Richard Rorty

Decadence in philosophy is defined in the relation between thinking and truth, and explored as a conflict between Richard Rorty and Gilles Deleuze.

The article went deeper into Richard Rorty’s texts that address the self as “a set of beliefs and desires.” In an imbrication of philosophy with psychoanalysis, Rorty’s hermeneutics accompanies the critique of psychoanalysis regarding the self-centralization from Metaphysical tradition, one of the strategies of self-redescription. The other strategy is aesthetic redescription. This redescription is based on understanding the psychic world as an encounter of “beliefs and desires” as “quasi-people.” The thread of our argument is the articulation of psychoanalysis with the (...) concept of “hegemony.” This reflexive line occurs due to the agonist and conflicting context of internal alterity from the “interpersonal” relationship between conscious and unconscious, rediscovering the self. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 10, Page 1353-1368, December 2022. Rorty understands pragmatism in philosophy and social science, literature and art, to be intertwined with the political project of changing the world. Achieving Our Country, together with a lecture on the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, has become Rorty’s political testament. Rorty understands the leftist American project as the incomplete one of all those who fight for a classless society of boundless diversity. At the centre of Achieving (...) Our Country is the tragic division between old and new, social and cultural Left. Rorty’s patriotism is progressive and cosmopolitan. The American project can only be realized if the Left breaks the hegemony of the political Right. For that, America must be understood as a utopia that makes itself the avant-garde of global political, economic, social and cultural change. This utopia can be realized only by a new kind of unity between leftist centres in the university and leftist organizational power in the rest of society. In this respect, America could become a model for the rest of the world again. (shrink)

Richard Rorty stood out as a relevant thinker of contemporary political life, in addition to building a framework of ideas of language, culture, freedom and solidarity. One of his most recurrent banners was the primacy of literature over philosophy and freedom over truth. For the purposes of this article, we start with excerpts from Rorty's interview by Helmut Mayer and Wolfgang Ulrich, compiled in the text It's good to persuade, in Take care of freedom that the truth will take care (...) of itself. In addition to this text, we also use Philosophy and social hope, and, in particular, Education as socialization and individualization, a text in which the author, moving away from the enchantment of traditional philosophy and defending the adoption of a philosophizing, primacy of freedom the edifying truth, by dogmatic, over a markedly essentialist and anti-foundationist posture. (shrink)

Metaphilosophy, Volume 53, Issue 1, Page 144-147, January 2022.

The key organizing theme of Rorty and Beyond, edited by Randall Auxier, Eli Kramer, and Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński, is—as the title suggests—to consider what pragmatism and philosophy are and could be in a post-Rorty world. As Auxier puts it in his preface to the volume of 19 papers, "no one can deny that the world we now write in is one in which Rorty defined what pragmatism would be, and what it has become. To write beyond Rorty is to address (...) a world whose idea of pragmatism was formed by his work". And, in his introduction to the volume, Eli Kramer suggests that Rorty is best seen as a "transitional philosophical figure," one who "heralded and inspired a shift in philosophy from... (shrink)

Richard Rorty has been taken to task for his apparent inability to defend democracy to the anti-democrat. Cheryl Misak, for example, in developing her own epistemic defense of democracy, argues that because he abjures truth, Rorty cannot provide any argument to show that democracy is superior to other political arrangements. In this paper, I agree with Misak that Rorty is unable to provide an argument, epistemic or otherwise, in defense of democracy, but show that this doesn’t mean he, or someone (...) who takes his insights seriously, needs to be silent about its shape or its promises. Instead, I follow Rorty’s lead and develop out of Fabienne Peter’s work an epistemology that, though it cannot be used to defend democracy, does comport well with it. (shrink)

This short review raises a trilemma for Chris Voparil’s reading of Richard Rorty. Voparil must deny one of three things. He must deny that Rorty affirmed a Jamesian approach to metaethics; he must deny that Rorty affirmed a version of Peircean realism; or, he must deny that Rorty treated all domains of discourse roughly the same. Because Rorty is quite clear in his commitment to the first and third theses and far less clear in affirming Peircean realism, I argue that (...) Voparil is forced to give up attributing realism to Rorty or must simply concede that his version of Rorty is incoherent. (shrink)

Preview:/Review: Marcin Kilanowski, The Rorty-Habermas Debate: Toward Freedom as Responsibility,, 304 pages./ The American philosopher Richard Rorty and the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas engaged in a lengthy discussion over the years on a range of issues, particularly as these issues involved the nature of liberal, democratic society following the horrors of Auschwitz. The two thinkers came from different philosophical traditions with Rorty associated with analytical philosophy and pragmatism and Habermas with Continental philosophy, the Frankfurt School, and critical theory. Both philosophers (...) saw themselves as “postmetaphysical,” rejecting traditional philosophical questions about the nature of reality and knowledge. Marcin Kilanowski, Professor of Law at Nicholas Copernicus University in Poland, offers a detailed discussion of the Rorty-Habermas debate. His book is intended for a broad audience beyond academic philosophers. He presents an exposition of both Rorty’s and Habermas’ thought, together with a comparison with those of John Dewey, who influenced them both. Kilanowski then compares and contrasts the thought of Rorty and Habermas with the goal of showing large areas of agreement, even though they philosophized in seemingly different ways. Kilanowski also suggests lessons that may be learned from the Rorty-Habermas debate about the nature of politics and democracy. He does so through the concept of freedom and through the development of a view he calls “freedom as responsibility.” The review examines Kilanowski’s study of the Rorty-Habermas debate and concludes that Kilanowski succeeds in his aim of showing the convergence between the two thinkers. The review also suggests that Kilanowski’s work may have a broader application in that it suggests how dialogue between different philosophical traditions may be developed and understood. As in Kilanowski’s book, the review also questions the “postmetaphysical” stance adopted by both Rorty and Habermas. (shrink)

This text proposes a conception of Richard Rorty’s philosophy from the distinction between systematic philosophy and edifying philosophy, proposing this distinction as a key to reading his neo-pragmatism and his political-ethical proposal of the 90s, whose consequence main will be his conception of liberal democracy, ironic citizen and post-philosophical culture.

Nietzsche, Foucault, and Rorty are each ethical thinkers in that widest sense that concerns questions of who we ought to be, and each seeks to answer those questions through accounts of self-creation that are distinguished by the style and scope of embeddedness in some community they rely on. Nietzsche’s is a middle-ground position between Rorty and Foucault since he offers an affirmation of community, on grounds that Rorty might accept, without acquiescence to the status quo, a concern for Foucault. Nietzsche (...) aims to place himself in a community, but one in part defined by its vigilance in identifying its blind spots, in knowing that it does not always know itself. In particular, I would like to say that Rorty misses the force of Nietzsche’s views on self-creation and the affirmation of community because Rorty mischaracterizes Nietzsche’s perspectivism by construing it along narrative rather than affective or physiological lines. (shrink)

"Dimensions of Shared Agency" investigates the way in which standard philosophical accounts have been dealing with the issue of collective actions. In particular, the book focuses on the 'Big Five' of analytical social ontology and their accounts of shared/collective intentions and actions. Through systematic readings of different positions in the debate, the author proposes original ways of analyzing and classifying current theories of shared agency according to whether they advance a member-level or a group-level account of shared agency. While member-level (...) accounts are theories of shared agency based on individuals' attitudes and actions, group-level accounts give attention to the group of individuals considered as a whole, i.e., as an agent itself. Criticism arises against the idea that the Big Five have proposed stable group-level accounts suitable for explaining the case of shared agency as a group-level phenomenon. The widespread tendency in the debate is to endorse a perspective called holistic individualism, which maintains that high-level explanations are objective even though social facts are ontologically reducible to facts about individuals. Lasagni argues that as long as holistic individualism is held, the GLA is reducible to the MLA because holistic individualism upholds ontological individualism based on a deep individualistic premise, fixing the special status of individual agents as natural persons. The premise makes the claim to treat groups as agents contradictory to the general framework of the theory. This book profiles an alternative interpretation according to which agency should be considered as a functional kind, which is equally instantiated by different systems, such as individual human beings and organized social groups. In this way, the author claims, the reduction of the social can be avoided. "Dimensions of Shared Agency" will be of interest to doctoral students, researchers, and scholars interested in social ontology and the philosophy of the social sciences. It can also be utilised as supplementary reading or an introduction to philosophy students and scholars who are first approaching the philosophy of collective intentionality and shared agency. (shrink)

The introduction of corporate mode into universities with the widespread of neoliberalism has posed threats to intellectuals’ academic creativity and political sensitivity. To respond to the threats, I argue that it is high time we talk about educating hope. Moreover, I contend that Richard Rorty and Gilles Deleuze’s theories on hope can be of great help in understanding the complexity and exquisiteness of hope—non-representational and non-metaphysical, dependent on contingent encounters, transformative and political.

The article sheds light on some points of convergence between Rorty’s theoretical proposal to reject systematic and foundational philosophy favoring a “post-Philosophy” and Gargani’s idea of knowledge without foundations. In particular, the article argues how Gargani’s interpretation of Rorty’s thought is in line with Gargani’s critique of universal and ahistorical rationality in favor of naturalized anthropology, expressing in a praxis that, although without foundations, is not an expression of irrationality. The last part of the article highlights some differences between Gargani (...) and Rorty on the possibility of adopting some different facets of Heidegger’s thought. (shrink)

In recent years, Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism has been repeatedly associated with the loss of truth and a post-factual age. At the same time, Rorty is presented as a strict opponent of such positions. How is it that the same thinker who is held responsible for a postmodern decline is also to be understood as the most severe critic? To answer this question, this paper reconstructs Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism as a practice of solidarity by referring to his theory of recognition and virtue of (...) contingency. Subsequently, it can be shown why the accusations of post-facticity and ethnocentrism fall short. On the contrary, because his theory combines different political archetypes, the paper presents Rorty’s description of anti-authoritarianism as a social paradigm of contemporary societies. (shrink)

Prescient essays about the state of our politics from the philosopher who predicted that a populist demagogue would become president of the United States Richard Rorty, one of the most influential intellectuals of recent decades, is perhaps best known today as the philosopher who, almost two decades before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, warned of the rise of a Trumpian strongman in America. What Can We Hope For? gathers nineteen of Rorty’s essays on American and global politics, including four previously (...) unpublished and many lesser-known and hard-to-find pieces. In these provocative and compelling essays, Rorty confronts the critical challenges democracies face at home and abroad, including populism, growing economic inequality, and overpopulation and environmental devastation. In response, he offers optimistic and realistic ideas about how to address these crises. He outlines strategies for fostering social hope and building an inclusive global community of trust, and urges us to put our faith in trade unions, universities, bottom-up social campaigns, and bold political visions that thwart ideological pieties. Driven by Rorty’s sense of emergency about our collective future, What Can We Hope For? is filled with striking diagnoses of today’s political crises and creative proposals for solving them. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 10, Page 1480-1493, December 2022. By applying the concept of democracy and the state proposed by Richard Rorty, the article aims to make a theoretical contribution to understanding frames of political mobilization and solidarity. While Rorty’s conceptual instruments stem from the field of epistemology and moral philosophy and have, so far, not been widely applied to theorizing statehood in general and labour market policy in particular, his ideas can help to understand leftist politics (...) between inter- and re-nationalization. By drawing on empirical findings on debates and negotiations between European trade union organizations, the text proposes an idea on how to overcome a dualistic framework beyond a footloose cosmopolitanism and national protectionism. (shrink)

This collection of fourteen chapters succeeds in its editorial aims of bringing together “both established and emerging voices in contemporary philosophy” whose contributions critically examine Rorty’s lasting influence in ethics, epistemology, and political philosophy (22). While every chapter is previously unpublished, a handful of pieces explore ideas that their authors have treated in book-length projects (Allen, Curtis, Voparil). This is a virtue of the volume, as it provides succinct st...

The aim of this paper is to propose a reconstruction of Richard Rorty’s philosophy of mind aimed at showing both its systematic structure and the originality of some outcomes, not adequately underlined by critics. My starting point is an early paper, titled Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental, in which Rorty takes sides on the venerable question of the mark of the mental. I will show that Rorty defends a weak view on the above question and that his idea, (...) according to which a particular concept of incorrigibility provides the most promising way of distinguishing the mental from the physical, has a deep influence on Philosophy and the Mirror of the Nature. In the last part of the paper, I will underline the consequences of Rorty’s peculiar idea of the mental on the specific problem of fictional entities, showing how his position could be seen as a form of deflationism which in some ways seems compatible with the positions recently engaged by Crane. (shrink)

Este artigo se destina a investigar a concepção do termo solidariedade em Richard Rorty e Axel Honneth, buscando apresentar as possíveis semelhanças e divergências de perspectivas tendo como parâmetro o progresso social. Richard Rorty aponta a solidariedade como uma troca de relações práticas intersubjetivas, sem apegos a tradição metafísica e a epistemologia. O autor nos propõe fugir de qualquer tentativa de fundamentalismos e buscas por verdades absolutas que venham guiar a noção de mundo dos indivíduos e fundamentar suas ações. Tal (...) comportamento limitaria as relações práticas que ocorrem dentro de uma comunidade, atrapalhando o processo de resoluções dos problemas que estão nas práticas sociais, mas que são solapados por buscas de justificativas universalistas. Por outro lado, Axel Honneth defende a solidariedade como uma terceira esfera de reconhecimento, seria a esfera destinada a estima social, comportamento que cada sujeito deveria manifestar a outro indivíduo para haja relações intersubjetivas entre eles. Esta estima é construída levando em consideração a história e as lutas por mudanças sociais, ela é dada como uma esfera de reconhecimento recorrendo a princípios naturalmente humanos, tomando a racionalidade e valores intrinsecamente humanos. O objetivo desse artigo é verificar como cada autor articula suas reflexões sobre o tema. (shrink)

Este artigo se destina a investigar a concepção do termo solidariedade em Richard Rorty e Axel Honneth, buscando apresentar as possíveis semelhanças e divergências de perspectivas tendo como parâmetro o progresso social. Richard Rorty aponta a solidariedade como uma troca de relações práticas intersubjetivas, sem apegos a tradição metafísica e a epistemologia. O autor nos propõe fugir de qualquer tentativa de fundamentalismos e buscas por verdades absolutas que venham guiar a noção de mundo dos indivíduos e fundamentar suas ações. Tal (...) comportamento limitaria as relações práticas que ocorrem dentro de uma comunidade, atrapalhando o processo de resoluções dos problemas que estão nas práticas sociais, mas que são solapados por buscas de justificativas universalistas. Por outro lado, Axel Honneth defende a solidariedade como uma terceira esfera de reconhecimento, seria a esfera destinada a estima social, comportamento que cada sujeito deveria manifestar a outro indivíduo para haja relações intersubjetivas entre eles. Esta estima é construída levando em consideração a história e as lutas por mudanças sociais, ela é dada como uma esfera de reconhecimento recorrendo a princípios naturalmente humanos, tomando a racionalidade e valores intrinsecamente humanos. O objetivo desse artigo é verificar como cada autor articula suas reflexões sobre o tema. (shrink)

The experiential self in interaction with an object is not, as Richard Rorty emphasizes, an inherent attribute that exists before real interactions, nor is it an entity with fixed characteristics. What Rorty constantly highlights is that the interaction in forming the self must achieve self-awareness as an entity impacted, acknowledged, and evaluated by others. This line of interpretation leads to two important concepts regarding the self’s formation that need to be clarified: First, when an individual expands his/her ability to manage (...) space outside the reach of his/her physical person and visual perception, it is imperative that the individual is aware that he/she is controlling his/her own body. Second, the reciprocal effect from others cannot make the individual self-aware of his/her own existence as an independent entity if there is a lack of the other’s skepticism and questioning of the subject himself/herself. In this step of the self-experience process, the self’s attributes and its existence in relation to its surroundings are questioned. This article will focus on the explanation of the feasibility of perceiving the self as a form made up of biological premises and the awareness of the self as a living entity with contingent and flexible characteristics. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin and Richard Rorty are sometimes thought to be diametrically opposed philosophers, particularly in their approach to foundational questions in moral thought. Dworkin is a champion of truth and objectivity in morality. Rorty, by contrast, is a great pragmatist who subscribed to a deflated vision of truth and unambiguously renounced objectivity, in favor of what he called “solidarity”. If their stated -isms and alliances were not evidence enough of discord, they also criticized one another in print, particularly on these (...) foundational, or metaethical, questions. The point of this chapter is to show that things are not what they seem: Rorty and Dworkin largely agree on metaethics. The difference between them is largely a difference in emphasis. (shrink)

We formalize a theory of the subject by sketching a pragmatic functional hierarchy of sapient cognition. Our expanded framework attempts to articulate a normative understanding of discursive cognition by demarcating its functional propriety within a naturalist rejoinder, seeing in the functional development of cognition from pre-discursive to discursive abilities an increase and refinement in representational competence found in non-intentional systems. We therein explain how sapient cognitive systems not only engage in patterns of material and formal inference to map intensional relations (...) between phenomena in nature through theoretical and practical reasonings, but also engage in practices of theoretical construction and systematic integration through techniques of formalization that make the unity of nature and thought progressively intelligible. We trace the development of mind in its representational function from barren discriminatory capacities, shared with inanimate objects, to complex theory-forming systematizing conceptual abilities enabling agents to theoretically map and intervene upon the world of which they are part, and to embed the informational indexes they register from the environment that makes globally explicit the objective modal structure of the world. (shrink)

This book features fourteen original essays that critically engage the philosophy of Richard Rorty, with an emphasis on his ethics, epistemology, and politics. Inspired by James’ and Dewey’s pragmatism, Rorty urged us to rethink the role of science and truth with a liberal-democratic vision of politics. In doing so, he criticized philosophy as a sheer scholastic endeavor and put it back in touch with our most pressing cultural and human needs. The essays in this volume employ the conceptual tools and (...) argumentative techniques of analytic philosophy and pragmatism and demonstrate the relevance of Rorty’s thought to the most urgent questions of our time. They touch on a number of topics, including but not limited to structural injustice, rule-following, Black feminist philosophy, legal pragmatism, moral progress, relativism, and skepticism. This book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars across disciplines who are engaging with the work of Richard Rorty. Papers By Barry Allen, Michael Bacon and Nat Rutherford, Rosa M. Calcaterra, Sharyn Clough, William M. Curtis, Susan Dieleman, Raff Donelson, Douglas Lind, Sabina Lovibond, Marianne Janack, Giancarlo Marchetti, Sarin Marchetti, Carol Rovane, Shannon Sullivan, and Chris Voparil. (shrink)

O presente artigo propõe analisar as concepções de Andrew Feenberg e de Richard Rorty em suas críticas antiessencialistas. Feenberg tem seu foco numa crítica às posições substantivistas e deterministas das tecnologias. Para ele, as tecnologias não são pré-determinadas por alguma natureza ou essência própria. Sua crítica coloca o modelo atual de produção e desenvolvimento tecnológico enquanto limitado pelos valores exaltados por grupos dominantes e que excluem a multiplicidade de valores em jogo numa sociedade. Já Rorty parte do pragmatismo para realizar (...) uma crítica às teorias de correspondência da verdade e das tentativas de fundamentar representações precisas da realidade. Ele aponta a imaginação, na concepção romântica, como a capacidade humana responsável pelo progresso social e como círculo dentro do qual a razão pode trabalhar. Essa noção de imaginação é, desse modo, o ponto de partida para novos modos do fazer e do desenvolvimento de potencialidades humanas. Este artigo buscou identificar um caminho de aproximação entre esses dois autores. Eles concordam quanto à necessidade de ampliação das possibilidades do fazer humano e de que concepções essencialistas limitam nossas potencialidades. A noção de imaginação, como apontada por Rorty, vai ao encontro da defesa de Feenberg pela ampliação do modelo de racionalidade que encaminha o desenvolvimento tecnológico, permitindo a democratização e ampliação das possibilidades humanas. (shrink)

This book brings Jewish moral reasoning into conversation with Richard Rorty's secular neo-pragmatist philosophy, which often comes across as anti-religious. The result is a type of hope for the future concerning the relationship between Judaism and secularism.

Argues that out of the confrontation between Rorty and Habermas may be found a new way to answer the question of what kind of politics do we need today.

This article critically investigates the landscape of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics, especially Gadamerian hermeneutics. This investigation reveals that one of the central trends in recent decades has been to construe hermeneutics as, instead of an ongoing and substantive philosophical research project, rather an amorphous current or nebulous spirit of intellectual life and culture—what this article refers to as the sense of hermeneutics as an attitude. The “effective history” of this characterization of hermeneutics is traced to polemical references to hermeneutics by Alain (...) Badiou and Richard Rorty, which have negatively contributed to the reception of the hermeneutical movement. The article suggests that hermeneutics should aim to be neither a vague sensibility nor, in what ultimately amounts to a reaction against the idea of hermeneutics as an attitude, a rigorous “method” of interpretation, but rather an ongoing philosophical research program. To unpack this suggestion, the article concludes by providing “foundations for a contemporary hermeneutics” with reference to six contributions from promising recent work in hermeneutics. (shrink)

This chapter takes a critical look at universities from the perspective of the neopragmatist philosophy of education outlined by Richard Rorty. The chapter begins with a discussion of Rorty’s view of the ends that educational institutions properly serve in a liberal democracy. It then considers the kind of culture that Rorty takes to be conducive to those ends and the kind that is antithetical to them. Rorty sometimes characterizes the latter as a culture of ‘egotism’. After describing the main aspects (...) of such a culture, the chapter uses it as an interpretive key for understanding the ‘dark side’ of the contemporary university. Our thesis is that within a Rortyan, neo-pragmatist philosophy of higher education, the ends that universities are meant to serve in a liberal democracy are vulnerable to frustration and corruption by a culture of egotism. (shrink)

In this article, our aim is to examine the place of “reality” in Richard Rorty’s thought in view of the important and key discussion of language in the philosophy of this thinker. In other words, we know that with the occurrence of the “linguistic turn” in the middle of the twentieth century, the relationship between language and reality has become one of the central debates of philosophy, especially analytical philosophy, and has become of particular importance. Is it language that determines (...) the external reality for us? Is knowing the world outside the mind possible only through the possibilities that language gives us? And to what extent does the structure of language affect our cognitive pattern? These are only a part of the linguistic concerns that have occupied the minds of contemporary philosophers. The main concern and problem of the present article, which has been approached using a descriptive-analytical method, is to examine the relationship between language and reality in Richard Rorty’s thought and to show how he defends the linguistic structure of having reality. Rorty, following an analytical philosophy that, in addition to detailed analyses of traditional philosophical concepts, like the concepts of truth, meaning, necessity, etc. and by changing the discussion from experience to discussion from language in the direction of pragmatizing the basic principles of positivism, believes that it is trans-lingual and trans-temporal. The common denominator that Plato found in the outside world and transferred to man in the Cartesian-Kantian tradition is sought in analytic philosophy in language, and so analytic philosophers continue to pursue the traditional philosophy project of providing a trans-historical and eternal framework for the accurate representation of the world. Rorty tries to overcome this view of analytical philosophers with a Darwinist and pragmatic view of language and under the influence of philosophers such as Wittgenstein.For Darwinists, language is a tool among other tools that gives its users the ability to better and more efficiently adapt to their environment and meet their needs. For the likes of Wittgenstein and like-minded people, despite their many and sometimes profound differences, language had an important and pivotal place with its eventual and possibility feature. Influenced by thinkers such as Wittgenstein, and in the context of his Darwinist and pragmatic approach to language, Rorty attributes certain characteristics to language that can be said to influence his whole thought. Firstly, he considers language as a tool like other tools and, therefore, considers it to have no fixed nature and identity. Given that it is not possible to leave the language and on the other hand language has a poetic and metaphorical character, the function of language cannot be a representation of reality and reality can never be available to us naked and as independent of language and descriptions. Therefore, from Rorty’s point of view, reality is a linguistic and constructed matter of language that we humans have invented in cooperation with each other and in accordance with our historical-cultural situation and needs. Of course, Rorty’s point in saying that reality is made by language is by no means that we create reality arbitrarily and as we wish; rather, what is happening is that we are responding to an external stimulus, a response of various sentence types that manifests itself as linguistic reactions. (shrink)

Das essential bietet eine systematische Anleitung für eine fruchtbare Rorty-Lektüre. Zugleich stellt es eine kurze Einführung in die Grundzüge von Richard Rortys Neopragmatismus dar. Der Autor schlägt vor, ihn als fragile Balance von Pragmatismus und Romantik zu lesen, mit der Rorty unser Selbstbild ändern will. Außerdem erläutert er diesen transformativen Anspruch anhand einer Skizze von „Kontinenz, Ironie und Solidarität“ und der utopischen Figur der liberalen Ironikerin. Das essential schließt mit einem Hinweis auf Rortys bisher verkannte ethisch-politische Motivation und mit dem (...) methodischen Vorschlag für das Weiterlesen seiner Texte: Man muss die pragmatistische Methode auf ihn selbst anwenden. (shrink)