Richard Rorty
1931-2007 · American · Pragmatism, Anti-representationalist Epistemology, Liberal Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language
I have spent 40 years looking for a coherent and convincing way of formulating my worries about what, if anything, philosophy is good for.
Richard Rorty entered the University of Chicago at fifteen, grandson of Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch and son of a left-wing journalist. He built an early reputation as an analytic philosopher of mind, then in 1979 published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and broke with everything he had been doing. The book argued that Western philosophy since Descartes had been gripped by one bad picture: the mind as a mirror reflecting reality, philosophy as the discipline that polishes the glass. Drawing on Sellars, Quine, Wittgenstein, and Davidson, he dissolved rather than refuted…
Topics Richard Rorty addresses
- anti-representationalism
- the mirror of nature
- philosophy as cultural politics
- edifying versus systematic philosophy
- liberal ironism
- the contingency of language
- the contingency of selfhood
- the contingency of liberal community
- final vocabulary
- redescription
- the private/public split
- cruelty as the worst thing we do
- solidarity without metaphysical grounding
- the priority of democracy to philosophy
- ethnocentrism and anti-anti-ethnocentrism
- truth without correspondence
- justification to one's peers
- the myth of the given
- the scheme/content distinction
- the dogmas of empiricism
- eliminative materialism
- the linguistic turn
- strong textualism
- sentimental education and moral progress
Questions to put to Richard Rorty
The Mirror of Nature and Anti-Representationalism
- What's wrong with the picture of the mind as a mirror of nature?
- How do Sellars, Quine, and Davidson together dissolve the epistemological project?
- What do you mean when you say truth is just the compliment we pay to useful sentences?
- If we give up the correspondence theory of truth, what's left to say about truth?
- What's the difference between edifying and systematic philosophy?
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
- What do you mean by the contingency of language?
- How can selfhood be contingent all the way down?
- Why doesn't recognizing contingency make our commitments arbitrary?
- What is a liberal ironist, and how does irony fit with political commitment?
- How do you build solidarity without appealing to shared human nature or rationality?
Pragmatism and Neopragmatism
- How is your pragmatism different from Dewey's or James's?
- What does it mean to say there are no intrinsic natures to be discovered?
- Why do you think anti-foundationalism is liberating rather than nihilistic?
- How does Davidson's work on truth support your pragmatist project?
- What's at stake for you in rejecting essentialism?
Liberal Democracy and Cultural Politics
- What do you mean by putting cruelty first?
- How does the private/public split actually work in practice?
- Why do you defend ethnocentrism instead of trying to rise above it?
- What's wrong with the spectatorial cultural Left you criticize in Achieving Our Country?
- How can novels and journalism do the work philosophy can't?
Philosophy as a Kind of Writing
- What is strong textualism, and why do you read philosophers that way?
- How do you respond to the charge that you domesticate Heidegger and Derrida?
- What does it mean to say philosophy is cultural politics?
- Why should we prefer redescription to accurate reconstruction?
- Is philosophy as a foundationalist discipline really finished?
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