In a symposium built around a critical reassessment by Nicholas Gaskill of Richard Rorty's pragmatism, this contribution examines the provocative question of whether Rorty's rhetoric hinders Rortian aims. When reconsidering him in company with “the philosophical wing of science studies” (Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway), Gaskill finds that Rorty's persistent assumption of nature/culture and word/world dichotomies is politically dangerous and prevents his comprehending both distributed agency and the complexity of human entanglements with the nonhuman. Gaskill's Rorty lacks a (...) sustained and coherent positive project, but a fuller picture, outlined in this article, reveals not only greater alignment of Rorty with science studies and agential realism but also key Rortian contributions to those fields that are particularly of moment in our “post-truth” condition. (shrink)

1. The current political scene in many countries is populated by polarised groups with sharply contrasting loyalties and beliefs implying that there are fundamental schisms between opposing groups....

Toxic speech inflicts damage to mental and physical health. This process can be chronic or acute, temporary or permanent. Understanding how toxic speech inflicts these harms requires both an account of linguistic practices and, because language is inherently social, tools from epidemiology. This paper explores what we can learn from two epidemiological models: a common source model that emphasizes poisons, and a propagated transmission model that better fits contagions like viruses.

This essay is a reply to commentaries by Elin Danielsen Huckerby, Yvonne Huetter‐Almerigi, and Paul Showler on Tracy Llanera's Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism (2020).