Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Richard Rorty's collected papers, written during the 1980s and now published in two volumes, take up some of the issues which divide Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophers and contemporary French and German philosophers and offer something of a compromise - agreeing with the latter in their criticisms of traditional notions of truth and objectivity, but disagreeing with them over the political implications they draw from dropping traditional philosophical doctrines. In this volume Rorty offers a Deweyan account of objectivity as intersubjectivity, one that drops claims about universal validity and instead focuses on utility for the purposes of a community. The sense in which the natural sciences are exemplary for inquiry is explicated in terms of the moral virtues of scientific communities rather than in terms of a special scientific method. The volume concludes with reflections on the relation of social democratic politics to philosophy.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: antirepresentationalism, ethnocentrism, and liberalism
• Part I Solidarity or Objectivity?
• 1 Science as solidarity
• 2 Is natural science a natural kind?
• 3 Pragmatism without method
• 4 Texts and lumps
• 5 Inquiry as recontextualization: an anti-dualist account of interpretation
• Part II Non-Reductive Physicalism
• 5 Pragmatism, Davidson and truth
• 6 Representation, social practice, and truth
• 7 Unfamiliar noises: Hesse and Davidson on metaphor
• Part III The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy
• 8 Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism
• 9 On ethnocentrism: a reply to Clifford Geertz
• 10 Cosmopolitanism without emancipation: a response to Jean-Francois Lyotard
• Index of names

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Rorty has added an introduction to 14 papers previously published between 1980 and 1989. The three main sections offer a contention that knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is not a matter of truth or falsity, but of acquiring useful habits of action for coping with reality; an examination of D. Davidson's views on explanation, truth, and language; and an exploration of the ``communitarian'' idea that a ``democratic, progressive, pluralist community'' can avoid questions about a mind- or language-independent reality by striving after ``intersubjective agreement and novelty.'' Although the essays contain points worth pondering, Rorty's writing is somewhat opaque and his argument lacks concrete detail. This reader remains unpersuaded that communitarian manipulation can satisfactorily replace rational inquiry into objective reality.-- Robert Hoffman, York Coll., CUNY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Rorty (University of Virginia) is well known for his pragmatist approach to philosophical problems. This volume begins a series of his philosophical papers (v. 2, CH, Jul'91). The six papers in Part 1 support an anti-representationalist view that knowledge consists of acquiring "habits of action for coping with reality," and not of correctly representing reality. This view harks back to Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (CH, Jun'80). The four essays in Part 2 expound and comment on the philosophical views of Donald Davidson, whom Rorty regards as having provided strong motivation for a kind of philosophical pragmatism. The four essays in Part 3 extend Rorty's pragmatism to political theory; they focus on political liberalism and the needs of a democratic society. Recurring topics are the viability of realism, the nature of representation, the conditions for interpretation, and the status of truth. The essays, written 1980-1989, are at times lucid, and at other times frustrating; but they never cease to be provocative and challenging. Such is Rorty's characteristic approach to the problems of philosophy. Recommended for any college library supporting work in philosophy. P. K. Moser Loyola University of Chicago

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Richard McKay Rorty is the principal American voice of postmodern philosophy. He was born in New York City and educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University. After having taught philosophy at Princeton University for more than 20 years, Rorty became a university professor in humanities at the University of Virginia in 1982. He has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. In 1967 Rorty published The Linguistic Turn, an anthology of twentieth-century philosophy that opens with his 40-page introduction. This work has become a standard introduction to analytic philosophy, and its title names an era. Despite his early hope for the future of analytic philosophy, Rorty came to doubt its foundations. This doubt prodded him to master American pragmatism as well as continental European work in hermeneutics and deconstruction. This work, in turn, led Rorty to question the entire tradition of Western philosophy. These doubts are expressed in his second book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), which is one of the most widely discussed of all recent American works in philosophy. It announces the death of philosophy as a kind of higher knowledge but recommends its continuance as edification and as a branch of literature. Choice proved prophetic in stating that "this bold and provocative book is bound to rank among the most important of the decade." (Bowker Author Biography)