This essay introduces a running symposium on the work of Richard Rorty and its legacy fifteen years after his passing. The arc of Rorty's thought defines a trajectory through American pragmatism, tracing a variation unimagined until he expressed it. His work raised Anglophone philosophers’ interest in American pragmatism as never before and also focused the interest of the whole world on American pragmatism as never before, even though the result was to define a pragmatism saturated with nominalism and suppressing the (...) most original qualities of the sources that he celebrated. (shrink)

The figure of Richard Rorty stands in complex relation to the tradition of American pragmatism. On the one hand, his intellectual creativity, lively prose, and bridge-building fueled the contemporary resurgence of pragmatism. On the other, his polemical claims and selective interpretations function as a negative, fixed pole against which thinkers of all stripes define themselves. Virtually all pragmatists on the contemporary scene, whether classical or "new," Deweyan, Jamesian, or Peircean, use Rorty as a foil to justify their positions. The resulting (...) internecine quarrels and divisions threaten to thwart and fragment the tradition's creative potential. More caricatured than understood, the specter of Rorty is blocking the road of inquiry and future development of pragmatism. Reconstructing Pragmatism moves beyond the Rortyan impasse by providing what has been missing for decades: a constructive, non-polemical account of Rorty's relation to classical pragmatism. The first book-length treatment of Rorty's intellectual debt to the early pragmatists, it establishes his selective appropriations not as misunderstandings or distortions but as a sustained, intentional effort to reconstruct their thinking. Featuring chapters devoted to five key pragmatist thinkers - Peirce, James, Dewey, Royce, and Addams - the book draws on archival sources and the full scope of Rorty's writings to challenge prevailing misconceptions and caricatures. By illuminating the critical resources, still largely untapped, that Rorty offers for articulating classical pragmatism's ongoing relevance, the book reveals limitations in the received images of the classical pragmatists that predominate in current debates and opens up new modes of understanding pragmatism and why it matters today. (shrink)

Pragmatism and Justice is an interdisciplinary volume of new and seminal essays by political philosophers, social theorists, and scholars of pragmatism which provides a comprehensive introduction and lasting resource for scholars of pragmatist thought and questions of justice.

This essay seeks to illuminate the ethical concerns that animate Richard Rorty's philosophy. I argue that Rorty's ethics foregrounds as its central priority the issue of responsibility and frame Rorty's work as offering us a picture of ethical comportment in a postfoundational, pluralistic milieu, where citizens not only recognize the contingency of their own deepest beliefs but give up any sense of responsibilities owed to nonhuman authorities. To paraphrase Rorty, from any number of occasions, all we have to be responsible (...) to is each other. Yet Rorty goes even further than antiauthoritarianism in ethics. He not only shifts to thinking about ethics in terms of our relations to others; he specifically attunes this ethics to those who are suffering or excluded or merely previously unnoticed. What emerges is an alternative Rorty to the smirking gadfly blithely shrugging off criticism and incapable of inhabiting a position of moral seriousness. (shrink)

This paper examines Rorty's notion of philosophy as cultural politics. Highlighting its explicitly Deweyan origins, I trace this idea to Rorty's call in the 1970s for philosophers to be more involved in the cause of enlarging human freedom. Rorty brings philosophy into his project of expanding the conversation beyond the West to include excluded voices through literature and narrative. After underscoring Rorty's important contributions, I argue that rather than merely assimilating non-Western voices to "our" conversation, cultural politics demands that privileged (...) philosophers start joining the conversations of others. (shrink)

This book offers a fresh perspective on Richard Rorty by situating his work in the arena of political theory. Reinterpreting Rorty's much-maligned antirepresentationalism as a Romantic affirmation of the power of imaginative writing, Voparil firmly grounds Rorty in an American tradition that includes not only James and Dewey, but Emerson, Whitman, and James Baldwin, and initiates an overdue reassessment of this important thinker's value to the political discourse of the 21st century.

The first comprehensive collection of the work of Richard Rorty, The Rorty Reader brings together the influential American philosopher’s essential essays from over four decades of writings. Offers a comprehensive introduction to Richard Rorty's life and body of work Brings key essays published across many volumes and journals into one collection, including selections from his final volume of philosophical papers, Philosophy as Cultural Politics ) Contains the previously unpublished essay, “Redemption from Egotism” Includes in-depth interviews, and several revealing autobiographical pieces (...) Represents the fullest portrait available today on Rorty’s relationship with American pragmatism and the trajectory of his thought. (shrink)

The existing body of scholarship on Rorty’s relation to Dewey devotes relatively little attention to the shared commitments that animate their respective projects and what they hold in common philosophically. This article aims to shift the discourse from assaying Rorty’s faithfulness to Dewey to clarifying and critically examining the differences that make a difference between their respective projects of philosophical reconstruction and democratic meliorism, in the hope of learning from mutually corrective insights and moving pragmatism beyond stale impasses. Highlighting the (...) continuity between Rorty’s early work and later Philosophy as Cultural Politics in a commitment to a Deweyan notion of philosophy as an instrument of social change, I argue that their differences are most fruitfully understood against the backdrop of their shared attentiveness to cultural context, the sociopolitical character of philosophical inquiry, pressing issues of the day, and the need for philosophers to transcend professionalized debates. (shrink)

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)

The appearance of several new works and a multivolume critical anthology devoted to Richard Rorty casts in bold relief the surprising lack of sympathetic interpretations his work has generated over the past few decades. After examining the complex nature of the critical reaction to Rorty, this essay reviews two new introductions to his thought that attempt to approach him in a spirit of hermeneutic charity. I argue that Rorty's somewhat neglected idea of treating philosophy as a Bildungsroman may shed some (...) light on the problem of how to read Rorty usefully. (shrink)

To engage constructively with aspects of his writing sometimes given short shrift, in this paper I contend that Rorty can be fruitfully approached as a political theorist concerned with promulgating a new picture of the political world. Situating his recent thought as a political intervention aimed at revitalizing a moribund left allows us to take seriously his antirepresentationalist claims and evaluate his thought in terms of its political effects rather than accuracy of representation. By reading Rorty’s notion of ‘metaphorical redescription’ (...) through Sheldon Wolin’s conception of political theory as a kind of ‘vision’, I highlight the value of imaginatively constructing new perspectives on our world as a prelude to changing it. Yet even as it authorizes the creative power of imaginative language, Rorty’s antirepresentationalism limits the critical potential of his project by severing his redescriptions from political reality. Where Rorty seeks to alter our vocabularies, the great political theorists sought to alter the world. Key Words: antirepresentationalism • Dewey • Habermas • imagination • Kuhn • redescription • Rorty • utopia • Wolin. (shrink)

This response to insightful commentaries on my book, from Richard Shusterman, Susan Dieleman, Raff Donelson, and Colin Koopman, takes up the recurring theme of the nature of normativity on a Rortyan view. To frame my individual replies, I revisit the Davidsonian account of epistemic interaction that influences Rorty’s mature view and suggest that the norms implicit in Davidsonian triangulation are insufficient to support Rorty’s antiauthoritarianism in ethics and epistemology. To address the resulting question of how to account for norms of (...) responsibility and obligation within Rorty’s thought, I highlight key strands of the pragmatic tradition, originating with Peirce but extending through James, Addams, and Dewey, that Rorty reconstructs in the process of developing the full implications of prioritizing democracy over philosophy. (shrink)

On Philosophy and Philosophers is a volume of unpublished philosophical papers by Richard Rorty, a central figure in late-twentieth-century intellectual debates and a primary force behind the resurgence of American pragmatism. The first collection of new work to appear since his death in 2007, these previously unseen papers advance novel views on metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, philosophical semantics and the social role of philosophy, critically engaging canonical and contemporary figures from Plato and Kant to Kripke and Brandom. This book's diverse offerings, (...) which include technical essays written for specialists and popular lectures, refine our understanding of Rorty's perspective and demonstrate the ongoing relevance of the iconoclastic American philosopher's ground-breaking thought. An introduction by the editors highlights the papers' original insights and contributions to contemporary debates. (shrink)

The diversity of learning differences in today's college classrooms raises an array of difficult questions that pedagogical theory and practice have yet to address. The trend toward more individualized instruction presents a puzzle when considered alongside this new diversity, particularly in the context of classical ideals of liberal education. Drawing on the surprisingly timely educational writings of John Dewey, this essay attempts to sketch a pedagogical vision for the 21st century that shifts the focus back toward the process of learning (...) itself, and that grounds learning in the personal experience of the learner without compromising the larger goals of liberal education. Meeting the challenges presented by diverse learners may hold the key to reinvigorating higher education as a whole. (shrink)

Somewhat unexpectedly, given the weighty baggage of anything-goes relativism that long trailed him, a central concern in work on Richard Rorty since his passing in 2007 has been his normativity.1 Rosa Calcaterra's Contingency and Normativity is the most ambitious and most illuminating effort to date in this vein. The book helps us better understand Rorty's pragmatism by using his challenges to us as the basis for an inquiry into epistemic and moral normativity in the wake of the critique of foundationalism (...) and rise of "contingentism," which Calcaterra understands as "a conceptual net tied to the criteria of indeterminacy, ambiguity, uncertainty and randomness". Ultimately, Calcaterra's contribution is the... (shrink)

On Philosophy and Philosophers is a volume of unpublished philosophical papers by Richard Rorty, a central figure in late-twentieth-century intellectual debates and a primary force behind the resurgence of American pragmatism. The first collection of new work to appear since his death in 2007, these previously unseen papers advance novel views on metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, philosophical semantics and the social role of philosophy, critically engaging canonical and contemporary figures from Plato and Kant to Kripke and Brandom. This book's diverse offerings, (...) which include technical essays written for specialists and popular lectures, refine our understanding of Rorty's perspective and demonstrate the ongoing relevance of the iconoclastic American philosopher's ground-breaking thought. An introduction by the editors highlights the papers' original insights and contributions to contemporary debates. (shrink)

Philosophy and Social Hope contains cogent accounts of Rorty’s core positions on truth, metaphysics, and ethics once hope replaces certainty. On display is his democracy-centered pragmatism’s wide range of application for promoting moral progress, the project of fostering richer and more humane lives of citizens and making communities more inclusive and just. This chapter situates the book’s chief philosophical claims within his larger project and provides an overview of his pragmatism’s emphasis on philosophy as an instrument of change, expanding the (...) reach of our moral community, and pluralism over commensuration. It then sketches his timely efforts to address the neglect of economic injustice. (shrink)

In this dissertation I present an interpretive approach to the thought of Richard Rorty that enables us to engage constructively with aspects of his writing that are sometimes given short shrift. I contend that Rorty can be fruitfully approached as a political theorist concerned with promulgating a new picture of the political world. Reading his practice of redescription as rooted in his temperament or personal vision, I argue that this vision, understood as an imaginative reordering of the world, makes Rorty's (...) thought of moment to political theorists, particularly those who conceive of political theory following Sheldon Wolin. Framing Rorty's work in this way allows us to approach it in a spirit of hermeneutic charity and avoid offhanded rejections. ;Reading Rorty as writing political theory helps free us from a paralyzing entanglement in questions of validity claims, and brings the political thrust of his writing to the fore. Rather than either a set of universal truths or a groundless relativism, it allows us to see Rorty's texts as political interventions: as attempts to revitalize a moribund contemporary left by spurring emotional engagement rather than detached spectatorship. It also enables us to better understand the turn in Rorty's recent work toward the thought of Emerson and Whitman and his approach to literature as a source for a distinctively American "sentimental education" aimed at forging a democratic moral community. Yet I argue the liberal utopia he imaginatively projects ultimately falls short of its transformative promise, partly because of his exclusion of individual creative energies from public life through his modified version of the public private split. That Rorty's pragmatist liberalism can be nudged out of its anxiety-rooted frame and be made to see such energies as less of a threat, and to weave them into its underlying fabric, is the underlying hope of this work. (shrink)

Abstract:A summary of central points I made in my book Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).

Given how much the tradition owes to Dewey’s pragmatic reconstruction of philosophy, that more is not written of a political bent by those working under the sign of pragmatism is to me always surprising. John McGowan’s Pragmatist Politics is a shining exception. The book’s aim is “to articulate and practice a liberal democratic ethos inspired primarily by the American pragmatist tradition.”1 Two compelling opening chapters lay out McGowan’s melioristic conception of pragmatism as a philosophy of possibility animated by a belief (...) in progress, drawing most heavily from James and Dewey but ranging well beyond them, both within the pragmatist tradition and outside it. Three subsequent chapters articulate “a vision of a .. (shrink)

Abstract:In this essay I respond to four commentators who participated in a symposium on my book, Reconstructing Pragmatism. Issues that emerge include: Addams’s and Rorty’s mutual commitment to cultivating affective rationality; how Royce and Rorty share an ethical imperative in their philosophy and where both can learn from Alain Locke; what a post-Rortyan pragmatism might look like and the best path toward realizing it; the significance of recovering the serious, unironic Rorty and the limits of weak misreadings; Rorty’s pragmatic maxim; (...) and reflections on how best to sustain the habits and practices of a robust pragmatic tradition and community. In places, for understandable reasons the commentaries stray from the book’s argument about Rorty’s relation to classical pragmatism and address larger issues surrounding Rorty’s work and its broader reception. I don’t respond to all such matters but try to here and there, which hopefully gives what follows a relevance for contemporary pragmatism beyond the book itself. (shrink)

Taking full measure of Rorty's influence and legacy demands encountering his reception outside North America. One such case, Eastern Europe, where Rorty spent considerable time and enjoys a committed following, is especially interesting, given the post-1989 resonance of his claims about the priority of democracy to philosophy.Polish philosopher Krzysztof Skowroński's attention to the underappreciated normative dimension of Rorty's pragmatism opens a window into this reception. This wide-ranging book advances a core – and, in my view, essential – insight: there is (...) a "profoundly axiological character" to Rorty's philosophy. Even though Rorty consciously eschewed a theory of values or a system of axiology, for... (shrink)