Search Results

“... equally conclusively, that formulations in this relativistic style that have been popularised by Richard Rorty, in particular, simply tear themselves apart. If, as Rorty is fond of putting it, the correct description of the world (for us) is a matter of what we find it convenient to say, and if, as ...”

“... difficulty in Our Mutual Friend, is also likely to be the chief difficulty facing the reader of Richard Poirier’s ambitious and eloquent plea for the ‘renewal’ of literature and criticism through a better understanding of Emerson. Believing all may involve something close to a conversion. Believing none will do scant justice to the work of one of the ...”

“... or fictional – ‘through and through, whatever their self-professed logical status.’ Richard Rorty, who identifies philosophy merely as ‘a kind of writing’, also believes, according to Norris, that ‘literary critics had best give up the idea that philosophy (or “theory”) is capable of solving any problems created by their own ...”

“... some pages to arguing that perceptual experiences cannot justify beliefs. In his contribution, Richard Rorty categorises Davidson as significantly close to the American pragmatists. Rorty lists four theses he says are common to Davidson and a pragmatist such as William James. The fourth thesis states that there is ...”

“... is the subject of a large literature; in addition to Smith, its defenders include Paul Feyerabend, Richard Rorty and Bruno Latour; trenchant critics include John Searle and Paul Boghossian. A basic philosophical question is whether it can be intelligibly applied ‘all the way down’. When the constructivist account refers to effective interaction with ...”

“... When Richard Rorty died last year, the New York Times called him ‘one of the world’s most influential contemporary thinkers’. Few philosophers would accept this assessment. Rorty was widely read and admired by many, he had a good nose for a controversy and was impressive in oral debate ...”

“... academic philosophers who have bewitched themselves into a sense of a civilising mission. For Richard Rorty, philosophers’ obsession with such merely mood-enhancing words as Reason, Reality, Truth, Objectivity and Method is little more than the fetishism of an increasingly parochial discipline. If you really want to understand how knowledge is made ...”

“... job of showing that epistemology is a kind of enquiry, central to Locke, that is worth preserving. Richard Rorty has made famous the thesis that epistemology is dead, eliminated by some generations of analytic philosophers who showed it to be an impossible pursuit. Rorty took epistemology to be a matter of finding ...”

“... of one’s soul is not a task usefully entrusted to professors of philosophy. Two years ago, Richard Rorty, who belongs to roughly the same generation us Cavell, recounted some of the reasons behind his own abjuration of ‘the Socratic ambition’ in a brief memoir, ‘Trotsky and the Wild Orchids’. A Platonic idealist at the age of 15, ...”

“... familiar, set of leftist liberal rights and duties. It is, in this respect, no surprise to find Richard Rorty writing a commendatory foreword to this collection. As Rorty points out, however, Heidegger himself – notorious for his entanglements with Fascism – would be more than a little surprised to see what, in ...”

“... of an incredibly talented black weaver. People asked me how my ideas related to Foucault or Richard Rorty. A painter, Swedish by origin, of great intensity as was his work, talked to me of the problems of South Africa. They were not political problems, he said, they were cultural problems. They were problems of communication and of creativity. The ...”

“... out, in the words of the King of Brobdingnag, as a pernicious race of little odious vermin. Even Richard Rorty, the self-styled postmodernist liberal, felt able to pronounce that cruelty was ‘the worst thing we do’. Torture has posed a problem for philosophers. Simple utilitarianism has notorious difficulties in explaining why torture or other such ...”

“... it should be providing ways of going beyond them. Against thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty, he refuses to celebrate the literary as a way to avoid or perpetually defer addressing hard epistemological questions as to how we can know a real world whose solidity cannot be dissolved even by the most imaginative exercise in ...”

“... between one possibility and another, the relation must be logical or internal. In fact, as Richard Rorty remarks in his contribution to Hoy’s collection, Hacking settles for archaeology in the sense of historical analysis, even though he insists on calling it ‘epistemology’ – that is to say, Erkenntnistheorie. For his part, ...”

“... Martha Nussbaum, with her Sixties sensibilities, responded to a New York Times op-ed article by Richard Rorty, a relatively senior philosopher who identifies with the Old Left of the Forties. Rorty had urged young Americans, especially Leftists, to cease denigrating the value of patriotism and take seriously the ...”