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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (24)

Richard Rorty, great philosopher, died in June 2007
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!
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"
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
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
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. ... Read more

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 (11)

Can't anyone think anymore?
Rorty writes well and if you met him, you know he was a clever guy and a nice guy. But as a philosopher he is a good gardener. If you go through this book slowly and take the time to deconstruct what he is saying, you will find very little there that is knew, interesting or correct. This is what philosophy has come to in today's world: people who have nothing to say, and nothing to offer, yet lack the honesty to admit it, engaging in intellectual games in an attempt to gain acclaim. Rorty gained that acclaim, within a small circle, but it is all grounded in illusion.

Smashing the Mirror of Nature
"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
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...
...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
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. ... Read more

Amazon.com
There are many shameful incidents in America's past: the institution of slavery, genocidal assaults on the indigenous peoples of this continent, the escalation of the Vietnam War, and so on. What should our response to such acts be? Should we regard the nation as irredeemably tainted by sin and spend our time cataloging its evils, or should we acknowledge its shortcomings and make a conscious effort to turn it into a better nation?

Philosopher Richard Rorty believes that there is hope for America, but that today's Left is not meeting the challenge. He contrasts the cultural, academic Left's focus on our heritage of shame (which, he admits, has to the extent that it makes hatred intolerable had the positive effect of making America a more civil society) with the politically engaged reformist Left of the early part of this century. "The distinction between the old strategy and the new is important," he writes. "The choice between them makes the difference between what Todd Gitlin calls common dreams and what Arthur Schlesinger calls disuniting Americans. To take pride in being black or gay is an entirely reasonable response to the sadistic humiliation to which one has been subjected. But insofar as this pride prevents someone from also taking pride in being an American citizen, from thinking of his or her country as capable of reform, or from being able to join with straights or whites in reformist initiatives, it is a political disaster."

Not everyone, to be sure, is going to agree with Rorty's ideas. But his approach to civic life, which is pragmatic in the tradition of John Dewey and visionary in the tradition of Walt Whitman, is bound to provoke increased discussion of what it is to be a citizen, and his call for a renewed awareness of the history of American reformist activism can only be applauded.Book Description

Must the sins of America's past poison its hope for the future? Lately the American Left, withdrawing into the ivied halls of academe to rue the nation's shame, has answered yes in both word and deed. In Achieving Our Country, one of America's foremost philosophers challenges this lost generation of the Left to understand the role it might play in the great tradition of democratic intellectual labor that started with writers like Walt Whitman and John Dewey.

How have national pride and American patriotism come to seem an endorsement of atrocities--from slavery to the slaughter of Native Americans, from the rape of ancient forests to the Vietnam War? Achieving Our Country traces the sources of this debilitating mentality of shame in the Left, as well as the harm it does to its proponents and to the country. At the center of this history is the conflict between the Old Left and the New that arose during the Vietnam War era. Richard Rorty describes how the paradoxical victory of the antiwar movement, ushering in the Nixon years, encouraged a disillusioned generation of intellectuals to pursue "High Theory" at the expense of considering the place of ideas in our common life. In this turn to theory, Rorty sees a retreat from the secularism and pragmatism championed by Dewey and Whitman, and he decries the tendency of the heirs of the New Left to theorize about the United States from a distance instead of participating in the civic work of shaping our national future.

In the absence of a vibrant, active Left, the views of intellectuals on the American Right have come to dominate the public sphere. This galvanizing book, adapted from Rorty's Massey Lectures of 1997, takes the first step toward redressing the imbalance in American cultural life by rallying those on the Left to the civic engagement and inspiration needed for "achieving our country."

Customer Reviews (21)

APlea to Work for Governmental Action to the Academic Left
Richard Rorty is a prominent philosopher and academic with deep family roots in the anti-communist efforts of Norman Thomas' Socialist Party, the societal amelioration of the New Deal, and the Social Gospel movement.

He is appalled by the failure of advocates of continued governmental involvement in societal problem-solving to win enough elections to keep political progress moving ahead during a time of ever-increasing globalization and general income stagnation.

He sees a vibrant Academic Left--which he admits has valid critiques of the reformist Left with which he most identifies--but he is appalled that its members have little interest in developing workable programs for societal betterment or engaging in active campaigns for change or the inner workings of government.

He is not David Horowitz.His attacks on the Academic Left are meant to persuade its members, not to rally support of others against them.He praises academic teachings against sadism, bullying, racism, sexism, and homophobia--but feels that merely dealing with how people relate to each other is an inadaquate response to the many institutional failings of American society.He describes the Academic Left's abstention from wider political conflict as to the economic direction of our country as"an inability to do two things at once."

"Sometime in the Seventies, " he writes, "American middle-class idealism went into a stall.Under Presidents Carter and Clinton, the Democratic Party has survived by distancing itself from unions and any mention of redistribution, and moving into a sterile vacuum called the "center."....So the choice between the two major parties has come down to a choice between cynical lies and terrified silence."

In the Pennsylvania legislature, I have long been a leader of efforts to improve the economic welfare of struggling citizens: from repealing laws raising consumer prices and the law establishing welfare liens, to raising the minimum wage and establishing and increasing subsidized senior citizen prescriptions and property tax rebates.

So I am in complete agreement with Rorty's argument for greater involvement to reduce economic injustices. He writes with a scathing eloquence and a deep political understanding that the only way to arouse public support on a national level for new policies is to be able to place them in a context of both patriotism and attention to the genuine needs of the American people.

Because he is largely addressing the Academic Left, he spends too much time for my taste enmeshing himself in leftist sectarian discussions.I hope he persuades some of his intended audience, but his book is also useful for the more general audience of people who, in Robert Kennedy's words, "see suffering and want to stop it."

"I have been arguing that...we Americans should not take the view of a detached cosmopolitan spectator," he writes."We should face unpleasant truths about ourselves, but we should not take these truths to be the last word about our chances for happiness, or about our national character. Our national character is still in the making.Few in 1897 would have predicted the Progressive Movement, the forty-hour week, Women's Suffrage, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the successes of second-wave feminism, or the Gay Rights Movement.Nobody in 1997 can know that America will not, in the course of the next century, witness even greater moral progress.

"(Walt)Whitman and (John) Dewey tried to substitute hope for knowledge.They wanted to put shared utopian dreams--dreams of an ideally decent and civilized society--in the place of knowledge of God's Will, Moral Law, the Laws of History, or the Facts of Science.Their party, the party of hope, made twentieth-century America more than just an economic and military giant...."

I don't think any one group is responsible for the failure of the public to adaquately organize to protect its common interests.I feel we need active organizing everywhere across ideological, geographical, generational,racial, religious, sexual, and other lines.So I do not attribute nearly the significance to the Academic Left that he does.

But I think he has written a book well worth reading by those who very much want a more empowered public, as well as those who want university studies and faculty research to include a greater focus on how the vast knowledge of the universities and their faculties can be better employed for social good.

Balance of Old Left Reform and New Left Revolution
Rorty looks into the pragmatic hope which does not grasp formulas as in Marxism and economic orthodox idea but in a union from a diversity
Rorty uses Hegel, Dewey & Whitman to look forward in humanism rather than upward to divine strict formulated authority. He sees in the Left both the agents of reform and the spectators of philosophy, criticism. Dewey's rejection of fixed values and support of the temporal. Hegel's idea of historical changes and the temporal nature of existence rather than fixed permanent authority of a God. Whitman's acknowledgment of Hegel and the divinity of man and history as humans are the in the place of God, of new diverse and growing progress, while Rorty seems to write Marx of as too scientific and dogmatic, which personally, I don't think he was, but his followers. Rorty speaks of no template, no map of truth to follow but again the diverse pragmatic complexity in the hope of humanism and the eventual classless society or utopian hope. While Marx and Dewey were both Hegelian, Marx was predictive, Dewey was for pragmatic unpredictable temporal flow and Rorty attempts to achieve this Whitman hope of progress in humanism.

The idea of the left is movement the right is to preserve the status quo. The new left is more condemnation and unforgivable sin, while the old lives in the present moment, lets go, and moves forward for changes. And Rorty agrees with Foucalt that all truth is really a social construction and objective reality is beyond conception, but doe snto get lost in that futility but leaves it to philosophy and finds foundation in political change for the better, to end oppression toward equalitarianism.

In this he contrasts Marxist leftists verse liberal leftists, that the Marxism should be dropped from experiential spirit of pragmatic suggestions in aiding the prolatariet. I think Marxism is more experiential than Rorty thinks it is, but nevertheless his optimism and reformist views within the framework (Bernstein vs.Luxemburg) are very refreshing, as most Marxism is pure revolution, nor reformism. He sees the Old left as the reformist left from the New Deal of 1945 to 1964 and the New Left from 1964 to date, as they became disillusioned with the entire American system in favor of revolution. What the New Left seemed to miss is that Old Left of changes was not only from the bottom up but a participatory interlocking blend of both bottom up and top down, progress within the system.

And yet despite the criticism of the New Lefts failure to work within the system, they were crucial in beneficial changes in American policy, fighting and protesting for rights of Blacks, the Vietnam War killing thousands of innocent civilians, rights of Woman and Gays and so forth, exposing American imperialism and military spending over welfare of the poor.And so the honors goes to both the Old left and the new. And yet, it appears to me that Rorty keeps equating Bolshevik Marxism with the Stalinist Cold War Soviet Union - two different things.

And while the cultural left fights for victims and social ills it does not seem to come with with workable answers in reformation. While the New Deal both succeeded and failed and later democrats were hypocrites - look at JFK with the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam - to render it useless tends to leave the cultural new left sitting on the side while the rights continue to do the opposite of the New Deal. For the New Deal bourgeoisie the proletariats and diminished much oppression and sadism, the rights are prolaterizing the bourgeois and what can happen is that a mass poverty occurs with the few super rich ruling class as the Orwelian prediction. It is then, as in Germany's Wienmar Republic, that the masses of proletariats then vote in a strong man out of desperation and a right wing fascism occurs. And here it is unpredictable, usually sadism against minorities reoccurs. While the New Deal may have not passed any significant laws for the blacks, women and gays, what the cultural left did do is bring to conscious awareness of the so commonly practiced sadism in American thinking, and in this made some major consciousness changes in eradicating much of it.

An important reminder of the true America.
The pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty is one of the best-known and most renowned academic philosophers of our time.In "Achieving Our Country," he turns his ever-penetrating gaze to the state of Leftist thought in American history, focusing on both the important gains Leftists made in our country in the past, and why the Left is moribund today.What results is a highly accessible, brilliant examination of what makes the Left the sustainer of hope in our modern era of quasi-Fascist brainwashing and chest-beating militarism.

To Rorty, the modern Left has abandoned the dreams of Debs, Dewey, and DuBois in favor of scholastic "theorizing" and defeatist fatalism, as exemplified by the unlearned scholars who populate most of the nation's humanities departments.In exchange for any movement toward authentic social change, we are left instead with Foucault-reading pessimists, disillusioned by the aftermath of the Sixties and less interested in effecting actual progress than in "resisting" the system through barren exercises in jargon-laden "thought."This development over the last three decades, with its concomitant anti-Americanism, has made the Left largely impotent in the face of the well-organized, practical, and methodical assault from the Right.

To remedy this, Rorty proposes an abandonment of pointless theory and instead an active, pragmatic, dedicated effort toward the realization of the true principles that have made America great: diversity, social justice, civil rights, and a movement toward actual equality rather than the social Darwinist "conservatism" which dominates our current political landscape.This is what the author means by "achieving our country." As someone who has spent considerable time in English departments, I wholeheartedly agree with Rorty that a transformation is necessary if the Left is not to decline into total oblivion in the near future.

This is an important and insightful assessment of our culture and politics, and a superb primer for Leftist regeneration.

An invaluable reminder of the true America.
The pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty is one of the best-known and most renowned academic philosophers of our time.In "Achieving Our Country," he turns his ever-penetrating gaze to the state of Leftist thought in American history, focusing on both the important gains Leftists made in our country in the past, and why the Left is moribund today.What results is a highly accessible, brilliant examination of what makes the Left the sustainer of hope in our modern era of quasi-Fascist brainwashing and chest-beating militarism.

To Rorty, the modern Left has abandoned the dreams of Debs, Dewey, and DuBois in favor of scholastic "theorizing" and defeatist fatalism, as exemplified by the unlearned scholars who populate most of the nation's humanities departments.In exchange for any movement toward authentic social change, we are left instead with Foucault-reading pessimists, disillusioned by the aftermath of the Sixties and less interested in effecting actual progress than in "resisting" the system through barren exercises in jargon-laden "thought."This development over the last three decades, with its concomitant anti-Americanism, has made the Left largely impotent in the face of the well-organized, practical, and methodical assault from the Right.

To this, Rorty proposes an abandonment of pointless theory and instead an active, pragmatic, dedicated effort toward the realization of the true principles that have made America great: diversity, social justice, civil rights, and a movement toward actual equality rather than the social Darwinist "conservatism" which dominates our current political landscape.This is what the author means by "achieving our country." As someone who has spent considerable time in English departments, I wholeheartedly agree with Rorty that a transformation is necessary if the Left is not to decline into total oblivion in the near future.

This is an important and insightful assessment of our culture and politics, and a superb primer for Leftist regeneration.

It's up to the Left to achieve our country
In Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty details the roots to leftist thought, exploring the dawning of the modern era and the pragmatic approach, the glorification of the American ideal and American story as one that would continue onward and upward, and the role of the intellectual Left to be the agent of hope and progress as opposed to maintaining the status quo.

Unfortunately, events in the 1960's created a schism in the Left from which neither side have succeeded in counteracting a unified Right that sunk its claws into the haunches of America. It is up to the Left to coalesce once again into a unifying force to continue the American story and achieve the country.

The loss of American pride is another key element.Rorty derives this from two modern thinkers, Walt Whitman and John Dewey, whose beliefs sharply contrasted with that of the finite, absolute, divine-centered beliefs of the Victorian pre-modernists.Whitman passionately exalted the more humanistic approach to truth and self-discovery caused by the floodgates opened by Darwin's theory of evolution.As a result, the divine standard to which men held to was replaced by secular humanism and humanistic standards.

Both Dewey and Whitman saw "America" and "democracy" as synonymous with being "human." Dewey too placed "America" and "democracy" on a visionary scale. But where Whitman described the American way as "the last and greatest vision of the American potential," Dewey saw "democracy" and thus America's story as "a great word, whose history... remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted".

As a result, Rorty asserts that Dewey and Whitman would advocate American pride despite blacker moments in America's history such as the Vietnam War.This was why the Left lost its effectiveness in carrying out its intellectual role--its spectatorial preoccupation with sin.According to Rorty, a Dewey-Whitman counter to this indulgence in self-disgust would be that "there are many things that should chasten and temper such pride, but that nothing a nation has done should make it impossible to regain self-respect."

Another group of thinkers Rorty drew upon was the "reformist Left," progressives who as champions of the downtrodden, strove to make political and social changes within a constitutional and democratic edifice.This reformist Left consists of two groups: the powerful, financially secure leftist elite launching top-down initiatives, (Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, the Wagner Act) andthe second group, consisting of the financially insecure and disempowered "little man" and grass roots organizations (Marcus Garvey, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the Stonewall riots.) Rorty contends that the reinforcement of the bottom by the top was the glue holding the two groups until 1964, when the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the denial of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic Convention created a rift in the Left.

The solution, according to Rorty, is a unification of the Lefts, as the Cultural Left is "unable to engage in national politics... [or] deal with the consequences of globalization." That is something the pre-Sixties left is able to do, i.e. "piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy." Rorty also wants to wean the Cultural Left from addictions such as theorizing, philosophizing, abstract systems, and self-disgust. In its place, he proposes activism, concrete solutions, a focus on people and pressing issues, and national pride, the latter two which the grass roots conservatives used to push the Right in power. The job of this Brand New Left, a union of the reformist Left, Cultural Left, and in support of the little man, is to create a new ideology and hence a new utopia that will engage and mobilize a hitherto disillusioned populace into political participation waiting for specific solutions. The Brand New Left will be an intelligentsia practicing pragmatism.

Proud as Dewey and Whitman are in their assertion of America, bowing to no other authority, not even God, I am disturbed by one application of their assertion. This statement corresponds with American unilateralism, the concept of the United States being above the auspices of the United Nations, whose vision is more inclusive and unbiased towards any one nation.

I also agree, that yes, it is beneficial to be aware of the darker moments of American history, and to learn not to make the same mistake and move forward to what one would hope to be a better tomorrow. But what is the line between proper awareness and a prosaic, token, and trendy "awareness month" or "awareness week"? ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (3)

Very prcatical volume
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
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 andbringing 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
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. ... Read more

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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (21)

The Call of Philosophy
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...
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
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
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
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.

... Read more

Book Description
The second volume pursues the themes of the first volume in the context of discussions of recent European philosophy focusing on the work of Heidegger and Derrida. His four essays on Heidegger include "Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor and as Politics" and "Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens;" three essays on Derrida (including "Deconstruction and Circumvention" and "Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?") are followed by a discussion of the uses to which Paul de Man and his followers have put certain Derridean ideas. Rorty's concluding essays broaden outward with an essay on "Freud and Moral Deliberation" and essays discussing the social theories and political attitudes of various contemporary figures--Foucault, Lyotard, Habermas, Unger, and Castoriadis. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

a very poor effort
This is the work of a filing clerk and a minor commentator on the ideas of others. Science reveals the 'actuality' and the real effects of external forces and processes every day, and the notion that we can have no perceptual grasp of these other than that provided by linguistic representation is just plain wrong. Dr. Johnson kicked a table in disgust at Berkely's Idealist drivel, to which Rorty is the heir, and it would be nice to hear a lot more tables being kicked across the Western world. In this collection Rorty tackles the ideas of sophisticated European philosphers with all the finesse and subtelty of the Incredible Hulk. This position is becoming rapidly obsolete, so let's not become members of Rorty's 'community of ironic geniuses' and move on.

Provocative connection-making
This is a fascinating work wherein Rorty once again proves himself a master of the consolidation of varying ideas and philosophical tracts.Yes, he does borrow a lot of ideas/interpretations from "second source" philosophers, people like Okrent, but that shouldn't discourage potential readers: Rorty excels at making intricate and original connections -- networks of thought.Certainly, not all of his arguments are unassailable, but they are almost always provocative.The points he makes along the way are often as intriguing as the larger point he tries to make with the essay itself.Also, the print, as another reviewer has mentioned, is indeed somewhat small, but I wouldn't say it offers a significant problem as far as reading goes.Oddly, the print in another set of his "philosophical papers," that on Truth and Progress, is larger though also published by Cambridge.Get this book, it's good reading.

Interesting, but...
This book is definitely interesting.But, I am amazed at how conveniently Rorty fits the philosophies of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and others into his pragmatic ethnocentrism.It seems that he is using them to help make his own philosophy more compelling, rather than just telling stories about them.But, of course he would do that.Well, anyway, don't be decieved.He is using them for the purpose of propagating his own views.Also, he has a "straw-god" argument against the God of the Bible.When he speaks of "type A entities," all he is talking about is a primus inter pares, not a Transcendental.Interesting kibitzing, though.A good read for philosophasters like myself.

Some interesting possibilities....
In this collection of essays Richard Rorty attempts to answer the question: What, if anything, can we liberal American intellectuals gain from reading the likes of Heidegger and Derrida?His answer: Plenty, if wecan just manage to rescue Derrida from his admirers (Norris, Gasche) andHeidegger from himself.

This volume also contains shrewd and provocativediscussions of Habermas, Lyotard, and the loathsome Foucault.

Readers newto Rorty might want to begin with the fourth essay: HEIDEGGER, KUNDERA, ANDDICKENS. It's a reflection on the moral worth of the European novel andmanages to touch on many of the themes Rorty has explored in his morerecent writings.

WARNING! The print font is tiny! Cambridge UniversityPress should be ashamed of itself.

Don't be taken in
WOW. That's what most people will say as they read this & think what a brilliant stylist Rorty is, how reasonable he makes his ideas sound, how "postmodern" and original etc. etc. it all is, bringing in Heidegger and Wittgenstein and Freud and even Dickens and making them allsound like they're saying the same thing.

If you cut through all theblurb there's actually not much solid argument there. He gets all hispragmatist interpretations of Heidegger from Okrent, like he admits, ratherthan thinking it through himself, and doesn't bring them to any startlinglynew conclusions. He even admits his leftist-Nietzschean-Deweyan stance hasno "logical" reason or meaning behind it, yet he claims itsbetter than other viewpoints! Once you throw away meaning, you can't applyit to yourself.

He also displays no knowledge of psychology except Freud,and so just about accepts Freud was mostly right, like most Americans whoread Freud & assume there's no need to read anyone else. Binswanger?Grof? Jung? Not only that, but he then subverts Freud's ideas to his ownagenda.

There's a lot of interesting ideas thrown up, and a lot of foodfor thought, but in the end there's no original content of any worth. Hejust picks & chooses the parts of philosophers he likes to make it seemlike they all lead towards his own pragmatic socialist stance, when if hetook into account all the information there's nobody he quotes, not evenDewey, (except perhaps Foucalt - another overrated"postmodernist" type) who really would accept Rorty's use ofthem, were they to read it.

If you read all the texts hequotes/likes/attacks from "Being & Time", Husserl's"Crisis..." Nietzsche's works, Quine, Jacques Derrida, Plato -andread them all, and Rorty's, critically - you'll come to realise that ifRorty's right there's not a lot point to it all anymore - except he's NOTright. ... Read more

Book Description
In this volume Rorty offers a Deweyan account of objectivity as intersubjectivity, one that drops claims about universal validity and instead focuses on utility for the purposes of a community. The sense in which the natural sciences are exemplary for inquiry is explicated in terms of the moral virtues of scientific communities rather than in terms of a special scientific method. The volume concludes with reflections on the relation of social democratic politics to philosophy. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Not clearly written
I'm sure Richard Rorty has some important things to say but to me his writing comes across as "philosophical shop talk."He writes of -ism this and -ism that but seldom makes a direct point.

I guess if you like pragmatism...
The first volume, Objectivism, Relatativism and Truth, is mainly concerned with Donald Davidson and John Dewey. Dewey I was vaguely familiar with(and still am) while concerning Davidson I was completely ignorant. My light-hearted critique Rorty is similar to a critique of Sartre. Sartre begins with the fact that there isn't a God, what do we do now. In many ways Rorty begins with that same position and though that doesn't effect my critique, it should be noted that we begin everything from different positions.

Rorty, like Rawls, takes religious belief very lightly. He is apparently friends with Alaisdair MacIntyre so he understands that theism is intellectually sustainable. In fact, in volume 2 he cites MacIntyre saying that "dramatic narratives may well be essental to the writing of intellectual history." I only bring this up to show Rorty's understanding of theism and yet his disregard of it in taking the position of a postmetaphysical philosopher.

My memory is unfortunately fleeting concerning the first volume which I no longer have, but thanks to the amazon excerpt I can bring up a few quotes.

Rorty's chief concern is the rivalry between platonic realists and Jamesian pragmatists. This is how he puts it:


Those who want to ground solidarity in objectivity - call them "realists" - so they have to contstrue truth as correspondence to reality. So they must construct a metaphysics which has room for a special relation between beliefs and objects which will differentiate true from fals beliefs...

By contrast, those who wish to reduce objectivity to solidarity - call them "pragmatists" - do not require a metaphysics or an epistemology. They view truth as, in William James' phrase, what is good for us to believe.


So this is basically it. He goes on for a few hundred pages, and then 200 more in the second volume, but it all basically comes down to this difference and his support of pragmatism. The support occurs because it is more beneficial for him to be a pragmatist, so I guess he is in line with his own philosophy, but then again, he doesn't consider philisophy an occupation worth much (he is now a humanities professor). Rorty doesn't much get into benifit, what that is, why that matters, but rests on a culture understanding with a desperate attempt to avoid ethnocentrism.

Volume 2 goes into Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida but mainly to show how they aline with Dewey and James, a noble quest if there ever was one. Mainly he goes about readings of their early works, trapped within the prison of metaphysics, or free into the...ambiguity? of pragmatism. I'd say delight but then that would put them all out of jobs. Maybe its just a grudge and Rorty wants to make all of the philosophy faculties of the world close because they gave him a wedgie in grad school.

So why not pragmatism? Well, the pragmatist is trapped in either solopsism or hedonism, two positions I do not envy and from which I do not see an escape nor do I think there is an attempt at one. But more than anything, pragmatism is a system that does not affect anyone else so frankly, it's not why pragmatism, but why should I care, and after reading enough of him the answer is evident, I don't.

anti-scientific?
A reader, Lechman, wrote here that "All scientists and engineers would reject Rortys ideas as extremely sloppy and antiscientific." Having not read this particular book [I gave it 4 stars to keep the score as I found it], I still can comment that Rorty's claims against science have nothing anti-scientific about them. As a pragmatist, Rorty would certainly not hold science to be without value, and I seriously doubt that he--in this book or in any other--challenges how scientists go about their work. Really, it's just not much of concern to science whether scientists believe themselves to be revealing metaphysical truth or not--they'll still get their work done.

But the question remains, 'what is the truth-value of the results produced by science?'. Many modern people, stuck in circular thinking, attempt to justify science with scientific premises. Even the biggest advocates of science in philosophy realize that that's not tenable.

Just another relativist...
As interesting and successful as Rorty is, he fails to make me feel comfortable identifying myself with the postmodernist liberals.Rorty holds to some sort of a skepticism.At best, he doesn't seem to care about any sort of representationalistic epistemology.Also, he tries to reduce any representationlistic epistemology to a simplistic "mirror" epistemology.To me, that is a straw-man argument.

Despite Rorty's claims not to be a relativist, I would assert that he is.No doubt, we all, in the end, use arguments that could be accused of being a mere petitio principii (i.e. begging the question).However, when one is an evolutionaristic anti-essentialist at the same time, one cannot escape cultural relativism, at best.There is no common ground among language games, according to Rorty's philosophy.If so, there is no moral obligation for one to play one language game, or hold to one web of belief, as opposed to another.

Well, anyway, it was a good read.Rorty is definitely another one of those innovative and interesting postmodernists (along with others like Foucault and Derrida).One difference, though, is that Rorty is much more optimistic than his peers.Of course, this optimism is groundless, though not reasonless.

Unputdownable. A thumping good read.
I was amazed by this book.Having read several of his works since I would recommend that you should start reading Rorty with this book.

You do not need to be a philosopher to read this book, or even be very interested in philosophy.All that is required is an interest in any of: History, science, politics and literature.I am pretty sure that Rorty's ideas about the common ground that these disciplines can be seen to occupy will be invigorating. ... Read more

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Very good!
This book is a vrey valuable book. Can you tell me Mr.RacardRorty'adressof E-mail? ... Read more

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Essays, written by thirteen of the most distinguished living philosophers, together with Rorty's substantial replies to each, and other new material by him, offer by far the most thorough and thoughtful discussion of the work of the thinker who has been called "the most interesting philosopher alive." ... Read more

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An excellent anthology
I am not a big fan of Rorty's work, but this volume is excellent.It contains articles by top-notch philosophers (with Rorty's responses) that hits on topics ranging from truth and objectivity to epistemology and pragmatism.

I consider the most important articles as the following: Davidson, "Truth Rehabilitated," Putnam, "RR on Reality and Justification," (excellent); McDowell, "Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity," (excellent); Brandom, "Vocabularies of Pragmatism," M. Williams, "Epistemology and the Mirror of Nature," Conant, "Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell."

I highly recommend this anthology.

Excellent, but fairly technical for Rorty material
This is by far the best book about Rorty on the market, however it is certainly at the more technical end of the spectrum.Since Rorty's own prose elsewhere is frequently accessible to a wide audience, the prospective reader of this must be forewarned that the essays by his challengers and his responses are all more technical than much that he has written recently.

On the other hand the quality is high throughout, with fewer "cheap shots" by his opponents than in other collections about him, and much material that is really first rate.Even though the book is centered on Rorty and his responses, the quality is high enough that it really is a dialogue on the issues that he has been concerned with, and which are quite central to philosophy today.

If your taste for Rorty is not just for the lighter fare and you have some background in philosophy to bring to this, then this is richly rewarding.

Philosophers Challenge Rortification
Take the single most entertaining and engaging philosopher that the academy can today boast, add a few colleagues who have pointed (and sometimes passionate) arguments to pursue with him and serve at the hands of one of his protégés - and you have Rorty and His Critics edited by Robert B Brandom.

This book is very stimulating, enormously erudite and not a little complicated. Here Rorty is hauled over the hot coals and its his task to defend himself against (and, occasionally, to further expedite) the arguments of his interlocutors; these figures include such heavyweights as Habermas, Davidson, Dennett, and Jacques Bouveresse. They argue and debate back and forth over various things that the interlocutors have at issue with Rorty. These include the status of "truth" as against "justification before ones peers", the supposed inescapability from "reality" and, in the best piece from the book, written by Bjorn Ramberg, what a "Post-Ontological Philosophy of Mind" might be and, indeed, might lead to. In response to this latter piece Rorty seems to bend his pragmatic line just a bit closer to the realist one in what I hope might become a classic quote of his: "What is true in pragmatism is that what you talk about depends not on what is real but on what it pays you to talk about. What is true in realism is that most of what you talk about you get right." The book begins with a helpful introduction by the editor (a former graduate student supervised by Rorty with his own chapter engaging Rorty in the book as well) and a paper by Rorty which argues that justification is more useful than "truth" since at least you can recognise the former when you have it (and what you can't recognise when you have it is useless anyway).

The collection of questions as arguments put to Rorty and his responses seems, to me, to make Rorty work at his thinking. It makes him explicate and also explain his pragmatic turn of thought in response to a new set of papers and I, for one, am thankful for that. The book is hard going. Those not used to philosophical debate or microscopically logical argument where you can trap your opponent in seeming errors which undercut her thesis are going to find themselves quickly caught up in something which seems to be overpowering them. This is a book that should be read at leisure, poured over, taken in deeply and mused upon. It will require not a little effort. At the end of the process Rorty still does not think that there is a "Reality" out there for us to get right "Because there are no norms for talking about it". But I, for one, am glad that I have had the opportunity to read this book and it has made me sharpen up my own thinking too.

PoSTmodERnFoOL ... Read more

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In this volume,a host of distinguished scholars examine Richard Rorty's influence on twentieth-century American pragmatism and its commitment to achieving social democracy. ... Read more