Richard Rorty

First published Sat Feb 3, 2001; substantive revision Thu Jun 22, 2023

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive andcontroversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two mainaxes. One is negative – a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takesto be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive– an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like,once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind andknowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology andmetaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty’s view, the self-conception ofmodern philosophy) are rooted. The centerpiece of Rorty’scritique is the provocative account offered inPhilosophy and theMirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in theclosely related essays collected inConsequences ofPragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty’s principal targetis the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mentalmirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image ofphilosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestoneachievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis ofhistoricism and naturalism. Characterizations and illustrations of apost-epistemological intellectual culture, present in both PMN (partIII) and CP (xxxvii–xliv), are more richly developed in laterworks, such asContingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989,hereafter CIS), in the popular essays and articles collected inPhilosophy and Social Hope (1999, hereafter PSH), and in thefour volumes of philosophical papers,Objectivity, Relativism, andTruth (1991, hereafter ORT);Essays on Heidegger andOthers (1991, hereafter EHO);Truth and Progress (1998,hereafter TP); andPhilosophy as Cultural Politics (2007,hereafter PCP). In these writings, ranging over an unusually wideintellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifacetedview of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him oneof the most widely discussed philosophers in our time.

1. Biographical Sketch

Richard McKay Rorty was born on October 4th, 1931, in New York City.He grew up, as he recounts inAchieving Our Country (1998,hereafter AOC), “on the anti-communist reformist Left inmid-century” (AOC, 59), within a circle combining anti-Stalinismwith leftist social activism. “In that circle,” Rortytells us, “American patriotism, redistributionist economics,anticommunism, and Deweyan pragmatism went together easily andnaturally” (AOC, 61). In 1946, Rorty went to the University ofChicago, to a philosophy department which at that time includedRudolph Carnap, Charles Hartshorne, and Richard McKeon, all of whomwere Rorty’s teachers. After receiving his BA in 1949, Rortystayed on at Chicago to complete an M.A. (1952) with a thesis onWhitehead supervised by Hartshorne. From 1952 to 1956 Rorty was atYale, where he wrote a dissertation entitled “The Concept ofPotentiality.” His supervisor was Paul Weiss. After thecompletion of his Ph.D., followed by two years in the army, Rortyreceived his first academic appointment, at Wellesley College. In1961, after three years at Wellesley, Rorty moved to PrincetonUniversity where he stayed until he went to the University ofVirginia, in 1982, as Kenan Professor of the Humanities. Rorty leftthe University of Virginia in 1998, accepting an appointment in theDepartment of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. In thecourse of his career, Rorty received several academic awards andhonours, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1973–74) and aMacArthur Fellowship (1981–1986). He held a number ofprestigious lectureships, giving, among others, the NorthcliffeLectures at University College, London (1986), the Clark Lectures atTrinity College, Cambridge (1987), and the Massey Lectures at Harvard(1997). Rorty died on June 8th, 2007.

2. Against Epistemology

On Rorty’s account, modern epistemology is not only an attemptto legitimate our claim to knowledge of what is real, but also anattempt to legitimate philosophical reflection itself – apressing task, on many accounts, once the advent of the so-callednew science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centurygradually gave content to a notion of knowledge obtained by themethodological interrogation of nature itself. Because the result ofthis kind of interrogation, theoretical empirical knowledge, is soobviously fruitful, and also carries with it seemingly uncontentiousnorms of progress, its mere presence poses a legitimation challenge toa form of thought, and claim to knowledge, that is distinct from it.Cartesian epistemology, in Rorty’s picture, is designed to meetthis challenge. It is sceptical in a fundamental way; sceptical doubtsof a Cartesian sort, that is, doubts that can be raised about any setof empirical claims whatever, and so cannot be alleviated byexperience, are tailor-made to preserve at once a domain and a job forphilosophical reflection. Rorty’s aim in PMN is to undermine theassumptions in light of which this double legitimation project makessense.

2.1 Epistemological Behaviorism

That any vocabulary is optional and mutable is the basic convictionbehind Rorty’s attack on representationalist epistemologycarried out in PMN. It informs, for instance, the genealogy (chapterone) and deconstruction (chapter two) of the concept of mind offeredin the book’s first part, “Our Glassy Essence.” Thishistoricist conviction, however, is not itself a central theme of PMN,and it emerges for explicit discussion only in the final section ofthe book, “Philosophy,” which is the shortest and in someways least developed of its three parts. The argumentative core of PMNis found in its second part, “Mirroring.” Here Rortydevelops and extends a diverse lot of arguments – notably fromWilfrid Sellars, Willard van Orman Quine, Thomas Kuhn, LudwigWittgenstein, and Donald Davidson – into a general critique ofthe defining project of modern epistemology, viz., the conceptions ofmind, of knowledge and of philosophy bequeathed by the 17^thand 18^th centuries. Rorty’s key claim is that“the Kantian picture of concepts and intuitions getting togetherto produce knowledge is needed to give sense to the idea of‘theory of knowledge’ as a specifically philosophicaldiscipline, distinct from psychology” (PMN, 168). According toRorty,

This is equivalent to saying that if we do not have the distinctionbetween what is “given” and what is “added by themind,” or that between the “contingent” (becauseinfluenced by what is given) and the necessary (because entirely“within” the mind and under its control), then we will notknow what would count as a “rational reconstruction” ofour knowledge. We will not know what epistemology’s goal ormethod could be. (PMN, 168–9)

Epistemology, in Rorty’s account, is wedded to a picture ofmind’s structure working on empirical content to produce initself items – thoughts, representations – which, whenthings go well, correctly mirror reality. To loosen the grip of thispicture on our thinking is to challenge the idea that epistemology– whether traditional Cartesian or 20th century linguistic– is the essence of philosophy. To this end, Rorty combines areading of Quine’s attack on a version of the structure-contentdistinction in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) with areading of Sellars’ attack on the idea of givenness in“Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (1956/1997). OnRorty’s reading, though neither Sellars nor Quine is able fullyto take in the liberating influence of the other, they are reallyattacking the same distinction, or set of distinctions. While Quinecasts doubt on the notion of structure or meaning whichlinguistically-turned epistemology had instated in place of mentalentities, Sellars, questioning the very idea of givenness, came at thedistinction from the other side:

…Sellars and Quine invoke the same argument, one which bearsequally against the given-versus-nongiven and thenecessary-versus-contingent distinctions. The crucial premise of thisargument is that we understand knowledge when we understand the socialjustification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracyof representation. (PMN, 170)

The upshot of Quine’s and Sellars’ criticisms of the mythsand dogmas of epistemology is, Rorty suggests, that “we seeknowledge as a matter of conversation and of social practice, ratherthan as an attempt to mirror nature” (PMN, 171). Rorty providesthis view with a label: “Explaining rationality and epistemicauthority by reference to what society lets us say, rather than thelatter by the former, is the essence of what I shall call‘epistemological behaviorism,’ an attitude common to Deweyand Wittgenstein” (PMN, 174).

Epistemological behaviorism leaves no room for the kind ofpractice-transcending legitimation that Rorty identifies as thedefining aspiration of modern epistemology. Assuming that epistemicpractices do, or at least can, diverge, it is not surprising thatRorty’s commitment to epistemological behaviorism should lead tocharges of relativism or subjectivism. Indeed, many who shareRorty’s historicist scepticism toward the transcending ambitionsof epistemology – friendly critics like Hilary Putnam, JohnMcDowell and Daniel Dennett – balk at the idea that there are noconstraints on knowledge save conversational ones. Yet this is acentral part of Rorty’s position, repeated and elaborated aslate as in TP and PCP. Indeed, in TP he invokes it precisely in orderto deflect this sort of criticism. In “Hilary Putnam and theRelativist Menace,” Rorty says:

In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficultiesinto which “the Relativist” keeps getting himself is tomove everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into culturalpolitics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence tosuggestions about what we should try. (TP, 57)

That epistemological behaviorism differs from traditional forms ofrelativism and subjectivism is easier to see in light of Rorty’scriticism of the notion of representation, and the cluster ofphilosophical images which surround it.

2.2 Antirepresentationalism

Rorty’s enduring attitude to relativism and subjectivism is thatboth are products of the representationalist paradigm. Though thetheme is explicit in PMN and CP (“Pragmatism, Relativism,Irrationalism”), it is with Rorty’s later and furtherappropriation of Davidson that his criticism of the idea of knowledgeas representation becomes fully elaborated (ORT,“Introduction” and Part II). Drawing on Davidson’scriticism of the scheme-content distinction (“On the Very Ideaof a Conceptual Scheme”) and of the correspondence theory oftruth (“The Structure and Content of Truth”), Rorty isable to back up his rejection of any philosophical position or projectwhich attempts to draw a general line between what is made and what isfound, what is subjective and what is objective, what is mereappearance and what is real. Rorty’s position is not that theseconceptual contrasts never have application, but that such applicationis always context and interest bound and that there is, as in the caseof the related notion of truth, nothing to be said about them ingeneral. Rorty’s commitment to the conversationalist view ofknowledge must therefore be distinguished from subjectivism orrelativism, which, Rorty argues, presuppose the very distinctions heseeks to reject. Equally, Rorty’s epistemological behaviorismmust not be confused with an idealism that asserts a primacy ofthought or language with respect to the unmediated world, since this,too, is a position that is undercut by Rorty’s Davidsonianposition. In light of the view of truth and of meaning that Rortyappropriates from Davidson, his conversationalism is not a matter ofgiving priority to the subjective over the objective, or tomind’s power over world’s constraint. Rather it is theother side of his anti-representationalism, which denies that we arerelated to the world in anything other than causal terms. Differentlyput, Rorty argues that we can give no useful content to the notionthat the world, by its very nature, rationally constrains choices ofvocabulary with which to cope with it (TP, “The Very Idea ofHuman Answerability to the World: John McDowell’s Version ofEmpiricism”). This has implications for Rorty’sview of the contribution of philosophy to intellectual progress:“what matters in the end are changes in the vocabulary ratherthan changes in belief, changes in truth-value candidates rather thanassignments of truth-value” (CIS, 47–48). As Rorty readsphilosophy, its significant achievements are not discoveries of thetruth or falsehood of certain propositions, but innovations in ourdescriptive capacities – changes in what we are able to say andthink.

2.3 Rationality, Science, and Truth

Attacking the idea that we must acknowledge the world’snormative constraint on our belief-systems if we are to be rationalsubjects, Rorty has drawn a great deal of criticism that takesscience, particularly natural science, as its chief reference point.Two general kinds of criticisms are often raised. The first insiststhat science consists precisely in the effort to learn the truth abouthow things are by methodically allowing us to be constrained in ourbeliefs by the world. On this view, Rorty is simply denying the veryidea of science. The other kind of criticism seeks to be internal: ifRorty’s view of science were to prevail, scientists would nolonger be motivated to carry on as they are; science would cease to bethe useful sort of thing that Rorty also thinks it is (see, e.g.,Bernard Williams, “Auto da Fe” in Malachowski, 1990).However, Rorty’s view of science is more complicated than hehimself sometimes implies. He says: “I tend to view naturalscience as in the business of controlling and predicting things, andas largely useless for philosophical purposes” (“Reply toHartshorne,” Saatkamp, 32). Yet he spends a good deal of timedrawing an alternative picture of the intellectual virtues that goodscience embodies (ORT, Part I). This is a picture which eschews thenotion that science succeeds, when it does, in virtue of being intouch with reality in a special way, the sort of way thatepistemologists, when successful, can clarify. It is in this sensespecifically that Rorty disavows science as philosophicallysignificant. Good science may nevertheless be a model of rationality,in Rorty’s view, exactly in so far as scientific practice hassucceeded in establishing institutions conducive to the democraticexchange of views.

The provocative and counterintuitive force of Rorty’s treatmentof rationality and science in terms of conversational ethics isundeniable. It is important to realize, though, that Rorty is notdenying that there is any bona fide use of notions like truth,knowledge, or objectivity. Rather his point is that our ordinary usesof these notions always trade for their content and point onparticular features of their varying contexts of application. Hisfurther point is that when we abstract away from these differentcontexts and practices, in search of general notions, we are left withpure abstract hypostatizations incapable of providing us with anyguide to action at all. The upshot, Rorty holds, is that we simply donot have a concept of objective reality which can be invoked either toexplain the success of some set of norms of warrant, or to justifysome set of standards over against others. This is perhaps clearest inRorty’s treatment of the concept of truth. With regard to truth,Rorty’s rhetoric and philosophical strategy has indeed shiftedover the last three decades. As late as in 1982 (in CP) he stillattempts to articulate his view of truth by drawing on WilliamJames’s famous definition in terms of what is good in the way ofbelief. Soon after this, however, Rorty comes to doubt the point ofany theory of truth, and, following Davidson’s lead, explicitlyrejects all attempts to explicate the notion of truth in terms ofother concepts. Rorty’s mature view of the point andsignificance of the concept of truth is first elaborated in“Davidson, Pragmatism and Truth” (in ORT). Recentexpressions are found in the first of the two Spinoza Lectures givenat the University of Amsterdam in 1997, “Is it Desirable to Lovetruth?”, in the paper, “Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? DonaldDavidson versus Crispin Wright” (TP), as well as in theintroductions to, respectively, TP and PSH. In these writings, Rortyargues that while “truth” has various important uses, itdoes not itself name a goal towards which we can strive, over andabove warrant or justification. His argument is not that truth isreducible to warrant, but that the concept has no deep or substantivecriterial content at all. That is, there are only semanticexplanations to be offered for why it is the case that a givensentence is true just when its truth conditions are satisfied. Soaiming for truth, as opposed to warrant, does not point to a possibleline of action, just as we have no measure of our approximation totruth other than increasing warrant. Indeed, for Rorty, this is partof what makes the concept so useful, in a manner not coincidentallyanalogous with goodness; it ensures that no sentence can ever beanalytically certified as true by virtue of its possession of someother property. Rorty’s attitude to the concept of truth hasbeen much criticized, often on the grounds that the very notion ofwarrant, indeed the concept of belief in general, presupposes thenotion of truth. However, it may be that we can do justice to theseconnections without supposing that the notion of truth thus involvedbacks up the notions of belief and warrant with any substantivenormative content of its own. Indeed, that neither the concept oftruth, nor those of objectivity and of reality, can be invoked toexplain or legitimate our inferential practices and our standards ofwarrant, is the essence of Rorty’s conversationalism, orepistemological behaviorism.

3. Cultural Politics

Taking epistemological behaviorism to heart, Rorty urges, means thatwe can no longer construe the authority of science in terms ofontological claims. Though many disagree, this is not, for Rorty, todenigrate or weaken the authority of science. Indeed, a prominentfeature of Rorty’s post-metaphysical, post-epistemologicalculture, is a thoroughgoing Darwinian naturalism.

3.1 Naturalism

To be a naturalist in Rorty’s sense,

is to be the kind of antiessentialist who, like Dewey, sees no breaksin the hierarchy of increasingly complex adjustments to novelstimulation – the hierarchy which has amoeba adjustingthemselves to changed water temperature at the bottom, bees dancingand chess players check-mating in the middle, and people fomentingscientific, artistic, and political revolutions at the top. (ORT,109)

In Rorty’s view, both Dewey’s pragmatism and Darwinismencourage us to see vocabularies as tools to be assessed in terms ofthe particular purposes they may serve. Our vocabularies, Rortysuggests, “have no more of a representational relation to anintrinsic nature of things than does the anteater’s snout or thebowerbird’s skill at weaving” (TP, 48). Pragmaticevaluation of various linguistically infused practices requires adegree of specificity. From Rorty’s perspective, to suggest thatwe might evaluate vocabularies with respect to their ability touncover the truth would be like claiming to evaluate tools for theirability to help us get what we want – full stop. Is the hammeror the saw or the scissors better – in general? Questions aboutusefulness can only be answered, Rorty points out, once we givesubstance to our purposes.

Rorty’s pragmatist appropriation of Darwin also defuses thesignificance of reduction. He rejects as representationalist the sortof naturalism that implies a program of nomological or conceptualreduction to terms at home in a basic science. Rorty’snaturalism echoes Nietzsche’s perspectivism; a descriptivevocabulary is valuable insofar as the patterns it highlights areusefully attended to by creatures with needs and interests like ours.Darwinian naturalism, for Rorty, implies that there is no oneprivileged vocabulary whose purpose it is to serve as a criticaltouchstone for our various descriptive practices.

For Rorty, then, any vocabulary, even that of evolutionaryexplanation, is a tool for a purpose, and therefore subject toteleological assessment. Typically, Rorty justifies his own commitmentto Darwinian naturalism by suggesting that this vocabulary is suitedto further the secularization and democratization of society thatRorty thinks we should aim for. Accordingly, there is a close tiebetween Rorty’s construal of the naturalism he endorses and hismost basic political convictions.

3.2 Ethnocentrism and Relativism

One result of Rorty’s naturalism is that he is an avowedethnocentrist. If vocabularies are tools, then they are tools with aparticular history, having been developed in and by particularcultures. In using the vocabulary one has inherited, one isparticipating in and contributing to the history of that vocabularyand so cannot help but take up a position within the particularculture that has created it. As he puts it,

…one consequence of antirepresentationalism is the recognitionthat no description of how things are from a God’s-eye point ofview, no skyhook provided by some contemporary or yet-to-be-developedscience, is going to free us from the contingency of having beenacculturated as we were. Our acculturation is what makes certainoptions live, or momentous, or forced, while leaving others dead, ortrivial, or optional. (ORT, 13)

This view looks to many readers like a version of cultural relativism.Granted, Rorty does not say that what is true, what is good, and whatis right is relative to some particular ethnos, and so in that sensehe is no relativist. But the worry about relativism – that itleaves us with no rational way to adjudicate conflict – seems toapply equally to Rorty’s ethnocentric view. Rorty’s answeris to say that in one sense of “rational” that is true,but that in another sense it is not, and to recommend that we drop theformer (TP, 186–201). Rorty’s position is that we have nonotion of rational warrant that exceeds, or transcends, or grounds,the norms that liberal intellectuals take to define thorough,open-minded, reflective discussion. It is chimerical, Rorty holds, tothink that the force or attractiveness of these norms can be enhancedby argument that does not presuppose them. It is pointless, equally,to look for ways of convicting those who pay them no heed ofirrationality. Persuasion across such fundamental differences isachieved, if at all, by concrete comparisons of particularalternatives, by elaborate description and redescription of the kindsof life to which different practices conduce. In his own work,Rorty’s offers such comparisons, descriptions, andredescriptions, with the goal of making liberalism the most attractivealternative.

3.3 Liberalism and Irony

Rorty is a self-proclaimed postmodernist bourgeois liberal(“Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” ORT). Hisliberalism is postmodernist because it does not depend on ametanarrative according to which liberalism is the realization andembodiment of transcultural and ahistorical conceptions of rationalityand morality. Rather, its institutions and practices are the luckyresult of a contingent history. His liberalism is bourgeois becausethis contingent history includes economic conditions that make theseinstitutions and practices possible (see section 3.7).

Thus, his liberalism is a pragmatic liberalism. He is skeptical ofpolitical thought purporting to uncover hidden, systematic causes forinjustice and exploitation, and on that basis proposing sweepingchanges to set things right. (ORT Part III; EHO; CIS Part II; AOC).Rather, liberalism involves piecemeal reforms advancing economicjustice and increasing the freedoms that citizens are able to enjoy.It is also a romantic liberalism. He follows Judith Shklar inidentifying liberals by their belief that “cruelty is the worstthing we do,” and contends it is our ability to imagine the wayswe can be cruel to others, and how we could be different, that enablesus to gradually expand the community with which we feel solidarity(CIS, 146).

It is possible, Rorty thinks, to be both a liberal and an ironist. Theironist, a figure Rorty contrasts with “themetaphysician,” is a central character in CIS. The metaphysicianis someone who adheres to the “common sense” view that itis possible to discover the true nature of reality or the true natureof the self, whereas the ironist is someone who understands that anyparticular description of reality or of the self that she might adoptwill be adopted only for contingent reasons, often having to do withher culture and upbringing. Because she recognizes that thedescriptions she uses are optional, she is often on the lookout fornew ways of describing things, particularly when she “hasradical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currentlyuses” (CIS, 73). Because she believes “there is nothingbeyond vocabularies which serves as a criterion of choice betweenthem” (CIS, 80), these doubts can only be resolved by comparingalternative possible vocabularies. Thus, she seeks out different andcompelling descriptions that she can adopt or incorporate into her ownfinal vocabulary.

Rorty’s liberal ironist, recognizing – indeed, affirming– the contingency of her own commitments, is explicitlyethnocentric (ORT, “Solidarity or Objectivity”). Sheaccepts that bourgeois liberalism has no universality other than thetransient and unstable one which time, luck, and discursive effortmight win for it. Recognizing the contingency of these values and thevocabulary in which they are expressed, while retaining thecommitments, is the attitude of the liberal ironist (CIS, essays 3,4).Liberal ironists have the ability to combine consciousness of thecontingency of their own evaluative vocabulary with a commitment toreducing suffering – in particular, with a commitment tocombatting cruelty (CIS, essay 4, ORT, Part III).

3.4 Public and Private

Rorty’s version of liberalism is expressed also in thedistinction he draws between the private and the public (CIS). Thisdistinction is often misinterpreted to imply that certain domains ofinteraction or behavior should be exempted from evaluation in moral orpolitical or social terms. The distinction Rorty draws, however, haslittle to do with traditional attempts to draw lines of demarcation ofthis sort between a private and a public domain – to determinewhich aspects of our lives we do and which we don’t have toanswer for publicly. Rorty’s distinction, rather, goes to thepurposes of theoretical vocabularies. We should, Rorty urges, be“content to treat the demands of self-creation and of humansolidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable” (CIS,xv). Rorty’s view is that we should treat vocabularies fordeliberation about public goods and social and political arrangements,on the one hand, and vocabularies developed or created in pursuit ofpersonal fulfilment, self-creation, and self-realization, on theother, as distinct tools. The attempt to bring them together, in anoverarching theory, is part of what has led philosophy to pursueprojects that have exceeded their usefulness.

Rorty’s distinction between public and private is personified inthe figure of the liberal ironist (CIS, chapter 4). She is a personwho recognizes that her final vocabulary can be split into two parts,where the public part of her final vocabulary has to do with herresponsibilities to others (justice), and the private part of herfinal vocabulary has to do with her responsibilities to herself(self-creation). Arguably, the liberal ironist is the type of personRorty himself aspired to be, as evidenced by his autobiographicalessay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” (in PSH). There, headmits that much of his early philosophical career had been an attemptto reconcile public and private, but he “gradually decided thatthe whole idea of holding reality and justice in a single vision hadbeen a mistake” (PSH, 12).

Critics have often worried that Rorty’s line between public andprivate simply reinscribes one of the most problematic features ofliberalism. However, the line Rorty draws between public and privateis necessarily porous; it is in part because of the move of privatevocabularies to the public realm that social progress occurs.

3.5 Redescription and Social Progress

The key imperative in Rorty’s ethico-political agenda is thedeepening and widening of solidarity. Consistent with hisethnocentrism, he distinguishes between “us” and“them,” arguing that thinking of more and diverse peopleas “one of us” is the hallmark of social progress (CIS,191). Solidarity is brought about by gradual and contingent expansionsof the scope of “we;” it is created through the hard workof training our sympathies rather than through the recognition ofantecedent criteria that stipulate what we have in common. We trainour sympathies, Rorty thinks, by exposing ourselves to forms ofsuffering we had previously overlooked. Thus, the task of theintellectual, with respect to social progress, is not to providerefinements of social theory, but to sensitize us to the suffering ofothers, and refine, deepen and expand our ability to identify withothers, to think of others as like ourselves in morally relevant ways.(EHO, Part III; CIS, Part III). The liberal ironist, in particular,sees “enlarging our acquaintance” (CIS, 80) as the onlyway to assuage the doubts she has about herself and her culture.

The task of achieving solidarity is, for Rorty, divided up betweenagents of love (or guardians of diversity) and agents of justice (orguardians of universality). Rorty writes,

The moral tasks of a liberal democracy are divided between the agentsof love and the agents of justice. In other words, such a democracyemploys and empowers both connoisseurs of diversity and guardians ofuniversality. The former insist that there are people out there whomsociety has failed to notice. They make these candidates for admissionvisible by showing how to explain their odd behavior in terms of acoherent, if unfamiliar, set of beliefs and desires – as opposedto explaining this behavior with terms like stupidity, madness,baseness or sin. The latter, the guardians of universality, make surethat once these people are admitted as citizens, once they have beenshepherded into the light by the connoisseurs of diversity, they aretreated just like all the rest of us. (ORT, “On Ethnocentrism: AReply to Clifford Geertz” 206)

This distinction between guardians of universality and guardians ofdiversity corresponds to Rorty’s distinction betweenpropositions and vocabularies (see section 2.2). A change in ourbeliefs may result from convincing argument that occurs at theintra-vocabulary level, within what Rorty earlier refers to as“normal discourse” (PMN, 320). A change in what weperceive as interesting truth-value candidates occurs at theinter-vocabulary level, within “abnormal discourse.”Abnormal discourse, Rorty contends, can produce “anything fromnonsense to intellectual revolution” (PMN, 320). Which of theseit will produce depends on whether the new descriptions offered upcatch on more broadly. Rorty identifies romanticism as the view thatthe latter sort of change is the more significant one (CIS“Introduction,” essay 1).

The guardians of diversity contribute to social progress by offeringnew descriptions that the liberal ironist might find in her search fornew and compelling descriptions to adopt or incorporate into her ownfinal vocabulary. In CIS, this role is attributed to strong poets andironist theorists on the one hand, and novelists and journalists, onthe other. Strong poets and ironist theorists, like Marcel Proust,Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida, offer newdescriptions in their private attempts to achieve autonomy by gettingout from under the final vocabularies they have inherited. Novelists,like Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Charles Dickens, Harriet BeecherStowe, and Radclyffe Hall, offer new descriptions that draw ourattention to the suffering of previously-overlooked people and groups.They contribute to social progress by pointing out “concretecases of particular people ignoring the suffering of other particularpeople” (ORT, 79). Because reading novels is one of the bestways to sensitize ourselves to the suffering experienced by others– to see that they have “the same tendency to bleed whenpricked” (RR, 465) – Rorty thinks a liberal arts educationis key to maintaining liberal democracy, and for strengthening aglobal human rights culture (“Human Rights, Rationality, andSentimentality” in TP). In other essays, like “Feminismand Pragmatism,” the role of guardian of diversity is expandedto include prophetic thinkers, like Catharine A. MacKinnon and MarilynFrye, who offer new descriptions in their public efforts to reducesuffering.

Rorty ultimately refers to these methods for securing social progressas “cultural politics.” Cultural politics includes bothnegative projects – abandoning words and descriptions that blockour ability to sympathize with others – and positive projects– new ways of speaking that help us see that“others” are “just like us,” and thereforedeserve to be part of our moral community (“Cultural Politicsand the Question of the Existence of God” in PCP). Culturalpolitics thus involves imagining and articulating utopian visions, atask he contends falls naturally to the Left, which is, “bydefinition, the party of hope. It insists that our nation remainsunachieved” (AOC, 14).

3.6 Rorty’s America

Rorty’s utopian yearnings describe an America that has taken uphis proposal to replace theory with metaphor and universal moralprinciples with feelings of solidarity (“Looking Backwards fromthe Year 2096” in PSH). He also argues that achieving solidarityrequires economic security; when our economic circumstances are suchthat we are forced to choose between feeding our families and feedingstrangers, the community to which one is loyal will contract. In hiswords,

Our loyalty to … larger groups will, however, weaken, or evenvanish altogether, when things get really tough. Then people whom weonce thought of as like ourselves will be excluded. Sharing food withimpoverished people down the street is natural and right in normaltimes, but perhaps not in a famine, when doing so amounts todisloyalty to one’s family. The tougher things get, the moreties of loyalty to those near at hand tighten, and the more those toeveryone else slacken. (PCP, 42)

Following the pragmatist insight that beliefs are habits of action,Rorty contends that to hold a belief simply means that one is inclinedto act in certain ways and not in others. Thus, “to believe thatsomeone is ‘one of us,’ a member of our moral community,is to exhibit readiness to come to their assistance when they are inneed” (Rorty 1996, 13). Thus “an answer to the question‘who are we?’ which is to have any moral significance, hasto be one which takes money into account” (Rorty 1996, 14).

This helps to explain why Rorty calls for a return to the reformistLeft of the 1960s in America, when universities and unions foundcommon cause. What Rorty calls the “cultural Left” –the contemporary, academic left – is plagued by two relatedproblems. First, it has ignored economic inequality (Rorty’sshorthand for which is “selfishness”) and focused onother, identity-based forms of inequality (Rorty’s shorthand forwhich is “sadism”). While Rorty thinks attempting toameliorate racial and gender inequality is a laudable goal, he lamentsthe fact that this focus has displaced the focus on economicinequality. Second, Rorty worries that the cultural left tries totheorize its way “into political relevance,” and therebyadopts a “spectatorial approach” (AOC, 94). In so doing,it prioritizes knowledge over hope. Thus, Rorty enjoins the culturalLeft to abandon its spectatorial approach by abandoning theory andreviving its hope in the promise of America.

A reinvigorated Left would have to reclaim the sort of pride inAmerica that animated the work of the reformist Left. Rorty opensAchieving Our Country (1998) by writing,

National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: anecessary condition for self-improvement. Too much national pride canproduce bellicosity and imperialism, just as excessive self-respectcan produce arrogance. But just as too little self-respect makes itdifficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficientnational pride makes energetic and effective debate about nationalpolicy unlikely. (AOC, 3)

While philosophical theorizing about America is a symptom ofhopelessness, engaging in debates about what America can do and becomerepresents a hopeful attitude that he thinks is required for socialprogress.

4. Rorty in the Conversations of Philosophy

The wide scope of Rorty’s metaphilosophical deconstruction ofrepresentationalism in PMN, together with a penchant for uncashedmetaphor and swift, broad-stroke historical narrative of the sortdisplayed in CP, earned Rorty a sturdy reputation as ananti-philosopher’s philosopher. At the same time, however, ashis reputation within the dominant cultures of analytic philosophy waswaning in the wake of PMN, his writings from the 1980s in particulargained a significant readership beyond the confines of the profession.Still, while his academic engagement certainly ranged far beyond theconfines of analytic philosophy, it would be wrong to say that Rortyturned his back on that enterprise. The relationship, as we shall see– though both complicated and shifting over the decades –has continued to develop as Rorty’s work is appropriated by newgenerations of readers.

4.1 Critical Responses

By 1970, the year Rorty was promoted to full professor at Princeton,he had made a name for himself in analytic philosophy. He had writtena series of original and often prescient essays (MLM) on issues thenat the of center of professional attention, notably in philosophy ofmind and metaphilosophy, and he had also edited the volume,TheLinguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (1992). Thiscollection of papers by prominent contributors, framed byRorty’s extensive introduction, received a great deal ofattention and acclaim. It did much to cement the idea of a linguisticturn (Rorty attributes the notion to Gustav Bergman (Rorty 1992, xx))as a sea change in the history of philosophy.

Throughout the 1970s Rorty’s metaphilosophical papers proddedthe self-understanding of contemporary analytical philosophy,advocating the relevance of American pragmatism, Wittgenstein, andthinkers in the European Continental tradition to the self-conceptionof post-positivist analytic philosophy. It is well documented thatRorty became increasingly disenchanted with the practice of philosophyas it was conducted by the dominant figures in the Princetondepartment during this period, and no doubt the feeling wasreciprocated (Gross, 2008).

Nevertheless, within the philosophical community at large,Rorty’s standing was such that he was elected President of theEastern Division of the American Philosophical Association for theacademic year 1979–1980. Just weeks before he gave thePresidential Address (“Pragmatism, Relativism, andIrrationalism,” see RR), however, PMN was published by PrincetonUniversity Press. To Rorty’s surprise (Rorty in Lewis-Kraus,2003), this monograph was read as an attack on the basic creed ofanalytic philosophy as such, rather than as an attempt at benevolentreform. Most reviews were hostile to what was regarded asRorty’s end-of-philosophy message, and in the years thatfollowed, Rorty’s challenge to representationalist epistemologywas in many influential quarters studiously ignored.

In retrospect, the hostility may appear excessive, but understandable.As we have seen in connection with Rorty’s attitude to science,it is particularly Rorty’s treatment of truth and knowledge thatdrew fire from philosophers. While a great variety of philosophershave criticized Rorty on this general score in a great variety ofways, a common concern stands out; Rorty’s conversationalistview of truth and knowledge leaves us entirely unable to account forthe notion that a reasonable view of how things are is a view suitablyconstrained by how the world actually is. This criticism is levelledagainst Rorty not only from the standpoint of metaphysical andscientific realist views of the sort that Rorty hoped would soon beextinct. It is expressed also by thinkers who respect Rorty’sdialectical acumen, who have some sympathy with Rorty’shistoricist view of intellectual progress, and who find persuasive hiscritique of Kantian and Platonist features of modern philosophy. JohnMcDowell (McDowell, 1994), for instance, claims that Rorty’sview of the relation between agent and world as merely causal runsafoul of the notion that our very concept of a creature with beliefsinvolves the idea of a rational constraint of the world on ourepistemic states. Pascal Engel, in his exchange with Rorty on thenotion of truth (Rorty and Engel, 2007), takes Rorty to task forgiving up the very notion that undergirds rational argument andconviction, without which it is hard to see what the remit ofphilosophy might possibly be.

However, critics are not concerned only with what they see as amisguided view of belief, truth, and knowledge, whether relativist,subjectivist, or idealist in nature. An important reason for the hightemperature of much of the debate that Rorty has inspired is that heappears to some to reject the very values that are the basis for anyarticulation of a philosophical view of truth and knowledge at all. AsEngel emphasizes, Rorty is indeed critical of the role of argument inintellectual progress, and he is dismissive of the very idea oftheories of truth, of knowledge, of rationality, and the like.Philosophers such as Hilary Putnam and Susan Haack, who sharedRorty’s view that analytic philosophy would do well toincorporate the lessons of American pragmatism, focused theircriticisms on exactly this aspect of Rorty’s views. Haack, inparticular, frames her attacks on Rorty along these lines in moralterms; to her mind, Rorty’s efforts to abandon the basicconcepts of traditional epistemology are symptoms of a vulgarcynicism, which contributes to the decline of reason and intellectualintegrity that Haack and others find to be characteristic of muchcontemporary thought. The charge of intellectual irresponsibility issometimes raised, or at last implied, in connection with Rorty’suse of historical figures. Rorty’s reading of Descartes and ofKant in PMN have often been challenged, as has his more constructiveuses of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. The kind ofappropriation of other writers and thinkers that Rorty performs willat times seem to do violence to the views and intentions of theprotagonists. Rorty, however, is quite clear about the rhetoricalpoint and scholarly limitations of these kinds of redescriptions, ashe explains in “The Historiography of Philosophy: FourGenres” (Rorty, 1984).

4.2 Claim to Pragmatism

Rorty’s reading of earlier philosophers has always beenunabashedly appropriative, and hence often controversial. Hisheterodox reading of Dewey and his generally dismissive attitudetoward Peirce has also meant that Rorty found few friends among thekeepers of the pragmatist tradition in the American academy. Prominentreaders of the classical American pragmatists have expressed deepreservations about Rorty’s interpretation of Dewey and Peirce,in particular, and of his construal of the pragmatist movement ingeneral (see, for instance, Misak, 2013.) Consequently, Rorty’sentitlement to the label “pragmatist” has been challenged.Haack’s strong claims on this score are notable, but there aremany others. (See the discussions of Rorty in Alexander, 1987;Brodsky, 1982; Campbell, 1984; Edel, 1985; Gouinlock, 1995; Lavine1995; R.W: Sleeper, 1986; as well as the essays in Langsdorf andSmith, 1995.) For Rorty, the key figure in the American pragmatistmovement is John Dewey, to whom he attributes many of his own centraldoctrines. In particular, Rorty finds in Dewey an anticipation of hisown view of philosophy as the facilitator of a humanist politics, of anon-ontological view of the virtues of inquiry, of a holisticconception of human intellectual life, and of an anti-essentialist,historicist conception of philosophical thought. To read Dewey hisway, however, Rorty explicitly sets about separating the“good” from the “bad” Dewey (see“Dewey’s Metaphysics” in CP, and “Deweybetween Hegel and Darwin” in TP). He is critical of what hetakes to be Dewey’s backsliding into metaphysics inExperience and Nature, and has no patience for theconstructive attempt ofLogic: The Theory of Inquiry. Rortythus imposes a scheme of evaluation on Dewey’s works which manyscholars object to. Lavine, for one, claims that “scientificmethod” is Dewey’s central concept (Lavine 1995, 44).Sleeper holds that reform rather than elimination of metaphysics andepistemology is Dewey’s aim (Sleeper 1986, 2, chapter 6).

Rorty’s least favourite pragmatist is Peirce, whom he regards assubject to both scheme-content dualism and to a degree of scientism.So it is not surprising that Haack, whose own pragmatism drawsinspiration from Peirce, finds Rorty’s recasting of pragmatismliterally unworthy of the name. From Haack’s perspective,Rorty’s opposition to the epistemological orientation of modernphilosophy breaks fundamentally with the American pragmatists, in sofar as he dismisses the very project that gave direction to theirwork. While classical pragmatism is an attempt to understand and workout a novel legitimating framework for scientific inquiry, Haackmaintains, Rorty’s “pragmatism” (Haack consistentlyuses quotes) is simply an abandonment of the very attempt to learnmore about the nature and adequacy conditions of inquiry. Instead ofaiding us in our aspiration to govern ourselves through rationalthought, Rorty weakens our intellectual resilience and leaves us evenmore vulnerable to rhetorical seduction. To Haack and hersympathisers, Rorty’s pragmatism is dangerous, performing anend-run on reason, and therefore on philosophy. Cheryl Misak, who isone of the most influential voices among contemporary pragmatists, andwho also shares Haack’s enthusiasm for Peirce, criticizes Rortyalong similar lines. When Rorty abandons the notion of objectivity,Misak argues, he also dispenses with the capacity for normativecritique (Misak, 2013). Rorty, from this perspective, ends up with apragmatism of subjectivity in the tradition of William James.

4.3 Analytic Philosophy

Rorty is sometimes portrayed as a renegade, as someone who wentthrough a transformation from bona fide analytical philosopher tosomething else, and then lived to tell a tale of liberation fromyouthful enchantment. This portrayal, however, distorts bothRorty’s view of analytical philosophy and the trajectory of histhinking. Indeed, Rorty’s relationship to the traditions ofWestern philosophy is more nuanced than his reputation might suggest.So, too, is his relation to analytical philosophy in particular.

Though the introduction to the 1967 volume on the linguistic turn(Rorty, 1992) and the early papers in philosophy of mind from the1960s do show Rorty adopting frameworks for philosophical problemsthat he later dispenses with, these writings at the same time veryclearly bear the mark of the fundamental metaphilosophical attitudewhich becomes increasingly explicit in the next decade (see StephenLeach and James Tartaglia, “Introduction,” MLM1–15). In the Preface to PMN, referring to Hartshorne, McKeon,Carnap, Robert Brumbaugh, Carl Hempel, and Paul Weiss, Rorty says,

I was very fortunate in having these men as my teachers, but, forbetter or worse, I treated them all as saying the same thing: that a“philosophical problem” was a product of the unconsciousadoption of a set of assumptions built into the vocabulary in whichthe problem was stated – assumptions which were to be questionedbefore the problem itself was taken seriously. (PMN, xiii)

This way of stating the lesson, however, appears to leave open thepossibility that certain philosophical problems eventually maylegitimately be taken seriously – that is, at face value in thesense that they require constructive solutions – provided theassumptions which sustain their formulation stand up to propercritical scrutiny. Taken this way, the attitude Rorty here expresseswould be more or less the same as that of all those philosophers whohave diagnosed their predecessors’ work as mixtures ofpseudo-questions and genuine problems dimly glimpsed, problems whichnow, with the proper frame of questioning fully clarified, may beproductively addressed. But the full force of the lesson Rorty learnedemerges only with the view that this notion of proper criticalscrutiny is questionable. For Rorty, to legitimate the assumptions onwhich a philosophical problem is based would be to establish that theterms we require to pose that problem are really mandatory, that thevocabulary in which we encounter the problem is in principleinescapable. But Rorty’s construal of the linguistic turn, aswell as his proposals for eliminating the vocabulary of the mental,are really at odds with the idea that we might hope to construct adefinitive vocabulary for philosophy. Even in his early days,Rorty’s approach to philosophy is shaped by the historicistconviction that no vocabulary is inescapable in principle. This meansthat progress in philosophy is gained less from constructive solutionsto problems than through therapeutic dissolution of their causes, thatis, through the invention of new vocabularies achieved by the launchof new and fruitful metaphors (“Introduction” in PMN;“Unfamiliar Noises: Hesse and Davidson on Metaphor” inORT).

To hold that no vocabulary is final is also to hold that no vocabularycan be free of unthematized yet optional assumptions. Hence any effortto circumvent a philosophical problem by making such assumptionsvisible is subject to its own circumvention. Accordingly, the factthat Rorty often distances himself from the terms in which he earlierframed arguments and made diagnoses is in itself no reason to imposeon him, as some have done, a temporal dichotomy. It may be thatRorty’s early work, inspired by a less critical, lessdialectical reading of Quine and Sellars than that offered in PMN, ismore constructive than therapeutic in tone and jargon, and thereforefrom Rorty’s later perspective in an important sense misguided.However, what ties together all Rorty’s work, over time andacross themes, is his complete lack of faith in the idea that there isan ideal vocabulary, one which contains all genuine discursiveoptions. Rorty designates this faith Platonism (an important theme inCIS). That there are no inescapable forms of description is a thoughtwhich permeates Rorty’s work from the 1960s through his latertherapeutic articulations of pragmatism right up until hischaracterization of philosophy as cultural politics (PCP).Characterizations of pragmatism in terms of anti-foundationalism(PMN), of anti-representationalism (ORT), and of anti-essentialism(TP) are all explicitly parasitic on constructive efforts inepistemology and metaphysics, and are intended to highlight thevarious ways these efforts remain under the spell of a Platonic faithin ideal concepts and mandatory forms of descriptions.

Rorty’s use of Quine and Sellars to make his fundamental pointsagainst the idea of philosophy as a knowledge legitimation project, aswell as his articulation of his critique in terms of typically“analytical” philosophical problems, has contributed to animpression of PMN as an internal indictment of analytic philosophy assuch. Many – some gleeful, some chagrined – have read PMNas a purported demonstration of the bankruptcy of one of the twocontemporary main streams of Western philosophy. Such readers drawsupport for this view also from the fact that much of Rorty’swritings since PMN have been concerned to show the virtues in thinkerslike Heidegger and Derrida (EHO). Forty years later, however, it seemsunwise to superimpose the analytic-continental divide onto the messageof PMN, or onto Rorty. In PMN, his central point is that philosophyneeds to break free from the metaphor of mind as a medium ofappearances, appearances that philosophy must help us sort into themere and the reality-corresponding ones. Rorty made this point in avocabulary that was developed by Anglo-American (whether by birth,naturalization, or late adoption) philosophers in the course of thepreceding half-century. It is not necessary, and probably misleading,to see Rorty’s criticism of epistemology and the assumptionsthat make it appear worthwhile as a criticism of a particularphilosophical style of philosophy or set of methodological habits.Reading PMN in conjunction with the essays in CP (see particularlyessay 4, “Professionalized Philosophy and TranscendentalistCulture”, essay 12, “Philosophy in America Today”,and also “Introduction”), one quickly sees that the targetof PMN cannot be a putative school or branch of the subject called“Analytic Philosophy.” Because Rorty thinks philosophy hasno essence, has no defining historical task, fails to mark out aspecial domain of knowledge, and is not, in short, a natural kind (CP,226), he leaves no ground from which to level that sort of critique.Nor is it his intention to do so. Around the time of the publicationof PMN, Rorty’s view of the matter was “that‘analytic philosophy’ now has only a stylistic andsociological unity” (CP, 217). He then qualifies this point asfollows: “In saying [this], I am not suggesting that analyticphilosophy is a bad thing, or is in bad shape. The analytic style is,I think, agood style. Theesprit de corps amonganalytic philosophers is healthy and useful” (CP, 217). However,while Rorty apparently bears no prejudice against analytic philosophyin particular, the very reason for his tolerance – hisantiessentialist, historicist view of philosophy and its problems– has for many critics been a point of objection. After hisfaint praise, Rorty goes on:

All I am saying is that analytic philosophy has become, whether itlikes it or not, the same sort of discipline as we find in the other“humanities” departments – departments wherepretensions to “rigor” and to “scientific”status are less evident. The normal form of life in the humanities isthe same as that in the arts and in belles-lettres; a genius doessomething new and interesting and persuasive, and his or her admirersbegin to form a school or movement. (CP, 217–218)

This is perfectly consonant with the attitude to the notion ofphilosophical method Rorty expresses 20 years later: “So-calledmethods are simply descriptions of the activities engaged in by theenthusiastic imitators of one or another original mind – whatKuhn would call the ”research programs“ to which theirworks gave rise” (TP, 10). Rorty’s metaphilosophicalcritique, then, is directed not at particular techniques or styles orvocabularies, but toward the idea that philosophical problems areanything other than transient tensions in the dynamics of evolving,contingent vocabularies. If his critique has bite specifically againstanalytic philosophy, this may be because of a lingering faith inphilosophical problems as lasting intellectual challenges that anyhonest thinker has to acknowledge, and which may be met by makingprogress in methodology. Rorty himself, however, nowhere says thatthis faith is part of the essence of analytical philosophy. On thecontrary, it is clear that pioneering analytical philosophers, peoplelike Sellars, Quine, and Davidson, provided Rorty with indispensablecritical tools in his attack on the epistemologicallegitimation-project that has been a central concern in philosophysince Descartes.

Shorn of the ambition to make progress on perpetual problems,philosophy in the analytic tradition remains a dynamic enterprise, asRorty’s own work demonstrates. It is true that Rorty, as aprofessor of the humanities at the University of Virginia, found alarger intellectual audience outside philosophy departments, as heincreasingly turned to literary theory and to political thought.However, while drawing on sources outside the analytic tradition andalso outside the field of philosophy, Rorty never ceased to engagewith analytic philosophy, and he retained a significant audience amongAnglophone philosophers critical of the resurgence of metaphysicsbrought on by the seminal work of Saul Kripke. A slow but persistentresurgence and rearticulation of pragmatic naturalism beginning in the1990s, gaining force after the turn of the millennium, provided newperspectives on Rorty and on the dialectical role of hismetaphilosophical critique.

In the years since Rorty’s death, the publication of monographsand anthologies dedicated to his thought suggests that interest inRorty’s contributions is on the rise in the world of Anglophonephilosophy. The tone of these critical appraisals is generallydifferent from the frequently harsh responses to the slayer ofrepresentationalist epistemology that appeared during the 1980s.Perceptions of Rorty’s critique have clearly softened; recentcommentators appear less concerned to defend the epistemologicalenterprise, and more interested in coming to terms with Rorty’scritique and to understand it in historical perspective. Moreover,Rorty’s work is increasingly being addressed as a contributionto political thought, with attention shifting away frommeta-epistemology and on to Rorty’s vision and defense ofliberalism, his distinctive conception of social progress, and hisassessments of the prospects of reform toward greater social justice.While his attack on representationalism gained Rorty notoriety as ametaphilosophical nihilist, the legacy that is now taking shape tendsrather to highlight Rorty’s fundamental and enduring concernwith the connection between philosophical thinking and the pursuit ofhuman happiness, thus making a place for Rorty’s voice in aconversation that springs from the founding impulses of Westernphilosophy.

Bibliography

Works by Rorty

Cited by Abbreviation

[PMN]: 1979,Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[CP]: 1982,Consequences of Pragmatism,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
[CIS]: 1989,Contingency, Irony, andSolidarity, New York: Cambridge University Press.
[ORT]: 1991,Objectivity, Relativism, andTruth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1, New York: CambridgeUniversity Press.
[EHO]: 1991,Essays on Heidegger and Others:Philosophical Papers, Volume 2, New York: Cambridge UniversityPress.
[TP]: 1998,Truth and Progress: PhilosophicalPapers, Volume 3, New York: Cambridge University Press.
[AOC]: 1998,Achieving Our Country: LeftistThought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press.
[PSH]: 2000,Philosophy and Social Hope.New York: Penguin Books.
[PCP]: 2007,Philosophy as CulturalPolitics,Philosophical Papers, Volume 4, New York:Cambridge University Press.
[RR]: 2010,The Rorty Reader. Voparil,C. J., and R. J. Bernstein (eds), Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
[MLM]: 2014,Mind, Language, andMetaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers. Leach, S., and J.Tartaglia (eds.). New York: Cambridge University Press.
[OPP]: 2020,On Philosophy and Philosophers:Unpublished Papers, 1960–2000. Małecki, W. P., and C.Voparil (eds.). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Other Works by Rorty

1952, “Whitehead’s Use of the Concept ofPotentiality,” MA thesis, University of Chicago.
1956, “The Concept ofPotentiality,” PhD dissertation, Yale University.
1961, “Recent Metaphilosophy,”The Review of Metaphysics, 15(2): 299–318.
1972, “Functionalism, Machines, andIncorrigibility,”Journal of Philosophy, 69:203–220.
1973, “Criteria and Necessity,”Noûs, 7(4): 313–329.
1976, “Realism and Reference,”The Monist, 59(3): 321–340.
1977, “Derrida on Language, Being,and Abnormal Philosophy,”Journal of Philosophy,74(11): 673–681.
1979, “Transcendental Arguments,Self-Reference and Pragmatism,” in P. Bieri, R. P. Hortsman, andL. Kruger (eds.),Transcendental Arguments and Science,Dordrecht: D. Reidel, pp. 77–103.
1982, “Contemporary Philosophy ofMind,”Synthese, 53(2): 323–348.
1984, “The Historiography ofPhilosophy: Four Genres,” in R. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Q.Skinner (eds.),Philosophy in History, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, pp. 49–76.
1986, “Beyond Realism andAnti-Realism,” in L. Nagl, and R. Heinrich (eds.),Wo stehtdie Analytische Philosophie heute? Vienna: R. Oldenbourg Verlag,Munich, pp. 103–115.
1996, “Who Are We?: MoralUniversalism and Economic Triage,”Diogenes, 44(173):5–15.
1997, “Introduction,” in W.Sellars,Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge,Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, pp. 1–12.
1997,Truth, Politics and‘Post-Modernism.’ The 1997 Spinoza Lectures.Amsterdam: Van Gorcum.
1999, “Pragmatism asAnti-Authoritarianism,”Revue Internationale dePhilosophie, 53(207): 7–20.
2007, “Dewey and Posner on Pragmatismand Moral Progress,”University of Chicago Law Review,74(3): 915–927.
2021,Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism, Cambridge, MA:Belknap Press.

Edited Volumes, Collaborations, Exchanges, and Interviews

Auxier, R. E., and L. E. Hahn (eds.), 2010,The Philosophy ofRichard Rorty, Chicago: Open Court.
Balslev, A. N., 1999,Cultural Otherness: Correspondence withRichard Rorty, Atlanta: Scholars Press.
Brandom, R. B., (ed.), 2000,Rorty and His Critics.Malden: Blackwell.
Collini, S. (ed.), 1992,Interpretation andOverinterpretation, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Festenstein, M., and S. Thompson (eds.), 2001,Richard Rorty:Critical Dialogues. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Huang, Y. (ed.), 2009,Rorty, Pragmatism, and Confucianism:With Responses by Richard Rorty, Albany: State University of NewYork Press.
Kulp, C. B., (ed.), 1997,Realism/Antirealism andEpistemology. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers,Inc.
Lewis-Kraus, G., 2003, “An Interview with RichardRorty,”The Believer 3. [Available online].
Mendieta, E. (ed.), 2006,Take Care of Freedom and Truth willTake Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, Stanford:Stanford University Press.
Mouffe, C. (ed.), 1996,Deconstruction and Pragmatism,New York: Routledge.
Niznik, J and J. T. Sanders (eds.), 1996,Debating the Stateof Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty and Kołakowski. Westport:Praeger Publishers.
Nystrom, D., and K. Puckett (eds.), 1998,Against Bosses,Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty.Charlottesville, VA: Prickly Pear Pamphlets.
Rorty, R., E. Lee, and A. Mourelatos, (eds.), 1973,Exegesisand Argument: Essays in Greek Philosophy presented to GregoryVlastos. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum.
Rorty, R. (ed.), 1992,The Linguistic Turn: Essays inPhilosophical Method with Two Retrospective Essays. Chicago andLondon: The University of Chicago Press.
Rorty, R., and G. Vattimo, 2005,The Future of Religion,S. Zabala (ed.), New York: Columbia University Press.
Rorty, R., and P. Engel, 2007,What’s the Use ofTruth?, W. McCuaig (trans.), New York: Columbia UniversityPress.
Rorty, R., 2011,An Ethics for Today: Finding Common groundbetween Philosophy and Religion. New York: Columbia UniversityPress.
Saatkamp, H. J. Jr. (ed.), 1995,Rorty and Pragmatism: ThePhilosopher Responds to his Critics. Nashville and London:Vanderbilt University Press.

Secondary Literature

Anthologies about Rorty

Auxier, R., E. Kramer, and K. P. Skowroński (eds.), 2020,Rorty and Beyond, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Dieleman, S., D. E. McClean, and P. Showler (eds.), 2022,TheEthics of Richard Rorty: Moral Communities, Self-Transformation, andImagination, New York and London: Routledge.
Goodson, J. L., 2020,The Dark Years? Philosophy, Politics,and the Problem of Predictions,Eugene, OR: Cascade Books.
Goodson, J. L., and B. E. Stone (eds.), 2012,Rorty and theReligious: Christian Engagements with a Secular Philosopher,Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers.
Gröschner, A., C. Koopman, and M. Sandbothe (eds.), 2013,Richard Rorty: From Pragmatist Philosophy to CulturalPolitics, London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Guignon, C., and D. R. Hiley (eds.), 2003,Richard Rorty,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Janack, M. (ed.), 2010,Feminist Interpretations of RichardRorty, University Park: The Pennsylvania State Press.
Langsdorf, L., and A. R. Smith (eds.), 1995,RecoveringPragmatism’s Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty, and thePhilosophy of Communication, Albany: State University of New YorkPress.
Marchetti, G. (ed.), 2022,The Ethics, Epistemology, andPolitics of Richard Rorty.New York and London: Routledge.
Malachowski, A. R. (ed.), 1990,Reading Rorty: CriticalResponses to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Beyond,Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
––– (ed.), 2020,A Companion to RortykHoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons Ltd.
Müller, M. (ed.), 2019,Handbuch Richard Rorty,Wiesbaden: Springer VS.
Peters, M. A., and P. Ghiraldelli, Jr. (eds.), 2002,RichardRorty: Education, Philosophy, and Politics, Lanham, MD: Rowman& Littlefield.
Pettegrew, J. (ed.), 2000,A Pragmatist’s Progress?:Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History, Lanham, MD:Roman & Littlefield.
Rondel, D. (ed.), 2021,The Cambridge Companion to Rorty.New York: Cambridge University Press.
Saatkamp, H. J. (ed.), 1995,Rorty and Pragmatism: ThePhilosopher Responds to His Critics, Nashville, TN: VanderbiltUniversity Press.

Monographs about Rorty

Arcilla, R. V., 1995,For the Love of Perfection: RichardRorty and Liberal Education, New York and London: Routledge.
Bacon, M, 2007,Richard Rorty: Pragmatism and PoliticalLiberalism, Lanham and Plymouth: Lexington Books.
Calcaterra, R. M., 2019,Contingency and Normativity: TheChallenges of Richard Rorty,Boston: Brill-Rodopi.
Calder, G., 2007,Rorty’s Politics ofRedescription, Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Casey, M. A., 2002,Meaninglessness: The Solutions ofNietzsche, Freud, and Rorty, Lanham: Lexington Books.
Chin, C., 2018,The Practice of Political Theory: Rorty andContinental Thought, New York: Columbia University Press.
Curtis, W. B., 2015,Defending Rorty: Pragmatism and LiberalVirtue, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Farrell, F. B., 1994,Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism:The Recovery of the World in Recent Philosophy, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
Gander, E. M., 1999,The Last Conceptual Revolution: ACritique of Richard Rorty’s Political Philosophy, Albany:State University of New York Press, 1999.
Gascoigne, N., 2008,Richard Rorty, Cambridge and Malden:Polity.
Geras, N., 1995,Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind:The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty, London and NewYork: Verso.
Gross, N., 2008,Richard Rorty: The Making of an AmericanPhilosopher, Chicago and London: The University of ChicagoPress.
Hall, D. L., 1994,Richard Rorty: Poet and Prophet of the NewPragmatism, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Kolenda, K., 1990,Rorty’s Humanistic Pragmatism:Philosophy Democratized, Tampa: University of South FloridaPress.
Kuipers, R. A., 1997,Solidarity and the Stranger: Themes inthe Social Philosophy of Richard Rorty, Lanham: University Pressof America.
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Citations and Other Relevant Works

Alexander, T. M., 1987,John Dewey’s Theory of Art,Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling, Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press.
Brodsky, G., 1982, “Rorty’s Interpretation ofPragmatism,”Transactions of the Charles S. PeirceSociety, 18(4): 311–337.
Campbell, J., 1984, “Rorty’s Use of Dewey”Southern Journal of Philosophy, 22(2): 175–187.
Edel, A., 1985, “A Missing Dimension in Rorty’s Use ofPragmatism,”Transactions of the Charles S. PeirceSociety, 21(1): 21–37.
Gouinlock, J., 1995, “What is the Legacy of Instrumentalism?Rorty’s Interpretation of Dewey” in H. J. Saatkamp (ed.),Rorty and Pragmatism, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UniversityPress, pp. 72–90.
Haack, S., 1993,Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstructionin Epistemology, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
–––, 1998,Manifesto of a PassionateModerate, Chicago and London: The University of ChicagoPress.
Lavine, T. Z., 1995, “America & the Contestations ofModernity: Bentley, Dewey, Rorty,” in H. J. Saatkamp (ed.),Rorty and Pragmatism, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UniversityPress, pp. 37–49.
McDowell, J., 1994,Mind and World, Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.
Misak, C., 2013,The American Pragmatists, Oxford and NewYork: Oxford University Press.
Quine, W. V. O., 1951 [1953/1980], “Two Dogmas ofEmpiricism,”Philosophical Review, 60: 20–43;reprinted inFrom a Logical Point of View, 1953 (2nd Edition,1980), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 20–46.
Sleeper, R.W., 1986,The Necessity of Pragmatism, NewHaven and London: Yale University Press.

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