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Philosophical Papers
Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers
This volume presents a selection of the philosophical essays which Richard Rorty wrote during the first decade of his career, and complements four previous volumes of his papers published by Cambridge University Press. In this long neglected body of work, which many leading philosophers still consider to be his best, Rorty develops his views on the nature and scope of philosophy in a manner which supplements and elucidates his definitive statement on these matters in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. He also develops his groundbreaking version of eliminative materialism, a label first coined to describe his position, and sets out original views on various central topics in the philosophy of language, concerning private language, indeterminacy, and verificationalism. A substantial introduction examines Rorty's philosophical development from 1961 to 1972. The volume completes our understanding of Rorty's intellectual trajectory and offers lucid statements of positions which retain their relevance to current debates.
- GenresPhilosophy
330 pages, Hardcover
First published February 28, 2014
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About the author
Richard Rorty
101Ìýbooks389ÌýfollowersRichard Rorty (1931â€�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.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 8, 2016
Hot, damn. That was a fine read.
June 8, 2017
Read for the metaphilosophy.
Made me respect Rorty more, while I have major quarrels w his take on postmodernism & his misunderstanding of pragmatism, but mostly with how pretentious he is
I did enjoy what he had to say here, however, tho i still think he is circling the drain of his own methodologies, which is paradoxical for metaphilosophy.
Made me respect Rorty more, while I have major quarrels w his take on postmodernism & his misunderstanding of pragmatism, but mostly with how pretentious he is
I did enjoy what he had to say here, however, tho i still think he is circling the drain of his own methodologies, which is paradoxical for metaphilosophy.
November 3, 2024
Puedo entender por qué la gente tiene un desprecio hacia Rorty, pero en lo personal me pareció divertido de leer. En su tercer paper llama a Descartes el "niño malcriado" de la metafÃsica.
SerÃa bueno que la gente se de la oportunidad de leerlo, en lugar de juzgarlo por lo que otros dicen.
SerÃa bueno que la gente se de la oportunidad de leerlo, en lugar de juzgarlo por lo que otros dicen.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
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