Richard Rorty (1931–2007)

6000 WORD REVIEW

When I saw the spine of this newly published book in the awesome Athenaeum bookshop in Amsterdam last summer, I decided to see if Richard Rorty could still teach me something. What Can We Hope For? Essays on Politics collects 19 essays that were written between 1995 and 2007 – 4 of which unpublished, and many lesser-known and hard to find pieces. It also has a 17 page introduction by editors W.P. Malecki and Chris Voparil.

I want to stress the collection is accessible to readers without any prior knowledge of Rorty.

Included is “Looking Backwards from the Year 2096”, a kind of science fictional essay that first appeared as “Fraternity Reigns” in the New York Times in 1996 and was also reprinted in Philosophy and Social Hope, a collection from 1999. Rorty imagines a future American history, looking back from 2096 to “our long, hesitant, painful; recovery, over the last five decades, from the breakdown of democratic institutions during the Dark Years (2014-2044)”, a recovery that “has changed our political vocabulary, as well as our sense of the relation between the moral order and the economic order”.

I highlight this here already, because political philosophy is clearly a matter of the imagination. In the remainder of this text I shall try to summarize some of Rorty’s main points, and also compare some of his ideas to those of Kim Stanley Robinson – another intellectual & writer, one who has thought about the future too, in the hope of bettering the world.

As such, this post can be read as a companion piece to my recent analysis of Antartica – KSR’s epistemological novel, in which Robinson ties together science, ethics, utopian praxis, imagination, ideologies and stories.

This post will be quote heavy, because I simply can’t say it any better than Rorty himself.

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Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It… (more)

A refreshingly clear--and at many times humorous--philosophical statement! I like his framing of philosophy, and all intellectual inquiry actually, as acts of imagination, since any effort to try to understand the world implies thinking of something new, or at least possibly new. I also appreciate the call to stop obsessing about what is "Real" and to focus on what "is" and how to increase our understanding of what "is" and our collective well being.

Rorty hinges pretty much everything on language, and while I agree that language is an important/defining part of being human, I disagree that there is no complex communication without language. I'm guessing he never had children or spent time with young infants, or ever had a close relationship with a pet. To my mind, the extent of our ability to community without language only serves to underscore his point about the ultimate impact of language.… (more)