Rorty and Beyond

The edited collection Rorty and Beyond assesses and moves beyond Rorty’s legacy, bringing together leading international philosophers. The collection covers diverse territory, from his views about what we may hope for to his personal character, and everything in between.

For better or worse, Rorty has shaped the trajectory of academic philosophy. A decade after his passing, his legacy is ever present, especially in context of the growth of the far right, the struggle over the meaning of justice and equity, and the ecological crises we face. Edited by Randall Auxier, Eli Kramer, and Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński, Rorty and Beyond brings together leading international philosophers from the United States and Europe to reevaluate Rorty’s legacy and explore what lies beyond his life and work. This collection covers a diverse territory, exploring Rorty’s legacy regarding theories of truth, accounts of nature and naturalism, the historical situation of professional philosophy, the private and public aspects of religion, the place of literature in cultural politics, and points beyond Rorty, such as what we may hope for after his critical attack on certainty and ultimacy. Scholars, specialists, and those new to Rorty will all find insight, useful criticism, and edification in this volume.

Contents

Preface

Randall Auxier

Introduction: Richard Rorty as a Transitional Genre

Eli Kramer

Part 1: Take Care of the Future and the Past Will Take Care of Itself

1. “Bad Boy of Philosophy”: Richard Rorty, Provocateur

Crispin Sartwell

2. “Nine Chances Out of Ten that Things Will Go to Hell”: Rorty on Orwell, Silko, and Narratives of the Dark Future

Wojciech Małecki

3. Only a God Can Save Us: Richard Rorty’s Philosophy of Social Hope Beyond Secularism

Roman Madzia

Part 2: Method and Madness

4. Naturalistic Axiology and Normativity in Rorty

Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński

5. The Tenuous Harmony of Imagination, Vision, and Critique

Brendan Hogan

6. Abandoning Truth is Not a Solution: A Discussion with Richard Rorty

Marcin Kilanowski

Part 3: Democracy and Its Discontents

7. —Not NeoPragmatism but Critical Pragmatism: There Are Times When the Private Must Become Public

Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley

8. The Problem of Ethnocentrism: An Attempt to Save Rorty’s Pragmatism from Itself

John Ryder

9. We Liberal, Ironic Hypocrites: Situating Rorty in the History of American Democratic Thought

Kenneth W. Stikkers

10. Solidarity, Imagination, and Richard Rorty’s Unfulfilled Democratic Possibilities: A Deweyan Reconstruction

Justin Bell

Part 4: Nature, Knowing, and Naturalisms

11. Vocabularies and the Life-World: A Criticism of Rorty’s Naturalism

Roberto Gronda

12. The Solomonic Strategy: The Brain as Hardware, Culture as Software: Re-reading Rorty’s Criticism of Cognitive Science

Maja Niestrój

Part 5: Representations and Other Mirrors

13. Why We Should Move from Rorty to “Rortwey”

Radim Šíp

14. Reconsidering Rorty’s Theory of Vocabularies: On the Role and Scope of Persuasion in a Post-Representationalist Culture

Miklós Nyírő

15. The Lamp of Reason and the Mirror of Nature

Preston Stovall

Part 6: Logic, Truth, and Progress

16. Logic Beyond the Looking Glass

David Beisecker

17. Reality is More Practical than Truth: Rorty on Truth vs. Justification

John Shook

18. Ironic Wrongdoing and the Arc of the Universe

Randall Auxier

Index

About the Editors

About the Contributors