Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty

by Richard Rorty, Eduardo Mendieta (Editor)

Overview

This volume collects a number of important and revealing interviews with Richard Rorty, spanning more than two decades of his public intellectual commentary, engagement, and criticism. In colloquial language, Rorty discusses the relevance and nonrelevance of philosophy to American political and public life. The collection also provides a candid set of insights into Rorty's political beliefs and his commitment to the labor and union traditions in this country. Finally, the interviews reveal Rorty to be a deeply engaged social thinker and observer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804746182
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	11/29/2005
Series:	Cultural Memory in the Present
Edition description:	1
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Richard Rorty is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of three volumes of Philosophical Papers (1991-1998), and Philosophy and Social Hope (1999). Eduardo Mendieta is Associate Professor of Philosophy at SUNY, Stony Brook. He is the author of Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apel's Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (2002).

Editorial Reviews

"The United States has produced a great many idiosyncratic champions of human freedom, Walt Whitman and William James above all. It is time to recognize Rorty's place in that lineage."—Dissent

From the Publisher

"The United States has produced a great many idiosyncratic champions of human freedom, Walt Whitman and William James above all. It is time to recognize Rorty's place in that lineage."

Dissent

In 1979, Rorty (humanities, Univ. of Virginia) shocked the members of the philosophical academy by exposing them as emperors without clothes, pointing out the bankruptcy of their epistemological systems and calling for an end to philosophy as it was being practiced. His Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature issued a clarion call to philosophers to think of philosophy not as a set of metaphysical propositions verified by language, but as a series of edifying discourses. Rorty later turned to writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera, whose work, he believed, offered an entry into philosophical thinking about culture. He also took his notions of philosophers as "conversation partners" into politics and religion as he tried to recover both the pragmatism of John Dewey and the liberalism of Irving Howe for our times. The interviews collected here, which span more than two decades, follow these trajectories. With an introduction by Mendieta (philosophy, SUNY at Stony Brook), they range in topic from literature, politics, and postmetaphysical philosophy to democracy and pragmatism. Most have been previously published. While all present Rorty as an outspoken thinker and our preeminent philosopher, they reveal little that we don't already know. Recommended for academic libraries only.-Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal