Richard Rorty

Arguably the most influential of all contemporary English-speaking philosophers, Richard Rorty has transformed the way many philosophers think about the discipline and the traditional ways of practicing it. The essays in this volume offer a balanced exposition and critique of Rorty's views on knowledge, language, truth, science, morality and politics. Written by a distinguished roster of philosophers, this introduction presents a valuable overview of Rorty's philosophical vision. It will appeal as well to students in the social sciences, literary studies, cultural studies and political theory. Charles Guigon, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida, has published widely on existentialism, psychotherapy and Heidegger, and edited the Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (1993). Provost and Professor at the University of New Hampshire, David R. Hiley, is also the author of other works, including Philosophy in Question: Essays on a Pyrrhonian Theme (University of Chicago, 1988) and The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science and Culture (Cornell, 1991).

This book engages with the work of radical liberalist Richard Rorty, utilising his thesis concerning rescuer behaviour during the Holocaust to explore the paradoxes of a philosophy which rejects any determinate view of human nature.

Deconstruction and pragmatism constitute two of the major intellectual influences on the contemporary theoretical scene; influences personified in the work of Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. Both Rortian pragmatism, which draws the consequences of post-war developments in Anglo-American philosophy, and Derridian deconstruction, which extends and troubles the phonomenological and Heideggerian influence on the Continental tradition, have hitherto generally been viewed as mutually exclusive philosophical language games.The purpose of this volume is to bring deconstruction and pragmatism into critical confrontation with one another through staging a debate between Derrida and Rorty, itself based on discussions that took place at the College International de Philosophie in Paris in 1993. The ground for this debate is layed out in introductory papers by Simon Critchley and Ernesto Laclau, and the remainder of the volume records Derrida's and Rorty's responses to each other's work. Chantal Mouffe gives an overview of the stakes of this debate in a helpful preface.

Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, and Rorty belong to a transitional generation of thinkers whose philosophy, in the wake of Hegel and Heidegger, has become a project of liberation rather than a search for truth. But precisely what does philosophy liberate us from? Continuing the work he elaborated in Metaphysics and Oppression, John McCumber asserts that the true target of philosophical liberation is to break the structures of domination that have been encoded in Western civilization. Because of the emancipatory nature of their thought, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, and Rorty challenge domination, but, McCumber contends, they do not see their challenge clearly and it does not rise to the level of conscious critique in their writings. Eliciting the various gestures with which each of these thinkers confronts philosophy's structures of domination, McCumber discovers that Derrida cannot differentiate what in his own discourse is truly liberating from what is banal or unintelligible, Rorty cannot substantiate his claims that the "ironist" can escape history altogether, Habermas cannot shake loose from a universalism that he neither needs nor can vindicate, and Foucault cannot explain how his accounts of something as evanescent as power can be "descriptive". Using Nietzsche's writings on "the great liberation" as a starting point, McCumber captures the valuable, but elusive insights of these thinkers and places them into the larger, pluralistic movement toward philosophical freedom.

On 'What is History?' provides a student introduction to contemporary historiographical debates.Carr and Elton are still the starting point for the vast majority of introductory courses on the nature of history. Building on his highly successful Rethinking History , Keith Jenkins explores in greater detail the influence of these key figures. He argues that historians need to move beyond their 'modernist' thinking and embrace the postmodern-type approaches of thinkers such as Richard Rorty and Hayden White.Through its radical critique of Carr and Elton and its championing of Rorty and White, On 'What is History'? represents a significant development for introductory studies on the nature of history.

In a brilliant series of essays, the distinguished philosopher D. Z. Phillips explores the alternatives for faith after foundationalism. A significant exploration of post-foundationalist thought in its own right, "Faith After Foundationalism" is also an important evaluation and critique of the theological implications of the views of Alvin Plantinga, Richard Rorty, George Lindbeck, and Peter Berger.

In this lively look at current debates in American philosophy, leading philosophers talk candidly about the changing character of their discipline. In the spirit of Emerson's The American Scholar, this book explores the identity of the American philosopher. Through informal conversations, the participants discuss the rise of post-analytic philosophy in America and its relations to European thought and to the American pragmatist tradition. They comment on their own intellectual development as well as each others' work, charting the course of American philosophy over the past few decades. Giovanna Borradori, in her substantial introduction, explains the history of the analytic movement in America and the home-grown reaction against it. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American philosophy was a socially engaged interdisciplinary enterprise. In transcendentalism and pragmatism, then the dominant currents in American thought, philosophy was connected to history, psychology, and public issues. But in the 1930s, the imported European movement of logical positivism redefined philosophical discourse in terms of mathematical logic and theory of language. Under the influence of this analytic view, American philosophy became a professionalized discipline, divorced from public debate and intellectual history and antagonistic to the other, more humanistic tradition of continental thought. The American Philosopher explores the opposition between analytic and continental thought and shows how recent American work has begun to bridge the gap between the two traditions. Through a reexamination of pragmatism, and through an attempt to understand philosophy in a more hermeneutical way, the participants narrow the distance between America's distinctly scientific philosophy and Europe's more literary approach. Moving beyond classical analytic philosophy, the participants confront each other on a number of topics. The logico-linguistic orientations of Quine and Davidson come up against the more discursive, interdisciplinary agendas of Rorty, Putnam, and Cavell. Nozick's theory of pluralist anarchism goes face-to-face with the aesthetic neo-foundationalism of Danto. And Kuhn's hypothesis of paradigm shifts is measured against MacIntyre's ethics of "virtues." Borradori's conversations offer an unconventional portrait of the way philosophers think about their work; scholars and students will not be its only beneficiaries, so will everyone who wonders about the current state of American philosophy.

American pragmatism can be best understood against the background of 20th-century American culture and politics. The essays in this volume, by philosophers, cultural critics, and historians, explore the development of pragmatism in this context. The emphasis in this volume is on the interrelations between the philosophical or foundational issues raised by pragmatism as a philosophical movement, and the cultural, political, and educational programs that have been associated with pragmatism from James, Dewey, and Mead to Rorty and Cornel West. The book is divided into three parts, reflecting the periods of Progressivism, Positivism, and Postmodernism. The contributors explore the ways in which pragmatist writings have been appropriated or misappropriated in the literature and practice of Progressive reformers, positivist academics, end-of-ideology liberals, and postmodernists.