PHILOSOPHERS WHO ENVY scientists think that philosophy should deal only with problems formulated in neutral terms—terms satisfactory to all those who argue for competing solutions. Without common problems and without argument, it would seem, we have no professional discipline, nor even a method for disciplining our own thoughts. Without discipline, we presumably have mysticism, or poetry, or inspiration—at any rate, something which permits an escape from our intellectual responsibilities. Heidegger is frequently criticized for having avoided these responsibilities. His defenders reply (...) that what he has avoided is not the responsibility of the thinker, but simply the tradition of "metaphysics" or "ontology." Consider the following typical passage. (shrink)

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. The second volume pursues the themes of the first volume in the context of (...) discussions of recent European philosophy focusing on the work of Heidegger and Derrida. (shrink)

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. The second volume pursues the themes of the first volume in the context of (...) discussions of recent European philosophy focusing on the work of Heidegger and Derrida. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Terms and Positions Iterability and Ereignis Rorty's Neo‐pramatist Reading.

In the last century there were philosophers who argued that nothing exists but ideas. In our century there are people who write as if there were nothing but texts. These people, whom I shall call “textualists,” include for example, the so-called Yale school of literary criticism centering around Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartmann, and Paul De Man, “post-structuralist” French thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, historians like Hayden White, and social scientists like Paul Rabinow. Some of these people take their (...) point of departure from Heidegger, but usually the influence of philosophers is relatively remote. The center of gravity of the intellectual movement in which these people figure is not philosophy, but literary criticism. In this paper I want to discuss some similarities and differences between this movement and nineteenth-century idealism. (shrink)

I think … we ought to distinguish two sense of “deconstruction.” In one sense the word refers to the philosophical projects of Jacques Derrida. Taken this way, breaking down the distinction between philosophy and literature is essential to deconstruction. Derrida’s initiative in philosophy continues along a line laid down by Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. He rejects, however, Heidegger’s distinctions between “thinkers” and “poets” and between the few thinkers and the many scribblers. So Derrida rejects the sort of philosophical professionalism (...) which Nietzsche despised and which Heidegger recovered. This does indeed lead Derrida in the direction of “a general, undifferentiated textuality.” In his work, the philosophy-literature distinction is, at most, part of a ladder which we can let go of once we have climbed up it.In a second sense of “deconstruction,” however, the term refers to a method of reading texts. Neither this method, nor any other, should be attributed to Derrida—who shares Heidegger’s contempt for the very idea of method.2 But the method exists, and the passage I have quoted from Culler describes one of its essential features. Culler is quite right to say that deconstruction, in the second sense, needs a clear distinction between philosophy and literature. For the kind of reading which has come to be called “deconstructionist” requires two different straight persons: a macho professional philosopher who is insulted by the suggestion that he has submitted to a textual exigency, and a naive producer of literature whose jaw drops when she learns that her work has been supported by philosophical oppositions. The philosopher had thought of himself as speaking a sparse, pure, transparent language. The poetess shyly hoped that her unmediated woodnotes might please. Both reel back in horror when the deconstructionist reveals that each has been making use of complex idioms to which the other has contributed. Both go all to pieces at this news. A wild disorder overtakes their words. Their whimpers lend into interminable androgynous keening. Once again, deconstructionist intervention has produced a splendidly diffuse irresolution. Richard Rorty is Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Consequences of Pragmatism and is currently writing a book on Martin Heidegger. (shrink)

This volume complements two highly successful previously published volumes of Richard Rorty's philosophical papers: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, and Essays on Heidegger and Others. The essays in the volume engage with the work of many of today's most innovative thinkers including Robert Brandom, Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, John McDowell, Hilary Putnam, John Searle, and Charles Taylor. The collection also touches on problems in contemporary feminism raised by Annette Baier, Marilyn Frye, and Catherine MacKinnon, and considers issues (...) connected with human rights and cultural differences. Anyone with a serious interest in contemporary philosophy and what it can do for us in the modern world will enjoy this invaluable collection. (shrink)

Two rough, sharply contrasting, answers to the question "What Is Hermeneutics?" are that it is a method and that it is an attitude. Dilthey thought of it as "the method of the human sciences." Gadamer thinks of the hermeneutic attitude as the intellectual position one arrives at when one puts aside the idea of "method" and the cluster of other Cartesian and Kantian ideas within which it is embedded. If I understand Gadamer correctly, he is asking us to abandon the (...) notion of discourse proceeding within a pre-existing set of constraints, and instead open ourselves to the course of conversation. This abjuration of the Kantian notion that there is something called "a structure of rationality" which the philosopher discovers and within which we have a moral duty to remain seems to me to characterize the common lesson to be learned from Heidegger, from Wittgenstein, and from Dewey. So I want to use the term "hermeneutics" as the name for this attitude. Rather than developing Gadamer’s point further, however, I shall be arguing for the uselessness of the Diltheyan notion of a "method of the human sciences." More specifically, I shall be arguing against the attempts of Professors Dreyfus and Taylor to preserve the opposition between the natural and the human sciences and thus to give sense to the Diltheyan notion. (shrink)

My colleague E. D. Hirsch has skillfully developed the consequences for literary interpretation of a “realistic” epistemological position which he formulates as follows: “If we could not distinguish a content of consciousness from its contexts, we could not know any object at all in the world.” Given that premise, it is easy for Hirsch to infer that “without the stable determinacy of meaning there can be no knowledge in interpretation.”1 A lot of people disagree with Hirsch on the latter point, (...) and they look to philosophy for replies to the premise from which it was inferred. But it is not clear where in philosophy they should look: To epistemology? Ethics?2 Philosophy of language? What Jacques Derrida calls “a new logic, … a graphematics of iterability”?3 Where do we find first principles from which to deduce an anti-Hirsch argument?I want to argue that there is no clear or straight answer to this question and that there need be none. I shall begin by criticizing the strategy used against Hirsch and others by my fellow pragmatists Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels. They think that one can start with philosophy of language and straighten things out by adopting a correct account of meaning. I share their desire to refute Hirsch, their admiration for Stanley Fish, and their view that “theory”—when defined as “an attempt to govern interpretations of particular texts by appealing to an account of interpretation in general”—has got to go . But they want to defend this position by exposing a mistake which they think common to all theory so defined: an error about the relation between meaning and intention. They assert that “what is intended and what is meant are identical” and that one will look for an “account of interpretation in general” only if one fails to recognize this identity . Such failure leads to an attempt to connect meaning and intention or to disconnect them . But such attempts must fail, for they presuppose a break “between language and speech acts” which does not exist . 1. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation , pp. 3, 1.2. See ibid., where Hirsch offers a “fundamental ethical maxim for interpretation” which, he says, “claims no privileged sanction from metaphysics or analysis” . Here and elsewhere Hirsch suggests that it may be ethics rather than epistemology which provides the principles that govern interpretation. There remain other passages, however, in which he retains the view, conspicuous in his earlier writings, that an analysis of the idea of knowledge is the ultimate justification for his approach.3. Jacques Derrida, “Limited Inc abc … , ” Glyph 2 : 219. Richard Rorty is Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Consequences of Pragmatism , among other works, and is currently writing a book on Martin Heidegger. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Deconstruction and Circumvention,” appeared in the September 1984 issue. (shrink)

Staten gets my intentions right when he suggests that I may simply have been saying that “the dream of philosophy is a rare but serious malady, now less common than it used to be, but currently threatening a new outbreak in the disguised form of deconstruction” . I had thought I was urging that the appropriation of Derrida in the Anglo-Saxon “Now let’s deconstruct literature” mode was a mistake and that there were some things in Derrida which had encouraged this (...) mistake—notably the Heideggerian suggestion that the “text of philosophy” was at the heart of our culture. State, however, finds me more cunning and ungenerous, harsher toward Derrida, than I had imagined myself to be. He may have a point, but is hard for me to tell. No author is much good at following “the rhetorical contours” of his own writing, since his beliefs about what he wanted to say keep leveling off the contours of what he actually wrote .The best I can do by way of reply to the charge that I was attempting to “ ‘encapsulate and circumvent’ ” Derrida is to take up a central ambiguity which Staten detects . He says that I flit back and forth between “two characterizations of the history of philosophy”: “a constantly changing, self-deconstructing enterprise which is therefore not characterizable in terms of any single system of metaphors,” and “a ‘metaphysical tradition’ which has dreamed the dream of a closed, total, and transparent vocabulary which would tell the whole truth and thing but the truth” . Richard Rorty is Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Consequences of Pragmatism , among other works, and is currently writing a book on Martin Heidegger. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Deconstruction and Circumvention” and “Philosophy without Principles”. (shrink)

THE OPENING OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER'S summer of 1928 Marburg lectures on logic is, to use a word he himself invokes elsewhere about these matters, "dismaying"--providing perhaps additional evidence for the perennial charge that aspects of his work contain tendencies toward irrationalism, mysticism, and forms of nostalgic romanticism. In fact, the lectures show Heidegger calling for nothing less than a "destruction of logic," a move not only consistent with a similar destruction in Being and Time, published a year previously, but also (...) consistent with a context which its author describes as one in which "the inner rebellion against knowledge, the revolt against rationality, and the struggle against intellectualism have become fashionable." His ensuing condemnation of "the widespread sterility of academic courses" in this area and the call for "loosening up traditional logic," would seem to lead directly to the proclamation which would issue from Heidegger's struggle with Nietzsche in the decade thereafter, that "reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought." The question of Heidegger's account in this regard has continually troubled those writing in its wake--not only in the continental traditional, such as Gadamer, Adorno, Habermas, Merleau-Ponty, or Derrida, but also those "beyond" it, such as Carnap, Ryle, Rorty, or Putnam. And yet, such claims seem only to provide added weight to the concern that the "retrieval of metaphysics" thought to be essential to these issues based upon the Daseinanalytik of Being and Time would only lead the classical issues in philosophy associated with justification and decidability into a quagmire. Its emphasis upon the conjunct in its title, being and time, could only lead, on the one hand, to anthropological reductionism--since it returned the interrogation of Being back to the commitments of the being through whom the questioning arose-and on the other hand, to a new version of historicism--since it claimed that questions concerning "truth" were tied essentially to time, and specifically, to the latter's appearance within the temporal horizon of the being to whom they appeared. Moreover, that even those closest to Heidegger viewed the matter similarly is clear, for example, in the criticisms his mentor, Edmund Husserl voiced in the 1931 response, "Phenomenology and Anthropology." There the strategy Husserl used in arguing against Dilthey's flirtation with relativism in a Logos essay of 1911 was reinvoked against Heidegger himself. In this regard, far from contributing to a retrieval of classical issues in philosophy, Heidegger would be simply guilty of effecting their ultimate dissolution, a claim which, like that of irrationalism, has accompanied his works ever since. (shrink)

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was one of the most provocative and controversial philosophers of the past 50 years. He had a rare ability to combine sophisticated arguments with wit, charm, and humor. He was never dull – and he reached a wide public throughout the world. Originally trained in the history of philosophy and the grand tradition of metaphysics, he became fascinated with the linguistic turn in philosophy. During his early philosophical career, he wrote articles that were at the cutting edge (...) of analytic philosophy. He developed a new approach to the mind-body problem and raised troubling questions about the viability of the conceptual analysis of ordinary language. Soon, he began to question what he called the “Kantian foundations” of analytic philosophy. In 1979, he published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, a book that became an immediate sensation. Rorty, employing ingenious arguments, questioned the basis of analytic philosophy, and more generally the very idea of systematic philosophy. He called into question the Descartes-Locke-Kant tradition and claimed that the metaphor of the “mirror of nature” had misled philosophers into thinking that the task of philosophy is to “get things right” by representing objective reality. In the mid-twentieth century, the analytic-continental split in philosophy became bitterly entrenched. Many Anglo-American philosophers were convinced that linguistic analytic philosophy is “the only game in town.” They disdained what they took to be the lack of clarity and argumentative rigor among continental thinkers. The “compliment” was returned by continental thinkers who thought that much of analytic philosophy was trivial and insignificant. Rorty employed clever analytic techniques to challenge the pretentions of analytic philosophy. Many of his professional colleagues were furious. At the same time, Rorty engaged thinkers like Sartre, Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas, Derrida, and Foucault. This delighted aficionados of continental philosophy – although they frequently judged his interpretations of these thinkers to be distorted caricatures. Rorty was one of the rare philosophers who transcended the analytic-continental split. At the same time, Rorty increasingly identified himself with the American pragmatic tradition. He entitled his 1982 collection of essays, “Consequences of Pragmatism,” which included his famous 1979 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association: “‘Pragmatism’ is a vague, ambiguous, and overworked word. Nevertheless it names the glory of our country’s intellectual tradition. No other American writers have offered so radical suggestion for making our future different from the past, as have James and Dewey” (Rorty 1982, p. 160). Rorty helped to revive a serious interest in James and Dewey. In the Introduction to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, he declared that the three most important philosophers of the twentieth century were Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey. Analytic philosophers might agree about the importance of Wittgenstein; continental thinkers might acknowledge the importance of Heidegger; but virtually no professional philosopher (except devotees of Dewey) would have ranked Dewey with the other two. Rorty claimed that each of these three thinkers had originally sought to find a new way to make philosophy “foundational,” but they came to realize that their earlier work was self-deceptive and they spent the rest of their time warning us against the temptations to which they had succumbed. “Their later work is therapeutic rather than constructive, edifying rather than systematic, designed to make the reader question his own motives for philosophizing rather than supply him with a new philosophical program.” (Rorty 1979, pp. 5–6) Rorty acknowledged that Dewey lacked Wittgenstein’s “dialectical acuity” and Heidegger’s “historical learning,” but Dewey articulated a vision of a new type of society. “In his ideal society, culture is no longer dominated by the ideal of objective cognition but by that of aesthetic enhancement. In that culture, as he said, the arts and sciences would be the ‘unforced flowers of life.” (Rorty 1979, p. 13) This was also Rorty’s vision of a liberal utopia. He developed this vision in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, where the central figure becomes the liberal ironist. Whereas Philosophy and the Mirror and Nature was filled with brilliant (although controversial) arguments, Rorty now debunked the role of argument in philosophy. “On the view of philosophy which I am offering, philosophers should not be asked for arguments against, for example, the correspondence theory of truth or the idea of the ‘intrinsic nature of reality’.” (Rorty 1989, p. 8) He favored redescription rather than argument. “I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace. Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how it may redescribe a variety of topics.” (Rorty 1989, p. 9) Interesting philosophy is not really a matter of argument at all but rather “a contrast between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed vocabulary which vaguely promises great things” (Rorty 1989, p. 9). Rorty deflated what many philosophers took to be the central concerns of philosophy, the nature of truth, reality, objectivity, knowledge, and morality. He sought to replace the appeal to objectivity with the appeal of solidarity. He is famous for his slogan “Take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself” (Rorty 1989, p. 176). Even admirers of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature were distressed by the radical turn of Contingency where he suggested that novels, journalism, and literary reflection might be more effective than philosophical argumentation in bringing about his liberal utopia. Some of his fiercest critics claimed that Rorty could no longer be taken seriously as a philosopher. Contingency was savagely criticized and ridiculed, so much so that Rorty was provoked to write his revealing and delightful autobiographical sketch, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.” “I am sometimes told, by critics from both ends of the political spectrum, that my views are so weird as to be merely frivolous. They suspect that I will say anything to get a gasp, that I am just amusing myself by contradicting everybody else. This hurts. So I have tried, in what follows, to say something about how I got into my present position—how I got into philosophy, and then found myself unable to use philosophy for the purpose I had originally in mind.” (Rorty 1999, p. 5) What follows is an account of how Rorty grew up in a family that was deeply committed to furthering social justice. (“Trotsky” is a synecdoche for social justice.) Rorty also tells of his early nerdish love of the wild orchids of New Jersey. (“Wild orchids” is the synecdoche for private pleasures.) When Rorty became interested in philosophy, he wanted to find some intellectual or esthetic framework that would hold reality and justice in a single vision – one that would integrate social justice and private idiosyncratic pleasures. He tells the story of his eventual discovery that there was no such overarching framework and his growing realization that there was no need for such a framework. As a public citizen, one can be deeply committed to advancing social justice and at the same time, as a private person, enjoy idiosyncratic pleasures. There is no need to reconcile or synthesize these two incommensurable dimensions of human life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 282-284 [Access article in PDF] Bruce Kuklick. A History of Philosophy in America, 1720-2000. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii + 326. Cloth, $30.00. Scott L. Pratt. Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Pp. xviii + 316. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $21.95. In his earlier works Bruce Kuklick has studied major figures and (...) episodes in the evolution of American thought, most famously the Golden Age of Harvard. In the present book he proposes to tell the whole story. Beginning, as it must, with Jonathan Edwards, Part I traces the long and difficult process by which philosophy gradually distinguishes itself from theology. Part II deals magisterially with the age of pragmatism, from Darwin to Dewey, and Part III with professional philosophy in the twentieth century. Kuklick's account of this latest development, briefly adumbrated in his previous books, is the freshest and (to this retired professional) most engaging part of the narrative. Once philosophy had loosened the bonds that tied it to theology, once sciences like psychology, originally parts of philosophy, had declared independence and set out on their own, and once philosophy's role as counselor to private morals and public policy had been taken over by psychoanalysis, economics, sociology, and political science, philosophers had to discover a new identity for themselves. Inspired by logical positivism and the linguistic ruminations of the late Wittgenstein, professional philosophy came to mean, very largely, a preoccupation with problems of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and epistemology. The result was that, apart from undergraduate lectures and occasional ventures into the popular media, what philosophers said and wrote, intelligible only to other philosophers, became irrelevant to just about everything of personal and public interest, and even to the traditional concerns of philosophy itself with the nature of reality and the conduct of life.The eventual arrival in the American academy of phenomenology, existentialism, and deconstruction, in spite of their apparent engagement with "real life" and their appeal to undergraduates, only bred another species of professionals and precipitated the familiar antagonism between analytic and continental philosophy. Late in the last century Richard Rorty, a preeminent analytic philosopher, broke ranks, discovered first Heidegger and Derrida, then William James and John Dewey, and declared himself a pragmatist. He characterized philosophy as a single voice in the conversation of the West, which also included literature, literary criticism, the arts, and all the sciences both natural and humane. But he remains a philosopher of language. The pragmatism of the nineteenth century was a low-mimetic [End Page 282] form of the high-mimetic idealism from which it emerged: from Royce to James. Rorty's pragmatism not only takes for granted the (often implicit) materialism and atheism of analytic philosophy, but is itself a new way of understanding and using language. It has been called, inverting James, an old name for a new way of thinking.But I need to correct this overly simple account. As Kuklick is aware, philosophy in America, though it did succeed in detaching itself from theology, has never wholly dissolved its ties to religion. Royce and James in the nineteenth century and Dewey in the twentieth continued to be preoccupied with religious questions, especially with the apparent conflict of religion and science suggested by Darwin's theory. Religious interests survive, barely, in "critical realism." And even though analytic philosophy would seem to be most comfortable with atheism, more than a few thinkers trained in analysis have combined analytic logic and religious faith. Witness the Society of Christian Philosophers. On the whole, however, professional philosophy has been devoid of religious, socio-political, or existential interest. This should not be surprising. All genuine professions serve an end beyond themselves—as medicine serves health, law justice, and theology salvation. But when philosophy becomes a "profession," it has no end but self-preservation, i.e., creating more philosophers and finding jobs for them.One slightly disconcerting feature of Kuklick's... (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Beginning with Heidegger is an in-depth examination of the influence that Martin Heidegger's inceptual thought exerted on Leo Strauss, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida and Alexander Dugin. How did these vastly different thinkers employ Heideggerian concepts to define their own philosophies and often antagonistic politics? After outlining Heidegger's main philosophical points, it discusses attacks on and the misuse of Heidegger's ideas to advance Rorty's left-leaning and liberal political agenda as well as the different interpretations that Strauss and Heidegger offer regarding Plato's (...) notion of the Good. It also looks at the existential rebirth in Russia that Heidegger's groundbreaking theories and Dugin's extension of them made possible. The role of Heidegger's notion of "Dasein" is the key to a Eurasian awakening for not just one but for many peoples of the heartland. In this respect, both Heidegger and Dugin seem to be the lights that guide a people without a philosophy into a destiny filled with meaning and identity. The book calls for the incorporation of Heidegger's thinking into the field of political philosophy and cautions against the distorting effects of our prevailing political prejudices. (shrink)

Scholars have a history of crossing intellectual borders (Abbott, 2001). In particular, educators draw from a diversity of intellectuals upon which to base our understanding of, for example, schools and society, curriculum content, teaching, and learning. In addition to icons such as Marx, James, Freud, and Dewey, the works of the Frankfurt School (e.g., Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse), Foucault, Gilligan, Derrida, Gramsci, West, Arendt, and Fraser, just to name a few, have been used to guide our scholarship and practice. However, (...) with the exception of few scholars (e.g., Peters & Ghiraldelli, 2001), one of America's most controversial scholars,1 Richard Rorty, has been largely ignored. This situation is unfortunate .. (shrink)

_John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ provides a rich sampling of exchanges that could have taken place long ago between the traditions of American pragmatism and continental philosophy had the lines of communication been more open between Dewey and his European contemporaries. Since they were not, Paul Fairfield and thirteen of his colleagues seek to remedy the situation by bringing the philosophy of Dewey into conversation with several currents in continental philosophical thought, from post-Kantian idealism and the work (...) of Friedrich Nietzsche to twentieth-century phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. This unique volume includes discussions comparing and contrasting Dewey with the German philosophers G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer on such topics as phenomenology, naturalism, organicism, contextualism, and poetry. Others investigate a series of connections between Dewey and contemporary French philosophy, including the notions of subjectivity, education, and the critique of modernity in Michel Foucault; language and politics in Jacques Derrida; and the concept of experience in Gilles Deleuze. Also discussed is the question of whether we can identify traces of _Bildung_ in Dewey’s writings on education, and pragmatism’s complex relation to twentieth-century phenomenology and hermeneutics, including the problematic question of whether Heidegger was a pragmatist in any meaningful sense. Presented in intriguing pairings, these thirteen essays offer different approaches to the material that will leave readers with much to deliberate. _ John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ demonstrates some of the many connections and opportunities for cross-traditional thinking that have long existed between Dewey and continental thought, but have been under-explored. The intersection presented here between Dewey’s pragmatism and the European traditions makes a significant contribution to continental and American philosophy and will spur new and important developments in the American philosophical debate. (shrink)

This essay originated as a reply to Richard Rorty's ”Habermas, Derrida, and the Functions of Philosophy“. In it, I contest Rorty's deployment of the categories of private selfcreation and the collective political enterprise of increasing freedom, first developed in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, to demonstrate that the philosophical projects of Habermas and Derrida are complementary rather than antagonistic. The focus of my critique is two-fold: firstly, I contend that so-called critiques of metaphysics are always simutaneously engaging with some form of (...) social domination or disintegration (e.g. nihilism or societal rationalization); secondly, I argue that the fault-line in Rorty's thought that structures his categories is his, Davidson inspired, naturalized philosophy of language. This philosophy of language falls afoul of Heidegger's analysis of the present-to-hand. (shrink)

IS POSTMODERNISM A NEW, perhaps decisive stage that completes the unfinished project of modernity, as Jürgen Habermas and, in some respects, Jean-François Lyotard claim? Or does it intend to break with that project altogether, as Derrida and Rorty maintain? The latter, more radical thesis tends to go hand in hand with the assumption of an essential continuity between modern and premodern thinking. Among those who defend the latter thesis we find Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Rorty. Rorty's position has become somewhat (...) questionable, however, since in the Introduction to his recent Essays on Heidegger and Others he distances himself from the very term "postmodern." "The term," he writes, "has been so over-used that it is causing more trouble than it is worth.... It seems best to think of Heidegger and Derrida simply as post-Nietzschean philosophers--to assign them places in a conversational sequence which runs from Descartes through Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche and beyond rather than to view them as initiating or manifesting a radical departure." This way of contextualizing the so-called postmoderns with the moderns differs from the radical discontinuity Derrida proposes and that Rorty himself formerly appeared to advocate. Western philosophy would then follow a single course from its Greek beginnings to the present with some distinct swerves, of which the so-called postmodern is one, but with no radical interruptions. According to the recent view the ontotheological principles that guided Greek and medieval thought continue to operate in the rationalist and, indirectly, in the empiricist philosophies of the modern age. This essay will argue that there is discontinuity between modern and premodern and continuity between modern and postmodern. (shrink)

John Dewey is considered not only as one of the founders of pragmatism, but also as an educational classic whose approaches to education and learning still exercise great influence on current discourses and practices internationally. In this book, we first provide an introduction to Dewey's educational theories that is founded on a broad and comprehensive reading of his philosophy as a whole. We discuss Dewey's path-breaking contributions by focusing on three important paradigm shifts - namely, the cultural, (...) constructive and communicative turns in 20th century educational thinking. Secondly, we seek to recontexualize Dewey for a new generation who has come of age in a very different world than that in which Dewey lived and wrote. We provide examples of such recontextualization by connecting his philosophy with six recent and influential discourses (Bauman, Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida, Levinas, Rorty). These serve as models for other recontexualizations that readers might wish to carry out for themselves. (shrink)

This dissertation seeks to clarify the import of the transcendence problem in Heidegger and Derrida. The guiding suggestion of my interpretations of both thinkers is that following the development of this problem through their respective projects can help to demonstrate in each an underlying continuity in light of which their seemingly discrepant shifts in emphasis from early to late can be understood as moments of an ongoing hermeneutic task. ;My argument unfolds in four chapters and a brief conclusion. Chapter one (...) motivates the project in view of the contentious standing of the problem in continental philosophy as it is characterized in the competing narratives advanced by Richard Rorty, John Caputo, and Rodolphe Gasche. ;Chapters two and three trace the problem through Heidegger's Denkweg. While Being and Time might seem to be the obvious place to start, I argue that the character of the problem is difficult to see without recourse to both the context in which the problem first arises, and the future interpretations of the problem toward which Being and Time proceeds. Accordingly, I attend to the emergence of the problem in Heidegger's dissertation and early lectures, and then leap ahead to its more explicit appropriations in the writings of 1928 where the provisional standing of fundamental ontology becomes increasingly apparent. In view of its past and future trajectories, then, I return to Being and Time to exhibit therein what I take to be latent indications of Heidegger's later disposition toward transcendence. ;Chapter four situates Derrida in terms of his debts to and departures from Heidegger. I argue that Derrida's debts in fact compel his departures; since he concurs that the transcendence of predecessor discourses necessitates their destruction in the name of advancing their undeveloped possibilities, he must dismantle Heidegger to do justice to him. In applying this insight to Derrida's project, I maintain, the careful reader can find traces of his later injunctions to "absolute responsibility" in his early affirmations of "infinite play". ;I conclude with a few brief remarks as to how this investigation might contribute to a richer understanding of contemporary continental philosophy. (shrink)

Richard Rorty draws a distinction between an activity of using old words in new senses for self liberation or private autonomy and an activity of searching ‘‘for theories which will get at real essence.’’ He calls those who engage in the former activity ‘‘ironists,’’ people like Proust, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Hegel and Derrida, and calls those who engage in the latter activity ‘‘metaphysicians,’’ people like Plato, Descartes and Kant. The ironists, he says, have radical and continuing doubts about their final vocabularies, (...) because they have been impressed by other vocabularies. Unlike metaphysicians who search for words closer to reality, ironists engage only in playing off new words against old ones. When Rorty realized that this distinction is implausible, that both groups shared a certain unavoidable metaphysical link, he then called for replacement of theory with novel in ironism, which implies replacement of philosophy with literature. Theory, he says, is about general ideas, while the novel is about people. This paper is aimed at averting this implication, by arguing that interpretation of the novel implicates metaphysics and is theory-laden, and that ironism should not be seen in the Rortyan way as that opposed to metaphysics, but as a new way of doing metaphysics. Integrativism, an African method of philosophy, is employed to dissolve Rorty’s distinction between ironism and metaphysics, and to redescribe ironism as ‘‘innovativism.’’ The method of this work is argumentative, conversational, critical and redescriptive. Keywords: Ironism, metaphysics, integrativism, innovativism, redescription. (shrink)

(1995). Re-Monstrations: Heidegger, Derrida and Wittgenstein's Hand. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 26, Lacan, Adorno, and Bataille, pp. 65-85.

"Philosophy as... a rigorous science... the dream is over," Edward Husserl once declared. Heidegger, Derrida, and Rorty have propounded versions of "the end of philosophy." Cumming argues that what would count as philosophy's coming to an end can only be determined with some attention to disruptions which have previously punctuated the history of philosophy. He arrives at categories for interpreting what is at issue in such disruptions by analyzing Heidegger's and Husserl's break with each other, Heidegger's break with Sartre, and (...) Merleau-Ponty's break with Sartre. In this analysis Cumming deals with how a philosophy can be vulgarized, with problems of periodization, with how the history of philosophy can be disinguished as a philosophical discipline from intellectual history. Cumming also elaborates an analogy between a philosophical method and style. (shrink)

Disc 1. Philosophy and the modern age ; Scholasticism and the scientific revolution -- Disc 2. The rationalism and dualism of Descartes ; Locke's empiricism, Berkeley's idealism -- Disc 3. Neo-Aristotelians : Spinoza and Leibniz ; The Enlightenment and Rousseau -- Disc 4. The radical skepticism of Hume ; Kant's Copernican revolution -- Disc 5. Kant and the religion of reason ; The French Revolution and German idealism -- Disc 6. Hegel, the last great system ; Hegel and the English (...) century -- Disc 7. The economic revolution and its critic, Marx ; Kierkegaard's Critique of reason -- Disc 8. Nietzsche's Critique of morality and truth ; Freud, Weber, and the mind of modernity -- Disc 9. Rise of 20th-century philosophy, pragmatism ; analysis -- Disc 10. Rise of 20th-century philosophy, phenomenology ; Physics, positivism and early Wittgenstein -- Disc 11. Emergence and Whitehead ; Dewey's American naturalism -- Disc 12. Heidegger's Being and time ; Existentialism and the Frankfurt School -- Disc 13. Heidegger's turn against humanism ; Culture, hermeneutics, and structuralism -- Disc 14. Wittgenstein's turn to ordinary language ; Quine and the end of positivism -- Disc 15. New philosophies of science ; Derrida's deconstruction of philosophy -- Disc 16. The challenge of postmodernism ; Rorty and the end of philosophy -- Disc 17. Rediscovering the premodern ; Pragmatic realism, reforming the modern -- Disc 18. The reemergence of emergence ; Philosophy's death greatly exaggerated. (shrink)

IF MODERN philosophy began with Cartesian doubt, it threatens to end not with a resolution of skepticism but with its dissipation. The skeptic's demand for total justification has been replaced by a repudiation of foundations. Such repudiation has been formulated in terms of holism, contextualism, pragmatism, and interpretationism. Yet some of these approaches display significant difficulties even if we accept their denial of foundations. The approach I will examine in particular here is Richard Rorty's version of holism. I will criticize (...) it not for its denial of foundations--with which I am in complete agreement--but for its incompleteness. I will argue that if we take Rorty's anti-foundationalism seriously, we must develop his theory in certain directions much further than he takes it himself. The directions to be pursued in such developments will become clearer in the course of the discussion. I am particularly concerned to explore the possibility of a systematic but anti-foundational theory--one similar in certain ways to but fundamentally incompatible with holism. I will argue that a metaphysical theory can be developed which accommodates the force of Rorty's, Heidegger's, and Dewey's contextualism--a theory which might be called a perspectival realism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Timothy Clark HEIDEGGER, DERRIDA, AND THE GREEK LIMITS OF PHILOSOPHY The question "What is philosophy?" is not simply one question among others. Its status involves the questioner at once in a series of peculiar problems. The question "What is chemistry?" (for instance) would surely seem to admit of an answer. Even if there were a dispute about the wording of a definition, the general region to which the question (...) directs us seems relatively secure. "What is chemistry?" asks about the essence of a physical science and, as a consequence, the questioner will be situated in the realm of the philosophy of science. "What is philosophy?" however, can make no such leap. A "philosophy of philosophy " is simply tantamount to more philosophy. The question of philosophy 's essence can only be posed within philosophy. Moreover, would not this very question of an essence ofphilosophy be determined in advance by an understanding of "essence" by philosophy, which thus seems remorselessly to encompass the borders of that which might try to enclose it? The mode of questioning on the (impossible?) borders of philosophical discourse is the site of Martin Heidegger's so-called overcoming of Western Metaphysics. More recently, Jacques Derrida has intensified the mode of borderline questioning, engaging himself in both a radicalization and displacement of Heideggerian questions. Derrida writes, in "Violence and Metaphysics" (1964), "The entirety of philosophy is conceived on the basis of its Greek source. As is well known, this amounts neither to an occidentalism, nor a historicism. It is simply that the founding concepts of philosophy are primarily Greek, and it would not be possible to philosophize, or to speak philosophically, outside this medium."1 Derrida continues to discuss Husserlian phenomenology and the thought of Heidegger in terms of their insistence on 75 76Philosophy and Literature conceiving philosophy according to its Greek impetus. If something is to transpire in the traditions of philosophy, its origin "will have to be summoned forth and adhered to as rigorously as possible" (p. 81). The specific "event" to be attended to will be what Derrida, after Heidegger, describes as the determination ofbeing as presence. This, it is argued, is constitutive in respect of philosophy and all the regional disciplines it governs. Needless to say "the determination of being as presence" demands considerable explication. The Greek nature of philosophy is discussed by Heidegger in the lecture, "What is Philosophy?"2 The question raises the problem of philosophy 's relation to its limits. Tb ask the question "What is Philosophy?" is not to step outside thought to some "metaphilosophical" realm. It is to be already standing in Greece. What is specifically Greek and decisive, in fact, is the very mode of the question ''What is XT' itself: "But not only what is in question —philosophy— is Greek in origin, but how we question, the manner in which we question even today, is Greek. We ask, "what is that—" (p. 35). The Greek mode of questioning something as to its whatness {ti estin?, "what is it?") has now become thoroughly familiar. Its novelty and Greek source have become obscured: "It is this form of questioning which Socrates, Plato, and Aristode developed. They ask, for example, What is the beautiful? What is knowledge?'..." (p. 37). Heidegger's characterization of the question, ti estin?, as decisively Greek must be distinguished from Edmund Husserl's apparently similar description of the fundamentally Greek nature of philosophy. Husserl characterized the theoretical relation to the world as a legacy which has largely determined Western Europe and, indeed, the modern world itself, a determination most palpable in the proliferation of the various sciences. The theoretical attitude is one of pure curiosity towards entities : "man becomes the disinterested spectator, overseer of the world, he becomes a philosopher."3 Moreover, the devotion to pure theoria builds up a body of disinterested knowledge in which others may participate and to which they may add. A universal culture, a project traversing individual and national difference, comes into being. The Greek philosopher embodied, for the first time, a type ofhumanity and culture to which the European world still belongs. Husserl thus underlines the huge stakes in so little a question as the "What is it?"//i estin... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF DISCOMFORT: RICHARD RORTY AND PRAGMATISM 0 VER THE LAST twenty years, one of the most consistently incisive critics of traditional Anglo-American philosophy has been Richard Rorty. Few contemporary writers can match the vigor, breadth, and intelligence of his books and articles, even as few readers can accept the radicality of the views they express. Rorty disturbs and astonishes like spring weather. His pages mount (...) like cumulus clouds in our intellectual sky, saturated by the past and promising (ambiguously) either to irrigate or to inundate the present fields of our culture. Almost everybody complains about him, but can anything be done? This essay is an attempt to come to grips with aat least part of Rorty's multi-faceted and troubling corpus. His diagnosis of the root problems of epistemology and their larger significance (or insignificance) for Western intellectual life is often brilliant, but I shall argue that his prescription for the future is unattractive. His uncompromising war on dogmatism is based on a rejection of conventional notions of objective truth and metaphysical comfort and is presented in the name of human freedom. It represents, however, a potentially disastrous kind of pragmatism which can be criticized on both theoretical and practical grounds. Of the two, the practical considerations may perhaps be the more telling. I. The Problems of Reading Rorty In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty evaluates modern philosophy's comon self-understanding.1 One as1 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). ~70 RICHARD RORTY AND PRAGMATISM 271 sumed occupation of the discipline, on his view, is the discovery of the " foundations " of knowledge and thus the validation or invalidation of specific claims to know made in such various fields as science, ethics, art, and religion. Philosophy can claim to take the measure of these other areas of intellectual life because it claims to understand the nature of the mind and its capacity for accurate representation of reality. Philosophy can claim to be foundational with respect to the rest of culture because it claims to encompass the rest of culture, because it claims to know better than science and religion, for instance, what communion with reality they can and cannot attain to. Or so many modern philosophers would (perhaps only implicitly) believe. Rorty suggests that this conception of philosophy stems largely from intellectual developments beginning in the 17th Century, and in this vein he isolates three key contributions: (1) Descartes's idea of the mind as a separate substance, the " inner" workings of which are uniquely knowable to itself; (2) Locke's idea that a "theory of knowledge" is both necessary and possible on the basis of an understanding of the mind and how it works; and (3) Kant's idea that philosophy both can and should provide other fields with overarching canons of reason by dissecting a priori the structure of reason itself. These three contributions to modern philosophy's self-image are interrelated but nonetheless distinguishable. Each played its own crucial part in suggesting a foundation for that discipline, philosophy, which claimed to be foundational for all others. Over against this common picture of philosophy and its proper labors stand Rorty's "heroes": Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey. These three men agree, in Rorty's estimation, that the picture (common to Descartes, Locke, and Kant) of knowledge as needing certain foundations and of the mind as locus of privileged epistemic processes, needs to be abandoned. They agree that both epistemology and metaphysics can and should be " set aside as possible disciplines " 272 TIMOTHY P. JACKSON in the name of a therapeutic form of life and a postmodernist self-image.2 It is this deconstructive, therapeutic line that Rorty wishes to champion. Philosophy should no longer conceive of itself as underwriting links between the human mind and the "objective " world; we have no access to the objective world as it is in itself; so most of traditional epistemology is misguided. Rorty characterizes his efforts as more akin to moral surusion than rigorous argument, claiming that the epistemological positions with which he takes exception are immune to such argument but objectionable (or at least optional) even so... (shrink)

Deconstruction and pragmatism constitute two of the major intellectual influences on the contemporary theoretical scene; influences personified in the work of Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. Both Rortian pragmatism, which draws the consequences of post-war developments in Anglo-American philosophy, and Derridian deconstruction, which extends and troubles the phonomenological and Heideggerian influence on the Continental tradition, have hitherto generally been viewed as mutually exclusive philosophical language games. The purpose of this volume is to bring deconstruction and pragmatism into critical confrontation with (...) one another through staging a debate between Derrida and Rorty, itself based on discussions that took place at the College International de Philosophie in Paris in 1993. The ground for this debate is layed out in introductory papers by Simon Critchley and Ernesto Laclau, and the remainder of the volume records Derrida's and Rorty's responses to each other's work. Chantal Mouffe gives an overview of the stakes of this debate in a helpful preface. (shrink)

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to 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 and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The (...) centerpiece of Rorty's critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty's principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. Characterizations and illustrations of a post-epistemological intellectual culture, present in both PMN (part III) and CP (xxxvii-xliv), are more richly developed in later works, such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, hereafter CIS), in the popular essays and articles collected in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), and in the four volumes of philosophical papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991, hereafter ORT); Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991, hereafter EHO); Truth and Progress (1998, hereafter TP); and Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007, hereafter PCP). In these writings, ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time. (shrink)

Having lost much of its political clout and theoretical power, communism no longer represents an appealing alternative to capitalism. In its original Marxist formulation, communism promised an ideal of development, but only through a logic of war, and while a number of reformist governments still promote this ideology, their legitimacy has steadily declined since the fall of the Berlin wall. Separating communism from its metaphysical foundations, which include an abiding faith in the immutable laws of history and an almost holy (...) conception of the proletariat, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala recast Marx's theories at a time when capitalism's metaphysical moorings--in technology, empire, and industrialization--are buckling. While Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call for a return of the revolutionary left, Vattimo and Zabala fear this would lead only to more violence and failed political policy. Instead, they adopt an antifoundationalist stance drawn from the hermeneutic thought of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty. Hermeneutic communism leaves aside the ideal of development and the general call for revolution; it relies on interpretation rather than truth and proves more flexible in different contexts. Hermeneutic communism motivates a resistance to capitalism's inequalities yet intervenes against violence and authoritarianism by emphasizing the interpretative nature of truth. Paralleling Vattimo and Zabala's well-known work on the weakening of religion, _Hermeneutic Communism_ realizes the fully transformational, politically effective potential of Marxist thought. (shrink)

This volume includes all Dewey's writings for 1938 except for "Logic: The Theory of Inquiry "(Volume 12 of The Later Works), as well as his 1939 "Freedom and Culture, Theory of Valuation, "and two items from "Intelligence in the Modern ...

There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn’t.argument: pluralistic theory opens itself toward different values, languages, histories, modes of reasoning, and forms of experience with a commitment not to reduce or hierarchize the many by means of the one. Such theory has emerged out of various traditions, including those associated with American pragmatism (Emerson, James, Dewey), analytic philosophy (Wittgenstein, Rorty), and continental philosophy (Derrida, Nancy). Not surprisingly, the (...) pluralism issuing from these traditions takes diverse forms and articulates itself through heterogeneous concepts and styles. Many pluralist philosophers in the present, however, have .. (shrink)

Richard Rorty's recent death has unleashed a strikingly mixed judgment of his philosophical legacy, ranging from claims to originality to charges of charlatanry. What is clear, however, is Rorty's role in articulating a distinctive American voice in the history of philosophy. He achieved this not only through his own wide-ranging contributions but also by repositioning the pragmatists, especially William James and John Dewey, in the philosophical mainstream. Rorty did for the United States what Hegel and Heidegger had done for (...) Germany—to portray his nation as philosophy's final resting place. He was helped by postwar German philosophers like Jürgen Habermas who were happy to defer to their American conquerors. Rorty's philosophical method can be understood as a sublimation of America's world-historic self-understanding: a place suspicious of foreigners unless they are willing to blend into the "melting pot." In retrospect, the breadth and confidence of Rorty's writing will come to symbolize the moment when the United States, for better or worse, came to be the world's dominant philosophical power. Key Words: Rorty • pragmatism • logical positivism • analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Ethics and Danger examines Heidegger’s association with German National Socialism and attempts to understand both the question of politics in Heidegger’s thought and the thought that gives rise to that question. It explores the contribution of Heidegger’s work to issues of ethics, technology, and social theory, as well as his relationship to other thinkers such as Parmenides, Aristotle, Hegel, Husserl, Benjamin, Levinas, Rorty, Foucault, and Derrida. Finally, it addresses the more general question of the future of ethical thought within continental (...) philosophy. In order to engage the ethical issues surrounding Heidegger’s life and thought, the authors speak of dangers such as facism and the facile, self-congratulatory moral stance that Heidegger exemplifies. The question of how to speak in the wake of Heidegger’s thought takes many forms, and the answers represent a diversity of viewpoints from both American and continental thinkers. (shrink)

Richard Rorty, a world-renowned American pragmatist, died on 8 June 2007. He left an enduring impact on Western philosophy. Like his predecessors Nietzsche, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Derrida, Rorty attempted the gargantuan task of redescribing the nature of philosophy in the late twentieth century. This article is a modest personal tribute to a great philosopher who shaped the author’s views about self-creation, metaphysics, and politics. The major themes in Rorty’s philosophy are discussed briefly. It is the author’s hope that this (...) article will serve as a short introduction to Rorty’s neopragmatism. The author likewise hopes that it will stimulate the readers to pursue the philosophical issues that Rorty raised. (shrink)

Beware of the abysses and the gorges, but also of the bridges and the barriers.It is fair to say that many philosophical interpretations of the Daoist classics have proceeded, or continue to proceed, to read into these works the quest for a transcendental, foundational principle, a permanent moment of rest beyond the turmoil of ever-changing things. According to this interpretation the Daoist sages are those who have for all time found this metaphysical ground of all things—"The Way" (dao 道)—and who (...) have tried (in vain, though, since language cannot convey this ultimate ground) to find ways of expressing this transcendental ground to their audience.To quote one instance of how easily such metaphysical .. (shrink)

Mediante el recurso que Rorty emplea para argumentar que Heidegger no ha dejado el canon Platón-Kant, vamos a mostrar que el mismo Rorty no puede salir del planteamiento platónico. Para ello nuestro artículo se divide en dos partes principales. En primer lugar, sistematizaremos la inversión de Heidegger que Rorty dejó meramente apuntada en «Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey», rastreando los supuestos ontológicos y epistemológicos en los que el pragmatista se basó para llevar a cabo su peculiar lectura de (...) Heidegger. Después, evidenciaremos que la técnica de inversión y recontextualización que emplea Rorty con Heidegger pueden volverse contra él y no permitirle salir de la matriz platónica. (shrink)

Arguably the most influential of all contemporary English-speaking philosophers, Richard Rorty has transformed the way many inside and outside philosophy think about the discipline and the traditional ways of practising it. Drawing on a wide range of thinkers from Darwin and James to Quine, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida, Rorty has injected a bold anti-foundationalist vision into philosophical debate, into discussions in literary theory, communication studies, political theory and education, and, as public intellectual, into national debates about the responsibilities of America (...) in the modern world. The essays in this volume offer a balanced exposition and critique of Rorty's views on knowledge, language, truth, science, morality and politics. The editorial introduction presents a valuable overview of Rorty's philosophical vision. Written by a distinguished team of philosophers, this volume will have an unusual appeal outside philosophy to students in the social sciences, literary studies, cultural studies and political theory. (shrink)

I find myself in the odd position of trying to convince someone who had done as much as anyone to bring philosophy into the wider culture that he is wrong to urge now that its practice be consigned to the esoteric pursuits of “private ironists.” The problem, I still believe, is Richard Rorty’s all-or-nothing approach to philosophy : foundationalism or ironism; and this, I think, is encouraged by his selective reading of philosophy’s history. On that reading, modern philosophy “centered around (...) a discussion of truth” ; it was preoccupied with foundationalist claims of one sort or another. But that preoccupation was permanently discredited by Friedrich Nietzsche and his descendants, especially Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, leaving philosophy with nothing to do but pick the bones of its own carcass. What is missing from this story is precisely the line of thought—extending from the left Hegelians to Jürgen Habermas—I sought to develop in my paper. That line is defined by, among other things, the primacy of practical reason and the rerouting of philosophical inquiry in sociohistorical directions. One of its high points is American pragmatism, which, pace Rorty, does not lie along the Nietzsche—Heidegger—Derrida line. Thomas McCarthy is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas and editor of the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. His work-in-progress concerns the relation of philosophy to social theory. (shrink)

Definitions of pragmatism increasingly turn on understanding and relating the philosophies of Richard Rorty and John Dewey. Rorty is often the first and most important lens through which many encounter pragmatism or Dewey; thus, it is crucial to know where “Rorty” ends and where “Dewey” begins. To find that line, this chapter answers the question: What did Rorty believe Dewey contributed to pragmatism, to philosophy, and to humanity? After reviewing how Rorty's personal and academic beginnings intertwined (...) with Dewey, preliminary context is provided by reviewing Rorty's view of pragmatism and neopragmatism and his general interpretive approach to Dewey. These preliminaries yield to analytical descriptions of the main areas in Dewey's work which Rorty was concerned to present: experience; objectivity and truth; inquiry and scientific method; ethics, politics, and democracy; and, finally, the general purpose of philosophy. (shrink)

The existing body of scholarship on Rorty’s relation to Dewey devotes relatively little attention to the shared commitments that animate their respective projects and what they hold in common philosophically. This article aims to shift the discourse from assaying Rorty’s faithfulness to Dewey to clarifying and critically examining the differences that make a difference between their respective projects of philosophical reconstruction and democratic meliorism, in the hope of learning from mutually corrective insights and moving pragmatism beyond stale impasses. (...) Highlighting the continuity between Rorty’s early work and later Philosophy as Cultural Politics in a commitment to a Deweyan notion of philosophy as an instrument of social change, I argue that their differences are most fruitfully understood against the backdrop of their shared attentiveness to cultural context, the sociopolitical character of philosophical inquiry, pressing issues of the day, and the need for philosophers to transcend professionalized debates. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Topics of Deconstruction: An Overview The Deconstruction of Structuralism The Deconstruction of Phenomenology Supplementarity in the Deconstruction of Rousseau The Deconstruction of Heidegger Deconstructive Remarks about Hegel The Deconstruction of Khōra Responding to Deconstructions Radical Meaning Holism: Rorty and Derrida Deconstruction and Questions of Ethics: Hospitality, Justice, and Friendship.

In February of 1988, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe came together in Heidelberg before a large audience to discuss, in French, the philosophical and political implications of Martin Heidegger's thought, particularly in light of the philosopher's engagement in Nazism. This book presents a transcription and translation of their reflections and exchanges with the audience.

What can comparative philosophy contribute to thinking about values, economics, and justice? Can we apply philosophy in general, and comparative philosophy in particular, to these problems directly? Martin Heidegger, one of the protagonists of this article, has on occasion made it clear that philosophy is literally “useless” and so let me start with one of my favourite Heidegger quotes, to give the reader an indication of what this paper tries to think: “philosophy … cannot be directly applied, or judged by (...) its usefulness in the manner of economic or other professional knowledge. But what is useless can still be a force, perhaps the only real force.”. (shrink)