Rorty and the Prophetic

This book brings Jewish moral reasoning into conversation with Richard Rorty’s secular neo-pragmatist philosophy, which oftentimes comes across as anti-religious. The result is a type of hope for the future concerning the relationship between Judaism and secularism.

The American neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty dismisses the public applicability of Jewish moral reasoning, because it is based on “the will of God” through divine revelation. As a self-described secular philosopher, it comes as no surprise that Rorty does not find public applicability within a divinely-ordered Jewish ethic. Rorty also rejects the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, which is based upon the notion of infinite responsibility to the Face of the Other. In Rorty’s judgment, Levinas’s ethics is “gawky, awkward, and unenlightening.” From a Rortyan perspective, it seems that Jewish ethics simply can’t win: either it is either too dependent on the will of God or over-emphasizes the human Other. This book responds to Rorty’s criticisms of Jewish ethics in three different ways: first, demonstrating agreements between Rorty and Jewish thinkers; second, offering reflective responses to Rorty’s critiques of Judaism on the questions of Messianism, prophecy, and the relationship between politics and theology; third, taking on Rorty’s seemingly unfair judgment that Levinas’s ethics is “gawky, awkward, and unenlightening.” While Rorty does not engage the prophetic tradition of Jewish thought in his essay, “Glorious Hopes, Failed Prophecies,” he dismisses the possibility for prophetic reasoning because of its other-worldliness and its emphasis on predicting the future. Rorty fails to attend to and recognize the complexity of prophetic reasoning, and this book presents the complexity of the prophetic within Judaism. Toward these ends and more, Brad Elliott Stone and Jacob L. Goodson offer this book to scholars who contribute to the Jewish academy, those within American Philosophy, and those who think Richard Rorty’s voice ought to remain in “conversations” about religion and “conversations” among the religious.

Introduction by Jacob L: Goodson

Part 1: Social Hope and Solidarity: Bringing Jewish Philosophy and Rorty’s Neo-pragmatism Together

Chapter 1: Rorty, my Atheist Rabbi? Between Irony and Social Hope by Akiba Lerner

Chapter 2: Prudence in the Twenty-first Century: Moving Beyond the Morality-Prudence Distinction with Maimonides and Rorty by Jacob L: Goodson

Chapter 3: Charlottesville Pragmatism: Richard Rorty’s Neo-pragmatism and Peter Ochs’s Rabbinic Pragmatism by Gary Slater

Part 2: Politics and Prophecy: Finding Common Ground in Jewish Theology and Rorty’s Secular Liberalism

Chapter 4: The Grounds of Prophecy: Richard Rorty and the Hermeneutics of History by Samuel Hayim Brody

Chapter 5: Messianism as a Conversation Stopper? Ironic Utopianism and Pragmatist Jewish Politics by Elliot Ratzman

Chapter 6: How to Read Rorty as a Political Theologian: And Why We Should by Stephen Minister

Part 3: Conversation and Cruelty: Putting Rorty’s Philosophy in Conversation with Emmuel Levinas’s Jewish Ethics

Chapter 7: All in the Details: Rorty and Levinas on Language, Cruelty, and Togetherness by Megan Craig

Chapter 8: Two Faces of Heteronomy: Autonomy and Cruelty in Rorty and Levinas by Brad Elliott Stone

Chapter 9: “A Faith without Triumph”: Levinas, Rorty, and Prophetic Pragmatism by J: Aaron Simmons

Chapter 10: Rabbinic Reasoning and a Rortyan Ethic: Narrative, Pragmatism, and Solidarity by Hannah Hashkes

Conclusion: Rorty and Heidegger’s Nazism by Brad Elliott Stone