Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Volume 1: Philosophical Papers

by Richard Rorty

Overview

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. In this volume Rorty offers a Deweyan account of objectivity as intersubjectivity, one that drops claims about universal validity and instead focuses on utility for the purposes of a community. The sense in which the natural sciences are exemplary for inquiry is explicated in terms of the moral virtues of scientific communities rather than in terms of a special scientific method. The volume concludes with reflections on the relation of social democratic politics to philosophy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781139930031
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/30/1990
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	644 KB

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; Introduction: antirepresentationalism, ethnocentrism, and liberalism; Part I. Solidarity or Objectivity?: 1. Science as solidarity; 2. Is natural science a natural kind?; 3. Pragmatism without method; 4. Texts and lumps; 5. Inquiry as recontextualization: an anti-dualist account of interpretation; Part II. Non-Reductive Physicalism: 5. Pragmatism, Davidson and truth; 6. Representation, social practice, and truth; 7. Unfamiliar noises: Hesse and Davidson on metaphor; PART III. The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy: 8. Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism; 9. On ethnocentrism: a reply to Clifford Geertz; 10. Cosmopolitanism without emancipation: a response to Jean-Francois Lyotard; Index of names.

Editorial Reviews

Rorty has added an introduction to 14 papers previously published between 1980 and 1989. The three main sections offer a contention that knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is not a matter of truth or falsity, but of acquiring useful habits of action for coping with reality; an examination of D. Davidson's views on explanation, truth, and language; and an exploration of the ``communitarian'' idea that a ``democratic, progressive, pluralist community'' can avoid questions about a mind- or language-independent reality by striving after ``intersubjective agreement and novelty.'' Although the essays contain points worth pondering, Rorty's writing is somewhat opaque and his argument lacks concrete detail. This reader remains unpersuaded that communitarian manipulation can satisfactorily replace rational inquiry into objective reality.-- Robert Hoffman, York Coll., CUNY

Library Journal

"This book is stimulating and challenging. The topics covered are diverse enough to capture the attention of almost any academic audience. Rorty introduces a variety of fresh and exciting ideas." Arnold Lorenzo Farr, disClosure

From the Publisher