. He was promoted to full professor in 1971.

While he was there, Rorty initially aligned his published work with the analytic philosophical tradition that was dominant not just at Princeton, but also elsewhere. His articles on the philosophy of mind in particular were well received, stimulated discussion, and helped set an agenda for further inquiry (Rorty 2014). Nevertheless, Rorty’s acute historical awareness and growing appreciation of the work of writers outside the analytic camp fed a sense of disenchantment. This shone through at the edges of even his earliest writings. It was more obvious in his substantial editorial introduction to The Linguistic Turn (Rorty 1967), and made explicit in what remains his best‐known book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, published in 1979. Rorty argued throughout its pages that philosophical problems are more like sociohistorical artifacts than inescapable concomitants of thought, thereby giving free rein to his long‐held suspicion that “philosophical problems appeared, disappeared, or changed shape, as a result of new assumptions or vocabularies” (p. xiii). Though the book was far from the “death to philosophy” tract of which many critics complained, it signaled a clear break with the tradition to which Rorty had contributed during the first half of his time at Princeton. Furthermore, the objections he voiced to the prevailing preoccupations of his fellow philosophers with, for example, epistemology and ontology ensured that a move to the University of Virginia in 1983 came as no surprise.

By this time Rorty was in any case keen to become a general‐purpose public intellectual, practicing culture criticism, if with a quasi‐philosophical slant. His transfer to Virginia facilitated that kind of transformation. After spending 15 very productive years there, publishing a steady stream of articles and a second important book, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Rorty 1989), Rorty rounded off his distinguished career by taking up a post at Stanford University. As a member of its department of comparative literature, he was given a relatively free hand to teach whatever interested him. This encouraged him to devise a variety of intriguing courses on such figures as Nietzche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and Habermas. Having retired from teaching in 2005, Rorty died on June 5, 2007, following complications due to pancreatic cancer, leaving a palpable intellectual vacuum that will be difficult to fill.

2 Motivation and Editorial Considerations

Whatever else might be said about him, it has to be agreed that Rorty was an engaging, wide‐ranging, and influential thinker. Moreover, as Christopher Voparil tells us in his introduction to The Rorty Reader, an ideal textual companion to this one, “whether or not one shares Harold Bloom’s assessment of Richard Rorty as the most interesting philosopher in the world, that he was for a time ‘the most talked about philosopher’ is hard to dispute” (2010, 1). Voparil is also correct in remarking that Rorty’s influence has continued to grow, that it “transcends the walls of discipline and culture [and] has spawned a body of secondary literature beyond the limits of any single human being to master” (2010, 1).

The final point here raises a question as to why a volume such as this one is required. However, although there are notable exceptions,2 much of the secondary literature Voparil alludes to has unfortunately been dominated (especially in the early days) by a hasty, and even at times dismissive, attitude of censure, one that inevitably fails to appreciate, still less explore, deeper and wider aspects of Rorty’s approach to philosophy and the multifarious influences on that approach. The very fact that so many discussions of his work have been opprobrious, piecemeal, and narrowly and/or superficially targeted makes it unnecessarily difficult for those who might otherwise be attracted to Rorty’s writings, particularly students and nonspecialists, to get a general sense of what he was doing, why he was doing it, why his work stirred up so much controversy, whether it was, and remains, important, and how it relates to broader concerns including, perhaps, their own areas of interest. Hence there is still a gap in the secondary literature for a one‐stop resource that helps remedy these failings. In short, the situation has created a need for the present Companion, while also ensuring that an unusually broad range of readers is likely to find it both interesting and useful. At least three other considerations make the volume timely, and have helped the editorial determination of its shape and content.

First, a fresh wave of Rorty commentary has emerged relatively recently in which a more considered and mature perspective has been adopted. This commentary is not uncritical. But it transcends the polarized attitudes of knee‐jerk defensiveness by philosophers and blithe acceptance from admirers outside the discipline that has characterized so many previous responses to Rorty’s work. The new wave has been partly inspired by philosophers who have serious standing within the analytic tradition and remain critical of Rorty’s views, but nevertheless discern some abiding value in his various challenges to that tradition, even when they regard them as misguided. This volume capitalizes on and carries further that considered outlook so as to offer readers a more balanced and insightful account of Rorty’s philosophical thought.

A parallel positive change, though not yet as prominent, has gradually taken place in the reactions to Rorty’s treatment of so‐called continental philosophy.3 Here again, there is now far less inclination to immediately dismiss his approach, which in this case tended to involve opposing factions: those who, for whatever reason, find themselves to be instinctively hostile to “that kind of philosophy” and those who actually want to defend it from within against what they regard as Rorty’s wayward interpretations and interventions. A Companion to Rorty follows up on this additional move toward maturity in Rorty studies, but it does so in a measured and strategically considered way, as explained in the next section.

The second editorial consideration is that in tandem with the twofold maturing of Rorty scholarship just described, there has been a further development in which Rorty’s influence has broadened considerably in geographical terms, with enthusiastic interest being shown in his work in Asia, Central Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. It is too soon to assess what this influence will amount to, or what it should amount to, but this volume makes a start by offering a detailed discussion of how Rorty’s philosophy has been received in central Europe. This serves as something of a case study in how, and why, the widening of his influence has progressed, and what it involves.

The final factor that has had bearing on the nature of this volume could be subsumed under the twofold maturation described earlier, but is worth saying something about separately.

Rorty’s writings have attracted attention along with controversy for various reasons, most of them addressed in this volume, but there is one that would have stood out even in the absence of the others, and that is his revivalist advocacy of pragmatism. Other philosophers have spoken in its favor (Putnam 1995 and Quine 1996 spring immediately to mind), but none so forcefully or distinctively over such a long period. Rorty’s advocacy was distinctive in that he harked back to the classic pragmatists William James and John Dewy, but took them to be inspirational figures rather than purveyors of particular doctrines. And then, he championed a form of pragmatism that dispenses with the empiricist assumptions of these founding figures, and makes language rather than experience the focal point of its inquiries. In claiming even just an inspirational affinity with James and Dewey, Rorty still provoked intense criticism from pragmatist scholars who accused him of recklessly interpreting the work of these two thinkers in ways that made it impossible to take the proposed new version of pragmatism seriously as a form of pragmatism. Over time though, there has been a more thoughtful reconsideration of Rorty’s pragmatism in which its value has been assessed on grounds that are less rigid than doctrinal/textual conformity. For that reason, Rorty’s relationships to James and Dewey have been reassessed here in separate chapters (see Part IV).

3 Structure and Organization

The Companion is divided in to five parts. These are sandwiched between a Prologue and a Coda. These two serve the “opening” and “closing” functions, as such nomenclature suggests. The Prologue introduces the collection by suggesting “a plan for reading Rorty,” while the Coda provides a poetic denouement that chimes with a Heideggerian dictum of which Rorty heartily approved: “All great philosophy is inherently thoughtful‐poetic, the distinction between ‘theoretical’ and ‘poetical’ cannot be applied to philosophical texts” (Heidegger 1984, 73).

The individual sections of the Companion are organized as follows.

Part I, Early Developments, contains three chapters that deal, as the title signals, with Rorty’s early writings. They assess his contribution to the analytic tradition in two main areas: the philosophy of mind and transcendental arguments. Partly because of the controversy that Rorty later generated, but mainly because many philosophers have been under the impression that their discipline has moved on from the issues thought to be at stake (or at least the ways in which they were framed), these contributions now tend to be ignored. While it is certainly true that progress has been made and problems transformed, the chapters in question show that not only are the original issues themselves worth revisiting, but so is Rorty’s approach to them.

Part II concentrates on Rorty’s key texts. It is designed to introduce them and assess their interest and importance. They include the three monographs: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), and Achieving Our Country (1998). But, since Rorty’s output of articles was so prolific (six volumes have already been published) and these are so indicative of his thinking, there is also a designated chapter on his role as an essayist.

In Part III, Rorty’s pragmatist approach to some major philosophical themes is investigated, with the first three chapters concentrating on three separate topics: truth, metaphysics, and ethics. This section then broadens its approach to tackle the theme of Romanticism before the last two chapters discuss Rorty’s relationship to analytic and continental philosophy respectively. The latter provides our cue for explaining the Companion’s overall strategy regarding continental philosophy.

Taken as a whole, Rorty’s engagements with continental philosophy were expansive, and they warrant a “companion” in their own right. His writings in this connection include copious articles, some substantial, on such figures as Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Paul de Man, Jean‐Francois Lyotard, Cornelius Castoriadas, Habermas, Foucault, and Derrida. To cover Rorty’s treatment of these would be beyond the scope of this volume without expanding it into an unwieldy encyclopedic project.

What has been done here, however, and it is something that needed to be done, is the laying down of a foundation for a clearer understanding of Rorty’s general approach to continental philosophy and, more specifically, those thinkers within that tradition who most interested him and had the most discernible influence on his thinking. For this purpose, close attention is paid to his reading of three historically important figures: Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Appreciation of how he deals with these three thinkers is essential to understanding how Rorty was inclined to interpret those who came after them. Conspicuous among these was Jacques Derrida. But there is scant direct discussion of Rorty’s engagements with him in this volume. There are two main reasons for this.

First, from an editorial point of view, it seemed necessary to emphasize the need to grasp the importance of getting to grips with Rorty’s handling of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger before tackling his work on Derrida. The second reason is based on this editor’s point of view: Rorty’s “engagements” with Derrida made little discernible impact on Rorty’s own approach to philosophy. Such changes as were caused by his ventures in “continental territory” kicked in either prior to his reading of Derrida or independently of that reading (for he claimed that reading Derrida sent him back to Heidegger). Although they clearly afforded him immense private enjoyment, it is not clear that Derrida’s writings had any substantial effect on Rorty’s thoughts as they were presented in public. Having digested the material on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, readers should be in a better position to make their own judgment on this score (see, for example, Rorty, 1991).

Rorty was very creative in helping himself to the views of a wide range of philosophers, and not always just philosophers. However, he also attracted a lot of criticism for the ways in which he did this. He was, for instance, accused of distorting the positions of the thinkers concerned and/or putting his own words in their mouths. Part IV considers some of his most important “appropriations” and assesses their philosophical interest in connection with particular issues. The individual chapters focus on nine of these: Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, James, Dewey, Freud, Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Habermas.

On first encountering Rorty’s writings, the initial impression is always likely to be that one is encountering a thinker who tried to open up the discipline of philosophy so that it can accommodate a wider range of discourse and a greater variety of methods, become more sensitive to historical considerations, less dependent on abstract theory, and, as a result, be more responsive to sociopolitical concerns. In the last collection of his philosophical papers published while he was still alive, aptly entitled Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Rorty 2007a), Rorty urged us to “look at relatively specialized and technical debates between contemporary philosophers in the light of our hopes for cultural change.” He went on to say that philosophers themselves “should choose sides in those debates with an eye to the possibility of changing the course of the conversation” (p. x).

Part V deals with Rorty’s treatment of issues in culture and politics. It includes two chapters on religion because this was a topic on which he spent a considerable amount of time later in life, presumably in an attempt to accommodate it within his own hopes for “cultural change” (see Rorty, 2007b, 2010). This section shows how far Rorty’s approach to philosophy brought it closer to being a subject that caters for the social justice aspirations he formed at an early age. It also enables readers to assess the extent to which Rorty fulfilled his conversation‐changing aims and/or inspired others to pursue similar goals.

References

Gascoigne, N. 2008.

Richard Rorty

. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Gross, N. 2008.

The Making of an American Philosopher

. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Heidegger, M. 1984.

Nietzsche, Vol. 2, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same

edited by D. Krell. New York: HarperOne.

Putnam, H. 1995.

Pragmatism: An Open Question

. Oxford: Blackwell.

Quine, W. V. 1996. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In

From a Logical Point of View

, 2nd edn., 20–46. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rorty, R. ed., 1967.

The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method

. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

—. 1979.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

—. 1989.

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

—. 1991. “Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?” In

Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers

, Vol. 2, 119–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

—. 1998.

Achieving Our Country

. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

—. 1999.

Philosophy and Social Hope

. New York: Penguin Books.

—. 2007a.

Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers

, Vol. 4. Leiden, Netherlands: Cambridge University Press.

—. 2007b.

The Future of Religion

. New York: Columbia University Press.

—. 2010.

An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion

. New York: Columbia University Press.

—. 2014.

Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers

, edited by S. Leach and J. Tartaglia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tartaglia, J. 2007.

Rorty and the Mirror of Nature

. New York: Routledge.

Voparil, C. 2006.

Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision

. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

—. 2010. “General Introduction.” In

The Rorty Reader

, edited by C. Voparil and R. Bernstein, 1–52. Chichester, UK: Wiley‐Blackwell.

Voparil, C. and Bernstein, R., eds. 2010.

The Rorty Reader

. Chichester, UK: Wiley‐Blackwell.

Notes

1

For more detailed accounts of Rorty’s background and philosophical career, see Voparil and Bernstein (

2010

) and Gross (

2008

).

2

The “notable exceptions” produced by contributors to this volume include: Gascoigne (

2008

), Tartaglia (

2007

), and Voparil (

2006

).

3

Rorty was skeptical of the need to make a sharp distinction between analytic and continental tradition in philosophy and endeavored to blur any such distinction.

Prologue

1Reading Rorty: A Sketch of a Plan

DANIELLE MACBETH

Reading Rorty can be hard, not because his ideas are especially difficult but because they very often are, or at least seem on the face of it to be, quite straightforward and yet somehow wrong. But this is very unlikely: Rorty is not a thinker to get straightforward things wrong. We need, then, a plan for reading Rorty. And Rorty himself offers a suggestion. He tells us that we will not understand him until, and unless, we distinguish between his ordinary, unreflective talk and his reflective, philosophical talk, between his lay and his philosophical uses of words such as “true.”1 This is helpful, but it does not, I think, go far enough in providing us with the tools we need in reading Rorty insofar as there seems to be not two but three different sorts of discourse in which Rorty engages. Indeed, I will suggest that in this regard Rorty’s reflections on truth bear a remarkable (and remarkably suggestive) similarity to Plato’s reflections on knowledge in his dialogue Theaetetus. This is a large and unprecedented claim, one that I can only begin to explicate here. But even this mere sketch of a plan for reading Rorty will be enough, I think, to show that reading Rorty as engaged at various points in three very different sorts of discourse will enable us to make good sense of claims that have seemed to many readers, even otherwise sympathetic readers, to be quite wrongheaded.

The overall framework is relatively straightforward. The basic case is our first‐level discourse, that is, our ordinary, everyday and unreflective, talk about things, including the talk involved in first‐order inquiry into things such as cats, corporations, and courage. But we can also engage in a different sort of discourse, as when we conduct a reflective, philosophical inquiry into first‐order inquiry. Obviously, such second‐order, reflective inquiry is possible only in light of first‐order inquiry; second‐order inquiry can be pursued only where there is already a good deal of first‐order inquiry to be made the object of one’s reflective gaze. Second‐order inquiry seems also to be qualitatively different from first‐order inquiry insofar as first‐order inquiry seems, at least on the face of it, to be inquiry into how things are, second‐order inquiry seems better described as concerned to understand, or to make manifest, the nature of our first‐order inquiries. The third sort of discourse we will be concerned with here is different again. It is not merely more of the same, a kind of philosophical reflection on the practice of philosophers – though that too is possible. The third sort of reflection and discourse as it will concern us here does not take the form of inquiry at all but is instead a reflection on something more fundamental, something that might be described as our existential condition, our being as humans. In Plato’s Theaetetus, as I read it, not only are all three sorts of discourse in play, as I will suggest they are in Rorty, the three sorts of discourse are also relatively well marked in Plato’s text, as they are not marked in Rorty’s writings, or we will see, often even in Rorty’s thought. Let us begin, then, by recalling some of the most striking features of Plato’s remarkable dialogue.

Theaetetus was written after such middle dialogues as Republic. However, it manifests many characteristic features not of the middle dialogues but of Plato’s earliest, aporetic dialogues. It focuses on a “What is …?” question, in this case, the question “What is knowledge?,” and over the course of the dialogue a series of answers are proposed, discussed, and ultimately rejected. Also, as in the early dialogues and by contrast with middle dialogues such as Republic, Socrates claims to have no knowledge himself, save for the knowledge that he does not know.

But there are also important differences between this dialogue and Plato’s early dialogues. First, and perhaps most strikingly, in the Theaetetus Socrates’s main interlocutor is not (as he is in all the early dialogues) a self‐professed expert in the topic under discussion. Socrates’s interlocutor in this dialogue is instead a mere boy, the sixteen‐year‐old student, Theaetetus, who, although already manifesting remarkable intellectual gifts, does not profess to know what knowledge is. Indeed, he is presented at the opening of the dialogue as having just the sort of wisdom Socrates claims for himself: Theaetetus knows that he does not know. The dialogue also combines the standard dialogue form with a more reflective description of Socrates’s method that is reminiscent of Socrates’s description of his activities in Plato’s Apology. But whereas in the Apology Socrates likens himself to a gadfly, in the Theaetetus Socrates again and again describes himself as a midwife to the ideas of others – though, as he tells Theaetetus, it is a “secret” that he has this art. The Theaetetus is written in dramatic rather than narrative form, and as is emphasized in the prefatory dialogue within which the main dialogue is embedded (as it were, halfway in that there is a prologue but no corresponding epilogue), the main dialogue is in the form of a written document, which, according to the prefatory dialogue, is being read aloud by a slave. What we have in the Theaetetus, then, is a written dialogue, a piece of text, within a written dialogue, a piece of text.2 Among other things, this embedding allows Plato to emphasize to the reader that the account of the main dialogue derives directly from Socrates and “has, in effect, Socrates’ own approval and imprimatur” (Sedley 2004, 16). There is, finally, a very curious section midway through the main dialogue, a section that Socrates himself describes as a digression, within which Socrates sketches the life of the philosopher as it contrasts with the lives of others. The digression clearly recalls themes from Republic, but it is not at all easy to understand why it is there, how exactly we are to read it, or what relationship it has to the rest of the text.

The Theaetetus is, then, a text with a very complex structure, one that has been carefully crafted to be read on at least three levels. First, and most obviously, there is the examination itself, which, after some preliminaries, comprises three proposed definitions – that knowledge is perception, that knowledge is true judgment, and that knowledge is true judgment with an account – all of which are examined and ultimately rejected. At this level of reading, the fact that the examination is cast in the form of a dialogue, the fact that it is embedded in another dialogue, the fact that Socrates digresses halfway through, all are merely stylistic, merely decorative; what matters are the ideas, what knowledge is said to be, and the arguments to show that it cannot be that. This, then, is first‐order inquiry, inquiry into what something is, in this case, not what a cat, corporation, or courageous act is, but what knowledge is. And as already remarked, that inquiry fails; none of Theaetetus’s answers to the question “what is knowledge?” survive Socrates’s examination of them.

When one asks a “What is …?” question, one addresses oneself to something in hopes of clarifying its nature, what it is to be that. One aims for knowledge. In the Theaetetus, it is knowledge itself that is addressed, and this, we are to come to see, is a fundamentally different sort of question. Although there can be first‐order inquiries in the vicinity, for example, in the sociology of knowledge or in cognitive science, to understand what knowledge is requires a distinctively philosophical reflection, that is, a form of investigation that is conducted in the self‐understanding that it is essentially different from first‐order inquiry. Those who turn to philosophy in order to achieve certainty, or to find an answer to the skeptic, or to secure the foundations of first‐order inquiry, fail to grasp this first and essential lesson of the Theaetetus. There are and can be no marks of truth as there are marks of cats, courage, and corporations.

Suppose, for instance, that we said that the mark of truth is clarity and distinctness, that one ought to judge as true only what is clearly and distinctly perceived. It would follow of necessity that what is clearly and distinctly perceived is itself already knowledge. Socrates makes this point, and it is the very last point that he makes in the dialogue: “it is surely just silly, when we are trying to discover what knowledge is, that it is correct judgment accompanied by knowledge” (210a). Socrates is of course talking here about the third answer that Theaetetus had proposed to the question “What is knowledge?,” namely, that it is correct, or true, judgment with an account, in effect, justified true belief. His point is that if so then one’s justification must already have the status of knowledge. As we are to come to see, knowledge is not a thing with marks that one could tell by discerning its marks but instead the fruition of a course of inquiry. It is one’s capacity for knowledge, in particular, one’s capacity for critically reflective examination, that holds the key to the understanding we seek regarding the nature of knowledge. Where we had been focused on the product, knowledge, and looked in vain for marks that distinguish knowledge from, say, mere true belief, now we are to consider instead the process, the activity of inquiry, the exercise of one’s power to know that, if all goes well, does culminate in knowledge.

To read the dialogue at this second level, as a philosophical reflection on first‐order inquiry, is to take into account the fact that the Theaetetus