Product Description

Richard Rorty’s collected papers, written during the 1980s and now published in two volumes, take up some of the issues which divide Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophers and contemporary French and German philosophers and offer something of a compromise - agreeing with the latter in their criticisms of traditional notions of truth and objectivity, but disagreeing with them over the political implications they draw from dropping traditional philosophical doctrines. In this volume Rorty offers a Deweyan account of objectivity as intersubjectivity, one that drops claims about universal validity and instead focuses on utility for the purposes of a community. The sense in which the natural sciences are exemplary for inquiry is explicated in terms of the moral virtues of scientific communities rather than in terms of a special scientific method. The volume concludes with reflections on the relation of social democratic politics to philosophy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #417725 in Books
• Published on: 1990-11-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 236 pages

Review
"This book is stimulating and challenging. The topics covered are diverse enough to capture the attention of almost any academic audience. Rorty introduces a variety of fresh and exciting ideas." Arnold Lorenzo Farr, disClosure

Customer Reviews

The truth of relativism
This title brings together some of Rorty's most accessible and engaging works. At first I was put off Rorty by his earlier "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature", but his writings here, particularly those on science, present lucid and engaging arguments for an anti-realist account of 'truth'.

Rorty argues that 'truth' should have no epistemological or metaphysical base, rather it should have only an ethical dimension. For Roty 'truth', rather than being a term used to denote correspondence to an objective world, is what you get when you listen to as many arguments and positions as possible.

It always seemed to require a 'peculiar effort of mind' on my part to think of 'truth' as something other than 'correspondence' to an objective facet of the world. But Rorty's arguments for this point are persuasive and forceful.

However, the reader should ask themselves whether Rorty's relativism/pragmatism/ethnocentric position is as openminded and tolerant as he believes it to be. Also we should question whether his idea of 'truth as solidarity' isn't really mob-psychology in new clothing.