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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 191
EAN num: 9780140262889
ISBN number: 0140262881
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: January 01, 2000
Publishing house: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Sale Popularity Level: 75356
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
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Product Description:
A superb introduction to one of today's leading and most provocative thinkers.
Since Plato most philosophy has aimed at true knowledge, penetrating beneath appearances to an underlying reality. Against this tradition, Richard Rorty convincingly argues, pragmatism offers a new philosophy of hope. One of the most controversial figures in recent philosophical and wider literary and cultural debate, Rorty brings together an original collection of his most recent philosophical and cultural writings. He explains in a fascinating memoir how he began to move away from Plato towards William James and Dewey, culminating in his own version of pragmatism. What ultimately matters, Rorty suggests, is not whether our ideas correspond to some fundamental reality but whether they help us carry out practical tasks and create a fairer and more democratic society.
Aimed at a general audience, this volume offers a stimulating summary of Rorty's central philosophical beliefs, as well as some challenging insights into contemporary culture, justice, education, and love.
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Rated by buyers 
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I was reading this book when Richard Rorty passed away recently. I regret that this man is gone. The world needs more open minded thinkers. I'm glad that he left behind this and other works. His thinking is very progressive. I feel he provided the world a way out of pointless ideological warfare. If you are able to set aside your own intellectual biases and really listen to what he says in this book, he points a way to tolerance in a multicultural world and hope for a better future.
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As a teacher of Philosophy courses, I have a preference for this excellent American writer. This volumn clearly marks Rorty's pragmatic move toward politics and society. It is not only this practical application of Philosophy that interests me, but his re-vitalization of Philosophy on the terms of Pragmatism and radical (non-reductionist) empiricism.
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Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, though excellent, is dense, and assumes a lot of knowledge of Western philosophical traditions. This book, by contrast, is pretty straightforward, and has excellent prose. Rorty argues once again for social constructionism, which, contrary to what rabid critics say about it, is neither nihilistic nor relativistic. Rorty is persuasive and straightforward, and does an excellent job of suggesting ties between the philosophy which he advocates and the politics of "social hope" which he stands for.
By dividing this apologia for social constructionism into several short chapters (most of them originally published as stand-alone essays), Rorty provides responses to many objections which have been made to his previous work. Some of these essays are pretty useless for most readers (e.g., an essay on Derrida's Specters of Marx), but most are models of simple and well-formed expository writing.
Rated by buyers 
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I started this book with very high expectations, which may be part of why I was disappointed. I thought that I would be convinced by his arguments about the nature of knowledge and morality, since I think social constructionism has some value and don't like metaphysics. Ultimately, Rorty didn't convince me that we could do away with metaphysics, which was a disappointment.
Chapters 2 and 3 are hard reading if you're not familiar with the following authors, because Rorty does a lot of detailed comparisons between their ideas: Plato, John Dewey, Immanuel Kant, Walt Whitman, Martin Heidegger, Emerson, James, Nietzsche, Donald Davidson, Witgenstein, and Willard van Orman Quine. I'd heard of all of them but Davidson, and had some vague sense of what they did, but was overwhelmed by these chapters because I couldn't keep up. The good news is that if you get past these chapters, the rest of the book is easy.
Politically, I think that Rorty attacks the right problems, but he doesn't defend centralized democratic socialism from critiques by people like Hayek and Popper, who argue that such planning is always authoritarian. He just asserts that it will work.
Overall, I think it's a decent read, but I wouldn't recommend it for people that haven't taken a class that covers most of the philosophers I've mentioned above or done some reading on them on their own. Rorty's arguments are important, but I don't think they're as convincing as they could be.
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About Philosophy and Social Hope by Richard Rorty
I will be brief: There is no contradiction between being a passionate proponent of liberalism or democratic socialism and being a reserved pragmatist who denies the possibility of absolute truth (absolute conformity of our mental constructs with reality) within the confines of a human head. Richard Rorty has a right to believe and defend what he finds justifiable and worthy of his personal support. He does so with the full knowledge that others may disagree and that his ideas can only obtain socially or gain momentum at the political level (where social change becomes possible) to the extent that they are persuasive enough to generate a consensus among a majority of individuals. He knows pluralism as a fact, something that we may not necessarily wish but must nevertheless acknowledge, as social beings intent on living with others in the most harmonious way, despite a plurality of individual differences. And this harmony entails mutual respect and a willingness to live by democratic rules, according to which the only legitimate political power is that which has the free support of the people under it.
Yes, Richard Rorty is right, absolute truth is socially irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that we agree on how we plan to live together on this earth, which seems discontent with our human presence as a dog with flees. And efforts like John Rawls' to define some basic principles of social organization that we can all agree on are invaluable.
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