Product Description

In this book Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable on a private level, although it cannot advance the social or political goals of liberalism. In fact Rorty believes that it is literature not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense of human solidarity. A truly liberal culture, acutely aware of its own historical contingency, would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers. The book has a characteristically wide range of reference from philosophy through social theory to literary criticism. It confirms Rorty’s status as a uniquely subtle theorist, whose writing will prove absorbing to academic and nonacademic readers alike.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #143426 in Books
• Published on: 1989-02-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
"...bristles with big and unsettling ideas...No brief summary of this book can begin to convey its freshness, scope, and immense erudition...Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity will induce intellectual tingles in the philosopher and layman alike. It is going to be read for a long time." The Philadelphia Inquirer

"This is Rorty at his most stimulating, and he emerges as a major political theorist." Library Journal

"Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is not only readable, informative and ceaselessly interesting; it is a bold and topical manifest about the entire philosophical and political prospect of our 'post-modern' times. Jonathan Re'e Radical Philosophy

"...consistently provocative, and every page excites philosophic thought." Philosophy and Literature

"An exciting book. For millennia philosophers have been debating whether the universe is out there to be discovered or is rather in effect invented by thinkers who can never get beyond their own categories. Rorty is our most prominent perspectivist today....Rorty writes with erudition and style. His views are always stimulating, though they will inevitably tend to infuriate readers who are not ready for a 'postmetaphysical' world." H. L. Shapiro, Choice

Customer Reviews

Rorty clears up a whole number of popular misunderstandings
After studying philosophy of science and social science for 2 years at degree level, and struggling to find words that said what I wanted, this book came as a huge relief to me.

Rorty sucessfully manages to cut a gulf between the idea of language as a tool and the descent into the popular misrepresentation that this is often given by people who misunderstand it.

"We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, ..., is to say with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.... The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not."

Dazzlingly useful clarifications like this, which come on every page, make this one of the most rewarding books I have ever read.

A good resource for use and abuse.
An amiable work that skillfully countervails the pretentious self-importance that pervades the chic pseudo-disciplines of "culural studies," "deconstructionism," and whatever other shallow fare that is served up these days under the auspices of "post-modernism." However, readers of a genuinely philosophical temper may recoil at Rorty's glaringly tendentious engagement with the likes of Heidegger, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Beneath the generally helpful suggestions concerning the self-image of non-theistic liberal intellectuals is a lot of fluff which passes for self-evident profundity among those lacking the severity appropriate to philosophers.

Rorty's Greatest Postmodern Book
In _Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity_, Rorty explores the end of objective realism due to linguistic faults in our language. I find Rorty's claims insightful and stimulating in this book, which is what we except from such a writer. In the book, Rorty examines the issue of our personal contingencies, and how the ideas that we have based on those contingencies should immediately placed under suspicion.