Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
Place on List:
IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
4. Secondary Readings
Richard
Rorty.
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.
Key Terms (tags): philosophy,
discourse, politics
Supporting References:
- Fukuyama, Francis, and Milton Fisk. "Democracy, the Limits of Liberal." The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World. : Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference. 2004. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
- "Rorty, Richard." The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. : Oxford University Press, 2005. Oxford Reference. 2005. Date Accessed 22 Aug. 2013
The following
focuses on the author and not the text.
“Rorty, Richard (1931–2007). American philosopher of mind and,
subsequently, notable critic of the pretensions of traditional
epistemology. Rorty did his first degree at Chicago, got a doctorate
at Yale, and taught at Princeton between 1961 and 1982, in which year
he moved to the University of Virginia, significantly as Professor of
Humanities. He began as an able, but fairly conventionally analytic,
philosopher, until the publication in 1979 of his Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature, whose vigorous repudiation of the idea
that it is possible to pass judgement on our beliefs from some
objective, transcendental standpoint excited wide attention.
“Rorty's central
idea, in its main outlines, repeats the objection of
nineteenth-century idealists to the correspondence
theory of truth; that there is no access,
except through other beliefs, to the facts in correspondence to which
the truth of our beliefs is supposed to consist. Rorty found support
for this rejection of any secure touchstone or foundation for
knowledge partly in the pragmatist tradition and partly in recent
developments tending in the same direction: Sellars's attack on the
‘myth of the given’ and Quine's attack on analyticity.
“He pushed his critique of the idea that there are firm foundations
from which epistemology can authoritatively pass judgement on beliefs
in general to something like the extreme point of Derrida's rejection
of the ‘metaphysics of presence’, which holds not only that there
are no absolute foundations, but that no belief is more fundamental
than any other. The implication he draws is that philosophy cannot
establish anything and that it should be understood as a, possibly
edifying, conversation, with the same sort of claim to finality as
the conversations of cultural and literary critics. Heidegger,
Wittgenstein, and Dewey are invoked as a kind of pantheon for this
undermining of the conception philosophers have ordinarily held of
their philosophical activity.”
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