Philosophical Papers, Volume 4: Philosophy as Cultural Politics

Philosophical Papers

by Richard Rorty

This volume presents a selection of the philosophical papers which Richard Rorty has written over the past decade, and complements three previous volumes of his papers: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Essays on Heidegger and Others and Truth and Progress. Topics discussed include the changing role of philosophy in Western culture over the course of recent centuries, the role of the imagination in intellectual and moral progress, the notion of 'moral identity', the Wittgensteinian claim that the problems of philosophy are linguistic in nature, the irrelevance of cognitive science to philosophy, and the mistaken idea that philosophers should find the 'place' of such things as consciousness and moral value in a world of physical particles. The papers form a rich and distinctive collection which will appeal to anyone with a serious interest in philosophy and its relation to culture.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Cultural, Nonfiction, Anthropology

220 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The centerpiece of Rorty's critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty's principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. Characterizations and illustrations of a post-epistemological intellectual culture, present in both PMN (part III) and CP (xxxvii-xliv), are more richly developed in later works, such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, hereafter CIS), in the popular essays and articles collected in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), and in the four volumes of philosophical papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991, hereafter ORT); Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991, hereafter EHO); Truth and Progress (1998, hereafter TP); and Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007, hereafter PCP). In these writings, ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time.

Reviews

[m · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rorty writes in the Preface to this collection that

Readers of my previous books will find little new in this volume. It contains no novel ideas or arguments.

That's true enough, but I've been reading him for profit for nearly four decades and I still haven't tired of hearing him sing the same old songs that with which he began his blockbuster career in 1979 with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature up until his death in 2007: His constant refrain is up with non-representationalism, down with epistemological realism.

You can read two excellent chapters from this book free online.

Chapter 2, without footnotes, is available here:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/d/...

And Chapter 6, slightly altered, is available here:
http://mitp-content-server.mit.edu:18...

Literature is boring; high-level literary criticism applied to social life is where all the action's at.
I will definitely reread these essays again someday.

06/01/08
03/12/09
05/02/15

[TheTyee.ca]

The philosopher Richard Rorty, who would be 76 tomorrow, died on June 8 of this year of pancreatic cancer, in Palo Alto, California. All of his books, dog-eared, underlined, and well-thumbed, including his most recent one, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007), are on my shelves. Along with a lot of other people, I found Rorty just about the most interesting philosopher in America in the last quarter of the 20th century. I don't propose to tell the whole story here of what Rorty thought, but I want to refer to a couple of his ideas that got me (and others) excited about his thinking.

read more ...
http://thetyee.ca/Books/2007/10/03/Ri...

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anyone unsure of what Rorty is all about, these essays are magnificent summations of his final thoughts on the many philosophical issues he addressed throughout his career. The volume is especially interesting due to its almost exclusively metaphilosophical orientation, and indeed, it is as a metaphilosopher that Rorty is truly brilliant.

[Szabolcs Lőrik · Rating 3 out of 5]

im sorry but metaphysics is so back

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Zdecydowanie dla zapalonych miłośników filozofii. Jedna z nielicznych nielubianych przez mnie pozycji z serii Nowy Sympozjon z wydawnictwa Czytelnik.