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Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism
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Brief Description
Provocative and engaging…The array of urgent questions and crises facing our democracy makes one miss Richard Rorty's voice: insistent, relentlessly questioning, and dedicated to the proposition that we can't afford to let our democracy fail. -Chris Lehmann, New Republic Richard Rorty was the most iconoclastic and...
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Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism
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In his final work, Richard Rorty provides the definitive statement of his political thought. Rorty equates pragmatism with anti-authoritarianism, arguing that because there is no authority we can rely on to ascertain truth, we can only do so intersubjectively. It follows that we must learn to think and care about what others think and care about.
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Description
Provocative and engaging…The array of urgent questions and crises facing our democracy makes one miss Richard Rorty's voice: insistent, relentlessly questioning, and dedicated to the proposition that we can't afford to let our democracy fail.
-Chris Lehmann, New Republic
Richard Rorty was the most iconoclastic and dramatic philosopher of the last half-century. In this final book, his unique literary style, singular intellectual zest, and demythologizing defiance of official philosophy are on full display.
-Cornel West
Coherent, often brilliant, and it presents a clear and timely case for political pragmatism.
-Jonathan Rée, Prospect
Today, there are few philosophers left whose thoughts are inspired by a unifying vision; there are even fewer who can articulate such a view in terms of such a ravishing flow of provocative, but sharp and differentiated, arguments.
-Jürgen Habermas
Richard Rorty's final masterwork offers his culminating thoughts on the influential version of pragmatism he began to articulate decades ago in his groundbreaking Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. He identifies anti-authoritarianism as the principal impulse and virtue of pragmatism. Anti-authoritarianism, in this view, means acknowledging that our cultural inheritance is always open to revision because no authority exists to ascertain the truth, once and for all. If we cannot rely on the unshakable certainties of God or nature, then all we have left to go on—and argue with—are the opinions and ideas of our fellow humans. The test of these ideas, Rorty suggests, is relatively simple: Do they work? Do they produce the peace, freedom, and happiness we desire?
To achieve this enlightened pragmatism is not easy, though. Pragmatism demands trust. It demands that we think and care about what others think and care about, and that we account for their doubts of, and objections to, our own beliefs.
No book offers a more accessible account of pragmatism, just as no philosopher has more eloquently challenged the hidebound traditions arrayed against the goals of social justice.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780674295476
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 11 June 2024
Country: United States
Imprint: Harvard University Press
Contributors:
- Edited by Eduardo Mendieta
- Foreword by Robert B. Brandom
- Edited by Eduardo Mendieta
- Edited by Eduardo Mendieta
Audience: Tertiary education
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 17.0mm
Width: 140.0mm
Height: 210.0mm
Weight: 254g
Pages: 272
About the Author
Richard Rorty (1931–2007) authored several landmark books and essay collections, including Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; Consequences of Pragmatism; Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; and Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. He taught at Wellesley College, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and Stanford University. Eduardo Mendieta is Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University and editor of Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself, a collection of interviews with Richard Rorty. Robert B. Brandom is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. He delivered the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford and the Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University. Brandom is the author of many books, including Making It Explicit, Reason in Philosophy, and From Empiricism to Expressivism (all from Harvard).
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