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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... Read More
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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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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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