Abstract

With its emphasis on indeterminacy, ambiguity, uncertainty, and chance, contingentism depicts normativity as one of our human practical possibilities rather than as a metaphysical bottleneck which we should necessary fulfill at the cost of repudiating concrete ways in which we grant epistemic and ethical meaning to our activities. Richard McKay Rorty's "neo-pragmatism" launched a powerful challenge to entrenched philosophical and pre-philosophical certainties of modernity, allowing us to articulate the powerful picture of normativity as a distinctive exercise and activity of human beings. The book is a critical survey of his philosophy, in the light of various theoretical arguments as well as of his own resourceful attempts to renew philosophy from within its practice by using the conceptual tools and argumentative techniques of both analytic philosophy and pragmatism.