Abstract

David McClean’s book Richard Rorty, Liberalism and Cosmopolitanism is an excellent contribution to Rorty scholarship and pragmatism in general. The book begins with a masterful reconstruction of the tradition of American philosophy from Emerson and Thoreau to Peirce and James and Dewey, culminating in Rorty. This beginning, from the Preface entitled “Rorty’s ‘Violence of Direction’” to Chapter 1 entitled “From Pragmatism to Rortyism” occupies almost the first third, and seems to establish a three-part structure, of the book. The second part of the book, also very well done, critically engages Rorty’s pragmatist cosmopolitanism, finding the outlines...