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“... and envy. Disapproval of English critical ‘conversation’ spills over into a censure of Richard Rorty: for just as the new, fully professional criticism is fighting free of ‘conversation’, that English laxity, Rorty is calling on philosophers to take it up. Yet a certain envy remains. The book oscillates ...”

“... on his own patch. Latter-day examples include the self-styled ‘Post-Modern bourgeois liberal’ Richard Rorty. The politics of this turn tend to the folksy – in an arch, snowstorm-paperweight-collecting kind of way – if not downright völkisch. And, as Clifford Geertz has noted, the wogs start long before Calais. Castoriadis, it should be ...”

“... have been and are many philosophers of a wide range of political shadings (Michael Oakeshott, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum) who breathe the air of the tower far more easily than they do that of the stove. Maybe if this tendency continues, Montaigne will one day come to seem as significant a figure in the history of philosophy as ...”

“... modern art value; though that might mean Richter was right to try to make it one. I like the story Richard Rorty told against himself late in life, when he heard that a philosophy department had just hired someone whose speciality was vagueness, and he raised an eyebrow. ‘Dick, you’re really out of it,’ his host said. ‘Vagueness is ...”

“... autonomy, inner responsibility, moral obligation and so forth’, ‘deniers’ like Richard Rorty who were inclined to reduce talk of the true and the right to what we find it convenient to believe – were discomfited by his dazzle. But in fact he was a constructive man. Shooting an idea out of someone’s hand as soon as it came up, he ...”

“... many convenient targets that Republican politicians and intellectuals have at their disposal,’ Richard Rorty wrote in an essay called ‘Demonising the Academy’ in 1995, ‘the one at which they direct their fire with perhaps the most delight is the academy.’ This delight has been on full display during the humiliation of the three university ...”

“... stretching from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger to Wittgenstein, Adorno, Benjamin and Richard Rorty, who can say what they mean only by forging a new style of writing, one which dismantles the traditional opposition between literature and philosophy, the aesthetic and the analytic. These thinkers cobble together ...”

“... which the form demands that you ‘stalk imaginary beasts like “Existential Marxism” ’). Richard Rorty (in Judt’s book, an embodiment of relativism and nihilism second only to Sartre himself) is appealed to by Khilnani for a more principled repudiation of the history of philosophy itself: a fictive narrative in which ad hoc positions are ...”

“... as radical feminists, but many seem to want only to understand the world. They adopt what Richard Rorty calls an ‘ironic’ stance. We thought that such and such was inevitable, in the present state of things. We now see it is the product of a highly contingent social history; but we are stuck with it, or so many constructionists seem to say. I ...”

“... have this problem because he didn’t believe social justice was either desirable or possible. As Richard Rorty has pointed out in these pages,* to be a Nietzschean and to pursue social justice, without inconsistency, is no mean feat. No wonder the concept of ‘inconsistency’ has to be ...”

“... Freud. But it is also because a past is not a thing to be discovered. As the analyst said, and as Richard Rorty has been saying in this journal, it is not discovered but made. Ronald Fraser was not trying to determine, like certain historians of former times, what his past ‘really was’. But there is some question of a pathogenic secret, of the ...”

“... enough, and what mothering is are all debatable and contentious). There is nothing deep inside us, Richard Rorty once remarked, that we haven’t put there ourselves. So even though, at least for some people, psychoanalysis, and psychology more generally, have interesting things to say about misogyny, they also run the risk of naturalising it (misogyny is ...”

“... a short step to sceptical democratic liberalism in the manner of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin or Richard Rorty, and perhaps to a celebration of politics as the noble art of fostering conversation across doctrinal divides. But that isn’t the route MacIntyre took. For him, liberalism is no more than a front for capitalist individualism, seeking to ...”

“... 1965 people had long been curious about this very famous man. Collections such as the one made by Richard Marsh and Tambimuttu for his 60th birthday in 1948 contained much pleasant anecdote, and there were respectful reminiscences in Allen Tate’s memorial volume of 1966. Meanwhile, off the page, there was some gossip about such matters as a putatively vast ...”

“... neutralists make substantial moral claims. To defend the two-face schema, Gray could say, echoing Richard Rorty, that there’s the bit where neutralists say it, and then there’s the bit where they take it back. ‘It’ here is the neutralists’ claim that they avoid controversial moral ideals. But then they take this claim back, relying on a moral ...”