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1. Philosophy and Social Hope by Richard Rorty | |
Paperback: 320
Pages
(2000-01-01)
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Editorial Review Product Description Customer Reviews (27)
Nice introduction to Rorty's thought
Flawed but inspiring.A must read.
Helpful For Courses on Ethics
Richard Rorty, great philosopher, died in June 2007
Great! |
2. An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion by Richard Rorty | |
Hardcover: 104
Pages
(2010-10-12)
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Editorial Review Product Description Richard Rorty is famous, maybe even infamous, for his philosophical nonchalance. His groundbreaking work not only rejects all theories of truth but also dismisses modern epistemology and its preoccupation with knowledge and representation. At the same time, the celebrated pragmatist believed there could be no universally valid answers to moral questions, which led him to a complex view of religion rarely expressed in his writings. In this posthumous publication, Rorty, a strict secularist, finds in the pragmatic thought of John Dewey, John Stuart Mill, Henry James, and George Santayana, among others, a political imagination shared by religious traditions. His intent is not to promote belief over nonbelief or to blur the distinction between religious and public domains. Rorty seeks only to locate patterns of similarity and difference so an ethics of decency and a politics of solidarity can rise. He particularly responds to Pope Benedict XVI and his campaign against the relativist vision. Whether holding theologians, metaphysicians, or political ideologues to account, Rorty remains steadfast in his opposition to absolute uniformity and its exploitation of political strength. |
3. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard Rorty | |
Paperback: 224
Pages
(1989-02-24)
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Editorial Review Product Description Customer Reviews (20)
Big Picture Philosophy! (not an analysis of petty technicalia)
A stimulating opportunity...
Truth in Moral Solidarity
big ideas, clear writing, with only a few gaps
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity |
4. The Rorty Reader (Blackwell Readers) by Richard Rorty | |
Paperback: 576
Pages
(2010-08-16)
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Editorial Review Product Description |
5. Consequences Of Pragmatism: Essays 1972-1980 by Richard Rorty | |
Paperback: 288
Pages
(1982-10-18)
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Customer Reviews (3)
"Philosophy is time grasped in thought"
Rorty and modern comedy I would prefer to review this book as if the particular philosophical questions which it collected in the essays (set in the subtitle in the timeframe 1972-1980) serve as a better example of the comedy which was popular in the field of topical humor about politics in a time of turbulent opinions during those years after the death of Lenny Bruce from an overdose of narcotics and before we could watch "South Park" and, unfortunately, of more interest to us today than what Truth or Philosophy might mean.The Introduction, in particular, which attempted to tie the essays together in a manner which suggests that Rorty would prefer some intellectual position that defines the nature of his self, but admitting that a thorough reading might convince us that he had not yet achieved an understandable consistency, fades into insignificance when we readers confront such statements as "Even if I were thinking, which I am not, that would not show that I exist."(p. 7).Ha?Ha?Ha? Is a title like "The World Well Lost" (pp. 3-18) even decent?Does humor form a barrier to understanding the title "Keeping Philosophy Pure:An Essay on Wittgenstein"(pp. 19-36) when a key theme of the essay is "Yet Wittgenstein came in the end to mock his own creation," (p. 19) "vapid imitation" (p. 22), and that philosophers' attempts to understand Wittgenstein involve "the same paradoxes elaborated by Wittgenstein himself (who cheerfully tosses out half-a-dozen incompatible metaphysical views in the course of the INVESTIGATIONS)."(p. 23) ?Moving right along, Essay 4, "Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture" (pp. 60-71) begins with the suggestion that "Santayana saw us as one more great empire in the long parade.His genial hope was that we might enjoy the imperium while we held it.In a famous essay on American philosophy, he suggested that we were still spoiling our own fun."(p. 60).Our society produces a fine mix of "joy in business itself"(p. 60), "We can afford to smile at this," (p. 61), "the contempt the successful feel for the shabby genteel." (p. 61), "pointing with scorn to the low level of argumentative rigor among the competition" (p. 62), and ultimately: "American sociology, whose early stages had been satirized as the expenditure of a five-thousand-dollar grant to discover the address of a whorehouse, came to be satirized as the expenditure of a five-million-dollar grant to plot the addresses of a thousand whorehouses against a multidimensional array of socio-economic variables."(pp. 63-64). Now that home computers make this much information readily available to millions of curious web surfers for study at a level that could be used to see how the number of credit card transactions at the whorehouses compared with the rate of personal bankruptcy in the area around each whorehouse, we are closer than ever to "the highbrow and the academic philosopher viewing each other with equal suspicion, each harping on the vices of each other's virtues."(p. 65).This could be the basis for a humorous aside on cross-disciplinary studies, in which the cross aspect is something like a euphemism for the word aghast, but that is far beyond the scope of this book.
Pragmatic Dogmatics |
6. Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher by Neil Gross | |
Hardcover: 390
Pages
(2008-05-15)
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Editorial Review Product Description Customer Reviews (3)
Rorts and all
Rorty Would Approve
The New sociology meets Richard Rorty |
7. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition by Richard Rorty | |
Paperback: 472
Pages
(2008-12-29)
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Editorial Review Product Description Customer Reviews (2)
Rejuvenated My Interest in Philosophy
Rorty |
8. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers (Philosophical Papers, Vol 1) (Volume 1) by Richard Rorty | |
Paperback: 236
Pages
(1990-11-30)
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Editorial Review Product Description Customer Reviews (7)
Crucial reading for Rorty students
A shining example of the complacency of our age
Not clearly written
I guess if you like pragmatism...
anti-scientific? But the question remains, 'what is the truth-value of the results produced by science?'. Many modern people, stuck in circular thinking, attempt to justify science with scientific premises. Even the biggest advocates of science in philosophy realize that that's not tenable. ... Read more |
9. Richard Rorty: Philosophical Papers Set by Richard Rorty | |
Paperback: 1029
Pages
(2007-02-12)
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Editorial Review Product Description Customer Reviews (5)
Not the Last of a Breed (We Hope)
Reviewing 'Philosophy as Cultural Politics'
More fantastic essays
Highly recommended
More of the same Rorty, but that may not be a bad thing |
10. Rorty and His Critics (Philosophers and their Critics) | |
Paperback: 432
Pages
(2000-10-10)
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Editorial Review Product Description Customer Reviews (3)
An excellent anthology I consider the most important articles as the following: Davidson, "Truth Rehabilitated," Putnam, "RR on Reality and Justification," (excellent); McDowell, "Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity," (excellent); Brandom, "Vocabularies of Pragmatism," M. Williams, "Epistemology and the Mirror of Nature," Conant, "Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell." I highly recommend this anthology.
Excellent, but fairly technical for Rorty material On the other hand the quality is high throughout, with fewer "cheap shots" by his opponents than in other collections about him, and much material that is really first rate.Even though the book is centered on Rorty and his responses, the quality is high enough that it really is a dialogue on the issues that he has been concerned with, and which are quite central to philosophy today. If your taste for Rorty is not just for the lighter fare and you have some background in philosophy to bring to this, then this is richly rewarding.
Philosophers Challenge Rortification This book is very stimulating, enormously erudite and not a little complicated. Here Rorty is hauled over the hot coals and its his task to defend himself against (and, occasionally, to further expedite) the arguments of his interlocutors; these figures include such heavyweights as Habermas, Davidson, Dennett, and Jacques Bouveresse. They argue and debate back and forth over various things that the interlocutors have at issue with Rorty. These include the status of "truth" as against "justification before ones peers", the supposed inescapability from "reality" and, in the best piece from the book, written by Bjorn Ramberg, what a "Post-Ontological Philosophy of Mind" might be and, indeed, might lead to. In response to this latter piece Rorty seems to bend his pragmatic line just a bit closer to the realist one in what I hope might become a classic quote of his: "What is true in pragmatism is that what you talk about depends not on what is real but on what it pays you to talk about. What is true in realism is that most of what you talk about you get right." The book begins with a helpful introduction by the editor (a former graduate student supervised by Rorty with his own chapter engaging Rorty in the book as well) and a paper by Rorty which argues that justification is more useful than "truth" since at least you can recognise the former when you have it (and what you can't recognise when you have it is useless anyway). The collection of questions as arguments put to Rorty and his responses seems, to me, to make Rorty work at his thinking. It makes him explicate and also explain his pragmatic turn of thought in response to a new set of papers and I, for one, am thankful for that. The book is hard going. Those not used to philosophical debate or microscopically logical argument where you can trap your opponent in seeming errors which undercut her thesis are going to find themselves quickly caught up in something which seems to be overpowering them. This is a book that should be read at leisure, poured over, taken in deeply and mused upon. It will require not a little effort. At the end of the process Rorty still does not think that there is a "Reality" out there for us to get right "Because there are no norms for talking about it". But I, for one, am glad that I have had the opportunity to read this book and it has made me sharpen up my own thinking too. PoSTmodERnFoOL ... Read more |
11. The Philosophy of Richard Rorty (Library of Living Philosophers) | |
Hardcover: 992
Pages
(2010-05-25)
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Editorial Review Product Description Customer Reviews (1)
A superb addition to philosophy shelves and a welcome contribution to college libraries |
12. Achieving Our Country : Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America by Richard Rorty | |
Paperback: 176
Pages
(1999-09-01)
list price: US$19.50 -- used & new: US$9.55 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0674003128 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description Philosopher Richard Rorty believes that there is hope for America, butthat today's Left is not meeting the challenge. He contrasts thecultural, academic Left's focus on our heritage of shame (which, headmits, has to the extent that it makes hatred intolerable had thepositive effect of making America a more civil society) with thepolitically engaged reformist Left of the early part of thiscentury. "The distinction between the old strategy and the new isimportant," he writes. "The choice between them makes thedifference between what Todd Gitlin calls common dreams and whatArthur Schlesinger calls disuniting Americans. Totake pride in being black or gay is an entirely reasonable response tothe sadistic humiliation to which one has been subjected. But insofaras this pride prevents someone from also taking pride in being anAmerican citizen, from thinking of his or her country as capable ofreform, or from being able to join with straights or whites inreformist initiatives, it is a political disaster." Not everyone, to be sure, is going to agree with Rorty's ideas. Buthis approach to civic life, which is pragmatic in the tradition ofJohn Dewey and visionary in the tradition of Walt Whitman, isbound to provoke increased discussion of what it is to be a citizen,and his call for a renewed awareness of the history of Americanreformist activism can only be applauded. Customer Reviews (22)
Rorty's Unfinished Business
APlea to Work for Governmental Action to the Academic Left
Balance of Old Left Reform and New Left Revolution
An important reminder of the true America. To Rorty, the modern Left has abandoned the dreams of Debs, Dewey, and DuBois in favor of scholastic "theorizing" and defeatist fatalism, as exemplified by the unlearned scholars who populate most of the nation's humanities departments.In exchange for any movement toward authentic social change, we are left instead with Foucault-reading pessimists, disillusioned by the aftermath of the Sixties and less interested in effecting actual progress than in "resisting" the system through barren exercises in jargon-laden "thought."This development over the last three decades, with its concomitant anti-Americanism, has made the Left largely impotent in the face of the well-organized, practical, and methodical assault from the Right. To remedy this, Rorty proposes an abandonment of pointless theory and instead an active, pragmatic, dedicated effort toward the realization of the true principles that have made America great: diversity, social justice, civil rights, and a movement toward actual equality rather than the social Darwinist "conservatism" which dominates our current political landscape.This is what the author means by "achieving our country." As someone who has spent considerable time in English departments, I wholeheartedly agree with Rorty that a transformation is necessary if the Left is not to decline into total oblivion in the near future. This is an important and insightful assessment of our culture and politics, and a superb primer for Leftist regeneration.
An invaluable reminder of the true America. To Rorty, the modern Left has abandoned the dreams of Debs, Dewey, and DuBois in favor of scholastic "theorizing" and defeatist fatalism, as exemplified by the unlearned scholars who populate most of the nation's humanities departments.In exchange for any movement toward authentic social change, we are left instead with Foucault-reading pessimists, disillusioned by the aftermath of the Sixties and less interested in effecting actual progress than in "resisting" the system through barren exercises in jargon-laden "thought."This development over the last three decades, with its concomitant anti-Americanism, has made the Left largely impotent in the face of the well-organized, practical, and methodical assault from the Right. To this, Rorty proposes an abandonment of pointless theory and instead an active, pragmatic, dedicated effort toward the realization of the true principles that have made America great: diversity, social justice, civil rights, and a movement toward actual equality rather than the social Darwinist "conservatism" which dominates our current political landscape.This is what the author means by "achieving our country." As someone who has spent considerable time in English departments, I wholeheartedly agree with Rorty that a transformation is necessary if the Left is not to decline into total oblivion in the near future. This is an important and insightful assessment of our culture and politics, and a superb primer for Leftist regeneration. ... Read more |
13. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 by Richard Rorty | |
Paperback: 212
Pages
(1991-02-22)
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Editorial Review Product Description Customer Reviews (5)
a very poor effort
Provocative connection-making
Interesting, but...
Some interesting possibilities.... This volume also contains shrewd and provocativediscussions of Habermas, Lyotard, and the loathsome Foucault. Readers newto Rorty might want to begin with the fourth essay: HEIDEGGER, KUNDERA, ANDDICKENS. It's a reflection on the moral worth of the European novel andmanages to touch on many of the themes Rorty has explored in his morerecent writings. WARNING! The print font is tiny! Cambridge UniversityPress should be ashamed of itself.
Don't be taken in If you cut through all theblurb there's actually not much solid argument there. He gets all hispragmatist interpretations of Heidegger from Okrent, like he admits, ratherthan thinking it through himself, and doesn't bring them to any startlinglynew conclusions. He even admits his leftist-Nietzschean-Deweyan stance hasno "logical" reason or meaning behind it, yet he claims itsbetter than other viewpoints! Once you throw away meaning, you can't applyit to yourself. He also displays no knowledge of psychology except Freud,and so just about accepts Freud was mostly right, like most Americans whoread Freud & assume there's no need to read anyone else. Binswanger?Grof? Jung? Not only that, but he then subverts Freud's ideas to his ownagenda. There's a lot of interesting ideas thrown up, and a lot of foodfor thought, but in the end there's no original content of any worth. Hejust picks & chooses the parts of philosophers he likes to make it seemlike they all lead towards his own pragmatic socialist stance, when if hetook into account all the information there's nobody he quotes, not evenDewey, (except perhaps Foucalt - another overrated"postmodernist" type) who really would accept Rorty's use ofthem, were they to read it. If you read all the texts hequotes/likes/attacks from "Being & Time", Husserl's"Crisis..." Nietzsche's works, Quine, Jacques Derrida, Plato -andread them all, and Rorty's, critically - you'll come to realise that ifRorty's right there's not a lot point to it all anymore - except he's NOTright. ... Read more |
14. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers (Philosophical Papers (Cambridge)) (Volume 3) by Richard Rorty | |
Paperback: 363
Pages
(1998-03-13)
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Editorial Review Product Description Instead of trying to answer the question, "What is human nature?"Rorty proposes that we ask ourselves what we would like human natureto be, then make every possible effort to be that. In doing so, hedoes not reject previous philosophic inquiry, although he believesthat philosophers must be willing to admit, as scientists do, whentheir predecessors got things wrong. If inquiry is the continualgrappling with and resolution of problems, rather than a quest for"truth," the lessons learned from the past become invaluable tools toapply to new problems as they emerge. Many people disagree withRorty's conclusions, but they all seem to agree that he has liberatedphilosophy from detached contemplation of "the real" and reconnectedit to the world we live in. Truth and Progress does what allgood philosophy should do: it makes you think. --Ron Hogan Customer Reviews (9)
Books - Richard Rorty
A Fashionable Madness? The real danger would be if the truth were objective, and we believed that there was no such thing.The real danger would be for us.For if there were an Objective Reality, and we lost contact with it or never had it to begin with, then we would be insane, or possibly dead. That's the real question for me: when is a person insane?Is a person insane when his/her linguistic community decides that s/he is nuts?Or is there something called Reality that a person falls out of contact with?It's all theory until you go mad, as I have been.Have I Regained Contact With Reality or have I simply become more popular?My deep suspicion is that there is a mind-independent reality, we can be in contact with it, and know we're in contact with it, and if we aren't then Phone Calls May Have to be Made. In saying that there is an objective reality, we mean only that there is something outside of the aesthetic field of consciousness and its object.Something that might eat you.Rorty would probably not deny this.Instead he denies arcane philosophical claims about the nature of truth and reality.But it is precisely this common-sense notion of an objective world that clumsy realist philosophical notions are intended to preserve. Is there some Truth and Reality to be found in the cyberspace fun-show, or is there merely ever-proliferating constantly mutating fashionable madness?Might it not be that the only pragmatic thing for a biological organism is to be in contact with objective reality at all times, however exactly that is accomplished?Assuming of course that human-eating dinosaurs are objectively real, and not a social construction?Rorty talks about the "straw-man claim that there were no dinosaurs before we 'invented' them" (57), but on page 8 he claims that quarks are a "recent social construction."Few thinkers so eagerly invite straw-man attacks. "Truth and Progress" is a thought-provoking work.Its pragmatic value, however, is questionable.It might be better to spend your money on weapons or nutritional products.In any case, Richard Rorty strikes again.
More Great Essays Readers familiar with Rorty's work will find more wonderful examples of it in this volume. New ideas can be found throughout, and some old ideas are here better developed. Some bad old ideas (such as some found in the final chapter of "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity," criticized by Norman Geras in "Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind; The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty,") seem to have been dropped or developed into good ideas. And Rorty is unlikely to create many new opponents with this book, though he'll probably keep many of his old ones. But old-hands at learning from Rorty may find the first section of this book a somewhat tiresome, if admirable and patient, reply to the same moral weakness in eight slightly different varieties. And newcomers may not find this book a good introduction to Rorty's thinking. For that purpose I am always inclined to recommend "Consequences of Pragmatism," even though Rorty has changed his mind on many points in it - or perhaps partly for that very reason: it is easier to begin with the earlier Rorty and follow his progress chronologically. I don't think that Rorty has yet written for a really popular audience, except perhaps in his new political book "Achieving Our Country," and in some magazine articles too short to make important points in. I do think Rorty is far easier for many readers to understand than are Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and various postmodernist writers, and easier also than Wittgenstein, Davidson or even Dewey. And I do not see that anything is sacrificed to achieve this clarity. I imagine I have spent more pleasurable time with books by Rorty than with those by any other author with the exception of Nietzsche. I might recommend this book as an introduction, not to Rorty, but to Davidson, who is frequently discussed in it. Rorty sees his job largely as cleaning up the rough but radical work of more creative thinkers than he, cleaning up and popularizing. Rorty thinks that he belongs to (in Kuhnian terms) normal, as opposed to radical, philosophy, that he carries out projects devised by the REAL geniuses, and otherwise marks time until the next genius (namely Derrida) begins to be understood. I am not so sure. Although I accept (at least as a rough outline) Kuhn's notion of paradigm shifts - the idea that a field progresses by asking new questions as well as by answering old ones - and although I agree with the emphasis Rorty places on the need for radical imaginative creation, I do not think that the lines are always crisp between radical and normal contributors (or even specific contributions) to a field. I am inclined to be a little suspicious of the surety with which Rorty thinks he can state whether something (a statement, much less a book) is an answer to an old question or the creation of a new one. This dichotomy is disturbingly similar to that of scheme-content so often convincingly dismissed by Davidson and Rorty. If statements cannot have forms and contents, then why should we be so sure it's a good idea to think of "questions" as forms awaiting the provision of their contents by "normal" workers until a new form is created? Having learned from Rorty to reduce such dichotomies to a matter of degree of utility, I interpret his claim that he is only an underlaborer as no more than a quite honest, admirable, and probably very productive humility, with perhaps a pinch of anxiety-of-influence thrown in. One theme brought out more prominently in this collection than in some previous ones is Rorty's desire to change the usage of certain words (such as "objective," and the two words in the book's title) rather than discarding them altogether. If you are wondering why he should wish to do either, it may help to quote the first paragraph of his Introduction: "'There is no truth.' What could that mean? Why should anybody say it? "Actually, almost nobody (except Wallace Stevens) does say it. But philosophers like me are often said to say it. One can see why. For we have learned (from Nietzsche and James, among others) to be suspicious of the appearance-reality distinction. We think that there are many ways to talk about what is going on, and that none of them gets closer to the way things are in themselves than any other. We have no idea what 'in itself' is supposed to mean in the phrase 'reality as it is in itself.' So we suggest that the appearance-reality distinction be dropped in favor of more useful ways of talking. But since most people think that truth is correspondence to the way reality 'really is,' they think of us as denying the existence of truth." Another feature that stands out in this new collection is Rorty's terrific ability to pick out arguments by analogy to events long-passed. Often, rather than baldly claiming that rejecting a particular philosophical argument is a rejection of theology (as well as that said rejection is possible without disastrous consequences), Rorty points out the similarities between this rejection and one long-accepted.
Trying to be a philosophy of the future In the chapter of this book, "The End of Leninism," Rorty attempts to see the need our future, which somehow is here already, has for some rhetoric."But unless some new metanarrative eventually replaces the Marxist one, we shall have to characterize the source of human misery in such untheoretical and banal ways as `greed,' `selfishness,' and `hatred.'"(p. 235).I'm amazed at how quickly the economic thinking of our time adopted the assumption that sustainable human life would be part of a system in which each life might be required to be economically responsible for paying whatever cost would be associated with providing whatever power and water might be necessary to sustain its existence.Even aluminum tubes might play some part in economic self-sufficiency, but people who do their thinking for the governments on this planet seem unlikely to think so. "The End of Leninism" is the chapter of this book in which Rorty discusses a comic frame suggested by Kenneth Burke in the book ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORY in 1936.Rorty, in assuming intentional acts by those "butchers who have presided over the slaughter-benches of history ~ people like Hadrian and Attila, Napoleon and Stalin, Hitler and Mao" (p. 241) fails to demonstrate how the politics of Chairman Mao is particularly apt for such a vivid appreciation of how we now make much ado over deaths which political subordinates chose not to make a big deal of, but which are now seen as highly political.Even Stalin and Hitler might be ironically considered worse now than when they actually had the power to do what they are now merely condemned for.Rorty seems puzzled by Burke's simple statement, "Comedy requires the maximum of forensic complexity."(p. 241, ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORY, p. 42).If people couldn't complain about these things now, down to the smallest detail, they would not seem so funny.What Burke means by complexity might be illustrated best by his statement, "The best of Bentham, Marx, and Veblen is high comedy."(p. 241, ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORY, p. 42).Rorty is concerned about seeing these people "as people who help us understand how we tricked ourselves in the past rather than as people who tell us the right thing to do in the future."(p. 242).This would be great if someone figured out how to do the future of September 11, 2001 without any "apocalyptical talk of `crisis' and `endings,' less inclined toward eschatology."(p. 242).Rorty's ending is close to Burke's view of literary criticism:"criticism had best be comic."(p. 243, ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORY, p. 107).
Blind leading blind |
15. What's the Use of Truth? by Pascal Engel, Richard Rorty | |
Hardcover: 96
Pages
(2007-12-28)
list price: US$18.95 -- used & new: US$9.26 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 0231140142 Average Customer Review: Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
Editorial Review Product Description What is truth? What value should we see in or attribute to it? The war over the meaning and utility of truth is at the center of contemporary philosophical debate, and its arguments have rocked the foundations of philosophical practice. In this book, the American pragmatist Richard Rorty and the French analytic philosopher Pascal Engel present their radically different perspectives on truth and its correspondence to reality. Rorty doubts that the notion of truth can be of any practical use and points to the preconceptions that lie behind truth in both the intellectual and social spheres. Engel prefers a realist conception, defending the relevance and value of truth as a norm of belief and inquiry in both science and the public domain. Rorty finds more danger in using the notion of truth than in getting rid of it. Engel thinks it is important to hold on to the idea that truth is an accurate representation of reality. In Rorty's view, epistemology is an artificial construct meant to restore a function to philosophy usurped by the success of empirical science. Epistemology and ontology are false problems, and with their demise goes the Cartesian dualism of subject and object and the ancient problematic of appearance and reality. Conventional "philosophical problems," Rorty asserts, are just symptoms of the professionalism that has disfigured the discipline since the time of Kant. Engel, however, is by no means as complacent as Rorty in heralding the "end of truth," and he wages a fierce campaign against the "veriphobes" who deny its value. What's the Use of Truth? is a rare opportunity to experience each side of this impassioned debate clearly and concisely. It is a subject that has profound implications not only for philosophical inquiry but for the future study of all aspects of our culture as well. Customer Reviews (6)
Unmet expectations
Truth, where's Rorty?
Excellent book for people studying Rorty's view on truth
Short, expensive, and inessential
A Debate on Truth |
16. Deconstruction and Pragmatism by Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, Richard Rorty | |
Paperback: 112
Pages
(1996-10-31)
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Editorial Review Product Description Customer Reviews (1)
I'm sentimental and I believe in happiness |
17. Richard Rorty (Contemporary Philosophy in Focus) | |
Paperback: 224
Pages
(2003-07-28)
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Editorial Review Product Description Customer Reviews (2)
An excellent addition to this series for Cambridge UP
Utterly Wonderful |
18. Wahrheit und Fortschritt. Moralische Vernunft in der Praxis. by Richard Rorty | |
Paperback: 515
Pages
(2003-03-01)
-- used & new: US$17.44 (price subject to change: see help) Asin: 351829220X Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France | Japan | |
19. Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism (S U N Y Series in Philosophy) (Suny Series in Philosophy) by David L. Hall | |
Paperback: 310
Pages
(1993-10-28)
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Customer Reviews (2)
Rorty in a nutshell
The best presentation |
20. The Future of Religion by Gianni Vattimo, Richard Rorty | |
Paperback: 104
Pages
(2007-06-29)
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Editorial Review Product Description Though coming from different and distinct intellectual traditions, Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo are united in their criticism of the metaphysical tradition. The challenges they put forward extend beyond philosophy and entail a reconsideration of the foundations of belief in God and the religious life. They urge that the rejection of metaphysical truth does not necessitate the death of religion; instead it opens new ways of imagining what it is to be religious -- ways that emphasize charity, solidarity, and irony. This unique collaboration, which includes a dialogue between the two philosophers, is notable not only for its fusion of pragmatism (Rorty) and hermeneutics (Vattimo) but also for its recognition of the limits of both traditional religious belief and modern secularism. In "Anticlericalism and Atheism" Rorty discusses Vattimo's workBelief and argues that the end of metaphysics paves the way for an anti-essentialist religion. Rorty's conception of religion, determined by private motives, is designed to produce the gospel's promise that henceforth God will not consider humanity as a servant but as a friend. In "The Age of Interpretation," Vattimo, who is both a devout Catholic and a frequent critic of the church, explores the surprising congruence between Christianity and hermeneutics in light of the dissolution of metaphysical truth. As in hermeneutics, interpretation is central to Christianity, which introduced the world to the principle of interiority, dissolving the experience of objective reality into "listening to and interpreting messages." The lively dialogue that concludes this volume, moderated and edited by Santiago Zabala, analyzes the future of religion together with the political, social, and historical aspects that characterize our contemporary postmodern, postmetaphysical, and post-Christian world. Customer Reviews (5)
Baptists need not apply
Get a life!
Overcoming Dualism; Or How To Get to the Market via Mars
Postmodern Assessment
NEW MAP FOR THE REALMS OF BELIEF |
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