- Lake Worth, Florida, United States
Chris Voparil
Lynn University, Philosophy, Faculty Member
- Pragmatism, Political Theory, Democratic Theory, Aesthetics and Politics, Richard Rorty, John Dewey, and 16 moreWilliam James, Jane Addams, Social Justice, Ethics, John Rawls, Martin Luther King Jr., Pragmatism (Philosophy), Philosophy Of Race, Otherness, Pragmatismo, Robert Brandom, Intercultural Philosophy, Linda Alcoff, Social Movements, Charles S. Peirce, and Metaethicsedit
- Christopher J. Voparil is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, where he teach... moreChristopher J. Voparil is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, where he teaches philosophy and political theory. His work bridges debates in philosophy and political theory around questions of democracy, ethics, social justice, and marginalized voices, using the richness and vitality of the American pragmatist tradition to rethink moral and ethical resources after postmodernism. In 2012 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. He is currently Secretary of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy and is the founding President of the Richard Rorty Society.edit
On Philosophy and Philosophers is a volume of unpublished philosophical papers by Richard Rorty, a central figure in late-twentieth-century intellectual debates and a primary force behind the resurgence of American pragmatism. The first... more
On Philosophy and Philosophers is a volume of unpublished philosophical papers by Richard Rorty, a central figure in late-twentieth-century intellectual debates and a primary force behind the resurgence of American pragmatism. The first collection of new work to appear since his death in 2007, these previously unseen papers advance novel views on metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, philosophical semantics and the social role of philosophy, critically engaging canonical and contemporary figures from Plato and Kant to Kripke and Brandom. This book's diverse offerings, which include technical essays written for specialists and popular lectures, refine our understanding of Rorty's perspective and demonstrate the ongoing relevance of the iconoclastic American philosopher's ground-breaking thought. An introduction by the editors highlights the papers' original insights and contributions to contemporary debates.
Research Interests:
The essays in this volume answer to anxieties that the pragmatist tradition has had little to say about justice. While both the classical and neo-pragmatist traditions have produced a conspicuously small body of writing about the idea of... more
The essays in this volume answer to anxieties that the pragmatist tradition has had little to say about justice. While both the classical and neo-pragmatist traditions have produced a conspicuously small body of writing about the idea of justice, a common subtext of the essays in this volume is that there is in pragmatist thought a set of valuable resources for developing pragmatist theories of justice, for responding profitably to concrete injustices, and for engaging with contemporary, prevailing, liberal theories of justice.
Despite the absence of conventionally philosophical theories of justice in the pragmatist canon, the writings of many pragmatists demonstrate an obvious sensitivity and responsiveness to injustice. Many pragmatists were and are moved by a deep sense of justice-by an awareness of the suffering of people, by the need to build just institutions, and a search for a tolerant and non-discriminatory culture that regards all people as equals. Three related and mutually reinforcing ideas to which virtually all pragmatists are committed can be discerned: a prioritization of concrete problems and real-world injustices ahead of abstract precepts; a distrust of a priori theorizing (along with a corresponding fallibilism and methodological experimentalism); and a deep and persistent pluralism, both in respect to what justice is and requires, and in respect to how real-world injustices are best recognized and remedied.
Ultimately, Pragmatism and Justice asserts that pragmatism gives us powerful resources for understanding the idea of justice more clearly and responding more efficaciously to a world rife with injustice.
Despite the absence of conventionally philosophical theories of justice in the pragmatist canon, the writings of many pragmatists demonstrate an obvious sensitivity and responsiveness to injustice. Many pragmatists were and are moved by a deep sense of justice-by an awareness of the suffering of people, by the need to build just institutions, and a search for a tolerant and non-discriminatory culture that regards all people as equals. Three related and mutually reinforcing ideas to which virtually all pragmatists are committed can be discerned: a prioritization of concrete problems and real-world injustices ahead of abstract precepts; a distrust of a priori theorizing (along with a corresponding fallibilism and methodological experimentalism); and a deep and persistent pluralism, both in respect to what justice is and requires, and in respect to how real-world injustices are best recognized and remedied.
Ultimately, Pragmatism and Justice asserts that pragmatism gives us powerful resources for understanding the idea of justice more clearly and responding more efficaciously to a world rife with injustice.
Research Interests: Pragmatism and Justice
Pragmatism and Justice is an interdisciplinary volume of new and seminal essays by political philosophers, social theorists, and scholars of pragmatism which provides a comprehensive introduction and lasting resource for scholars of... more
Pragmatism and Justice is an interdisciplinary volume of new and seminal essays by political philosophers, social theorists, and scholars of pragmatism which provides a comprehensive introduction and lasting resource for scholars of pragmatist thought and questions of justice. It answers to anxieties that the pragmatist tradition has had little to say about justice, asserting unequivocally that there is in pragmatist thought a set of valuable resources for developing pragmatist theories of justice, for responding profitably to concrete injustices, and for engaging with contemporary, prevailing, liberal theories of justice.
Research Interests:
The first comprehensive collection of the work of Richard Rorty (1931-2007), this volume brings together the influential American philosopher’s essential essays from over four decades of writings. Of interest to students and scholars,... more
The first comprehensive collection of the work of Richard Rorty (1931-2007), this volume brings together the influential American philosopher’s essential essays from over four decades of writings. Of interest to students and scholars, The Rorty Reader offers an in-depth introduction to Rorty’s life and work that outlines the continuities and changes that span his early training in the history of philosophy, his engagement with the analytic tradition, the thoroughgoing critique of the Cartesian-Kantian tradition that brought him international renown in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, as well as his later more explicitly political writings and embrace of literature as the vehicle of moral reflection most suitable to democratic life. With selections from his final volume of philosophical papers, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007), interviews, and autobiographical pieces, The Rorty Reader provides the fullest picture of Rorty’s relation to American pragmatism and overall intellectual trajectory of his thought available to date.
Research Interests:
The first full-length work devoted to Richard Rorty from the perspective of political theory, this book offers a fresh assessment of the promise of the renowned pragmatist's project. Framing Rorty's discourse as one of meaning and... more
The first full-length work devoted to Richard Rorty from the perspective of political theory, this book offers a fresh assessment of the promise of the renowned pragmatist's project. Framing Rorty's discourse as one of meaning and persuasion rather than truth and accuracy of representation, Voparil sheds new light on many of Rorty's most misunderstood and maligned stances, including his practice of "redescription" and disavowal of "getting it right," as well as his embrace of the novel and "sentimental education." As political theory, Rorty's perspective, not unlike Sheldon Wolin's, values the imagination, the ability to come up with new metaphors and angles of vision, and is driven by a deep desire to reinvigorate a moribund and detached contemporary left. Voparil's account engages the full range of Rorty's intellectual forebears, grounding his thought in an American tradition that extends beyond the classical pragmatists to include Emerson, Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and James Baldwin, in addition to chapters that trace Rorty's connection to such diverse figures as Marx, Mill, Dickens, Isaiah Berlin, and Milan Kundera.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
In a symposium built around a critical reassessment by Nicholas Gaskill of Richard Rorty's pragmatism, this contribution examines the provocative question of whether Rorty's rhetoric hinders Rortian aims. When reconsidering him in... more
In a symposium built around a critical reassessment by Nicholas Gaskill of Richard Rorty's pragmatism, this contribution examines the provocative question of whether Rorty's rhetoric hinders Rortian aims. When reconsidering him in company with “the philosophical wing of science studies” (Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway), Gaskill finds that Rorty's persistent assumption of nature/culture and word/world dichotomies is politically dangerous and prevents his comprehending both distributed agency and the complexity of human entanglements with the nonhuman. Gaskill's Rorty lacks a sustained and coherent positive project, but a fuller picture, outlined in this article, reveals not only greater alignment of Rorty with science studies and agential realism but also key Rortian contributions to those fields that are particularly of moment in our “post-truth” condition.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
My aim in these remarks is to sketch a way of approaching the thought of Richard Rorty that I will call reading Rorty politically. I argue that reading Rorty politically is not only the most fruitful way to read Rorty, it is necessary to... more
My aim in these remarks is to sketch a way of approaching the thought of Richard Rorty that I will call reading Rorty politically. I argue that reading Rorty politically is not only the most fruitful way to read Rorty, it is necessary to understand the full force of his challenge to philosophy. After sketching Rorty’s important early metaphilosophical work, I outline the fundamental shift from epistemology and metaphilosophy to the moral and political that drives the development of his thought, culminating in his notion of philosophy as cultural politics.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This response to insightful commentaries on my book, from Richard Shusterman, Susan Dieleman, Raff Donelson, and Colin Koopman, takes up the recurring theme of the nature of normativity on a Rortyan view. To frame my individual replies, I... more
This response to insightful commentaries on my book, from Richard Shusterman, Susan Dieleman, Raff Donelson, and Colin Koopman, takes up the recurring theme of the nature of normativity on a Rortyan view. To frame my individual replies, I revisit the Davidsonian account of epistemic interaction that influences Rorty’s mature view and suggest that the norms implicit in Davidsonian triangulation are insufficient to support Rorty’s antiauthoritarianism in ethics and epistemology. To address the resulting question of how to account for norms of responsibility and obligation within Rorty’s thought, I highlight key strands of the pragmatic tradition, originating with Peirce but extending through James, Addams, and Dewey, that Rorty reconstructs in the process of developing the full implications of prioritizing democracy over philosophy.
Research Interests:
This chapter places the ideas of Jane Addams and Richard Rorty into constructive dialogue revealing common appeals to sentiment, sympathetic knowledge, and meliorism in their ethics. When read together a distinctive contribution to... more
This chapter places the ideas of Jane Addams and Richard Rorty into constructive dialogue revealing common appeals to sentiment, sympathetic knowledge, and meliorism in their ethics. When read together a distinctive contribution to pragmatist social ethics emerges. Specifically, they merge the epistemic and ethical, holding that knowledge of others is predicated on a sympathetic affective orientation, and focus their melioristic practices toward the marginalized. They align in advocating a suite of melioristic practices that remains attentive to the limits and barriers all projects of social ethics face: forging democratic relations with those who have been marginalized or excluded from our community, mitigating egotism and its attendant self-certitude, and advancing mechanisms for deprivileging those at the top of undemocratic relational hierarchies. Taken together, Addams and Rorty help us better orient the practice of social justice to overcome the ethical and epistemic obstacles...
Research Interests:
Rorty’s explicit engagement with moral and political issues in the early 1990s has received significant commentary. More recent scholarship has begun to elucidate moral and political concerns at work in Rorty’s philosophical stances as... more
Rorty’s explicit engagement with moral and political issues in the early 1990s has received significant commentary. More recent scholarship has begun to elucidate moral and political concerns at work in Rorty’s philosophical stances as well. The specific topic of Rorty’s ethics has been relatively neglected, at least until the recent book by William Curtis. Curtis argues Rorty is «above all else, a political and moral philosopher» who can be read as «a proponent of a liberal virtue ethics». While broadly in keeping with and sympathetic to Curtis’s reading, my account differs in emphasizing a specific concern with ethical responsibility that runs from Rorty’s earliest published work to his last writings, focused directly on those we exclude from our communities, as his distinctive contribution.
Research Interests:
In this paper I examine the respective positions of Rorty and Brandom on the ontological primary of the social and highlight key differences – differences that make a difference when we consider philosophy in the context of world culture.... more
In this paper I examine the respective positions of Rorty and Brandom on the ontological primary of the social and highlight key differences – differences that make a difference when we consider philosophy in the context of world culture. I argue that Rorty’s embrace of cultural politics marks a self-conscious attempt to expand “the conversation of mankind” beyond the Western world that dates to the early 1990s. Despite recognizing in his careful reading of Rorty’s project the anti-authoritarian impulse that clears away the vestiges of philosophical privilege so as to open a space of “discursive pluralism,” where other cultures and social perspectives can contribute, Brandom is not attentive enough to the trans-cultural and context-independent facets of his own thought that close down precisely that which is opened up by Rorty’s more inclusive conception of philosophy as cultural politics.
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Philosophy and Pragmatism
Despite the evident lack of pragmatist family resemblance between the “absolute pragmatism” of Josiah Royce and Rorty’s antifoundationalism, historicism, and contingentism, this chapter identifies a shared project of, in Rorty’s parlance,... more
Despite the evident lack of pragmatist family resemblance between the “absolute pragmatism” of Josiah Royce and Rorty’s antifoundationalism, historicism, and contingentism, this chapter identifies a shared project of, in Rorty’s parlance, intervening in cultural politics. Three claims are advanced: first, that Royce’s later work can be productively viewed as a series of philosophical interventions in cultural politics; second, that while evidence of Rorty’s engagement with Royce’s thought is scant, drawing on archival material establishes that it exists and was more influential on Rorty than currently appreciated; and, third, that reading Rorty and Royce within the same frame generates insights about the transformative moral resources available to pragmatists—namely, the power of affective ties and ethical commitments exemplified in the notion of loyalty. What results is an approach to questions of justice through the lens of community particularly attuned to those who have been mar...
Research Interests:
The figure of Richard Rorty stands in complex relation to the tradition of American pragmatism. On the one hand, his intellectual creativity, lively prose, and bridge-building fueled the contemporary resurgence of pragmatism. On the... more
The figure of Richard Rorty stands in complex relation to the tradition of American pragmatism. On the one hand, his intellectual creativity, lively prose, and bridge-building fueled the contemporary resurgence of pragmatism. On the other, his polemical claims and selective interpretations function as a negative, fixed pole against which thinkers of all stripes define themselves. Virtually all pragmatists on the contemporary scene, whether classical or “new,” Deweyan, Jamesian, or Peircean, use Rorty as a foil to justify their positions. The resulting divisions and internecine quarrels threaten to thwart and fragment the tradition’s creative potential. More caricatured than understood, the specter of Rorty is blocking the road of inquiry and future development of pragmatism. Reconstructing Pragmatism moves beyond the Rortyan impasse by providing what has been missing for decades: a constructive, nonpolemical account of Rorty’s relation to classical pragmatism. The first book-length ...
Research Interests:
This chapter frames Rorty’s interpretation of Dewey as an attempt to reconstruct Dewey to better promote a particular vision of democracy and social change, rather than as a misreading. Rorty radicalizes Dewey’s own reconstruction of... more
This chapter frames Rorty’s interpretation of Dewey as an attempt to reconstruct Dewey to better promote a particular vision of democracy and social change, rather than as a misreading. Rorty radicalizes Dewey’s own reconstruction of philosophy, using Deweyan critiques against him. When he objects to particular elements in Dewey’s work, like the project of constructive metaphysics in Experience and Nature, it is because he believes they get in the way of reconstructing philosophy as an instrument of social change. Rorty’s effort to transcend limitations in Dewey’s conception of philosophy as an instrument of social change deserves to be considered on its own merits. By reading Dewey as giving us an account of inquiry and warrant under conditions of normal discourse and Rorty as focused on abnormal contexts where belief correction proceeds via unwarranted assertions and nonlogical changes in belief, the chapter suggests how pragmatists can learn from them both.
Research Interests:
Despite Rorty’s oeuvre containing limited commentary on Jane Addams, this chapter illuminates their distinctive shared contribution to pragmatist ethics: They merge epistemic and ethical priorities to unite sympathetic understanding with... more
Despite Rorty’s oeuvre containing limited commentary on Jane Addams, this chapter illuminates their distinctive shared contribution to pragmatist ethics: They merge epistemic and ethical priorities to unite sympathetic understanding with the cultivation of social ethical responsibility and orient their ethical projects explicitly toward responsiveness to marginalized or excluded others. Its chief claims are: first, that Rorty can be read as extending Addams’s project of creating a democratic moral community; and second, that a constructive dialogue between Rorty and Addams reveals key points of complementarity that, when taken together, generate a more robust conception of democratic social ethics than Addams’s alone. Reading Rorty alongside Addams elucidates the ethical commitments implicit in his more familiar epistemological critiques, including how Rorty’s understanding of the social practice of justification can be understood as a philosophical defense of Addams’s notion of a “...
Research Interests:
This chapter presents a fuller, more accurate picture of Rorty’s early appreciation for and indebtedness to Peirce by establishing that Rorty was, by his own lights, at least for a time, a Peircean realist. This distinctive “Peircean”... more
This chapter presents a fuller, more accurate picture of Rorty’s early appreciation for and indebtedness to Peirce by establishing that Rorty was, by his own lights, at least for a time, a Peircean realist. This distinctive “Peircean” version of realism illuminates Rorty’s mature positions later expressed via a Davidsonian vocabulary. It also recounts how Rorty’s reading of Peirce’s end of inquiry and normative theory of self-controlled conduct enables him to grasp the dependence of epistemology on ethics and to see philosophical discourse as a rule-governed realm that necessitates choice of vocabulary and hence responsibility. Rorty turns out to be more of a realist, as traditionally understood, and Peirce less of one than we might expect. The “ethically-centered epistemology” aimed at the growth of knowledge Rorty sees in Peirce contrasts sharply with the view dominant among contemporary Peirceans, like Misak and Talisse, preoccupied above all with justification.
Research Interests:
This essay traces the trajectory of Richard Rorty’s ideas about the role of philosophy and argues that his appeal to philosophy as cultural politics is of a piece with his call in essays of the mid-1970s for philosophers to be more... more
This essay traces the trajectory of Richard Rorty’s ideas about the role of philosophy and argues that his appeal to philosophy as cultural politics is of a piece with his call in essays of the mid-1970s for philosophers to be more involved in the cause of “enlarging human freedom,” in Sidney Hook’s phrase. Going against the grain of received views about Rorty’s relation to John Dewey, it establishes the place in Rorty’s thought of Deweyan ideas about promoting moral, cultural, and political change by reconstructing philosophy and its role in the culture. While Rorty sought to jettison Dewey’s attempt to establish the “generic traits” of experience, his overall aim remained an affirmation of Dewey’s conception of philosophy as “an instrument of social change.”
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This chapter documents unexplored parallels between the pluralistic, “unfinished” universe heralded by James, and the contingent, linguistically mediated landscape open to endless redescription embraced by Rorty. Both are philosophers of... more
This chapter documents unexplored parallels between the pluralistic, “unfinished” universe heralded by James, and the contingent, linguistically mediated landscape open to endless redescription embraced by Rorty. Both are philosophers of agency who evoke a conception of knowledge in which humans are active participants in the construction of what is right and true. They reject an ethics that appeals to fixed principles, yet nonetheless combine their fallibilism and pluralism with an account of commitment and responsibility that manifests in an acute attentiveness to what James called the “cries of the wounded” and to the obligations that the claims of concrete others place on us. Read alongside James, Rortyan irony emerges as an ethical form of antiauthoritarian fallibilism. The combination of epistemic modesty and willingness to listen and learn from others with an account of ethical responsiveness is a signal contribution of their pragmatisms.
Research Interests:
The existing body of scholarship on Rorty’s relation to Dewey devotes relatively little attention to the shared commitments that animate their respective projects and what they hold in common philosophically. This article aims to shift... more
The existing body of scholarship on Rorty’s relation to Dewey devotes relatively little attention to the shared commitments that animate their respective projects and what they hold in common philosophically. This article aims to shift the discourse from assaying Rorty’s faithfulness to Dewey to clarifying and critically examining the differences that make a difference between their respective projects of philosophical reconstruction and democratic meliorism, in the hope of learning from mutually corrective insights and moving pragmatism beyond stale impasses. Highlighting the continuity between Rorty’s early work and later Philosophy as Cultural Politics in a commitment to a Deweyan notion of philosophy as an instrument of social change, I argue that their differences are most fruitfully understood against the backdrop of their shared attentiveness to cultural context, the sociopolitical character of philosophical inquiry, pressing issues of the day, and the need for philosophers to transcend professionalized debates.
Research Interests:
A key intellectual figure of the late twentieth century and primary force behind the resurgence of American pragmatism, Richard Rorty gained notoriety for his sweeping critique of the western philosophical tradition in Philosophy and the... more
A key intellectual figure of the late twentieth century and primary force behind the resurgence of American pragmatism, Richard Rorty gained notoriety for his sweeping critique of the western philosophical tradition in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. As he developed the consequences of his pragmatic philosophy over the next three decades in works like Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Truth and Progress, Achieving Our Country, Philosophy and Social Hope, and Philosophy as Cultural Politics, a deep set of democratic commitments and a vision for realizing them emerged. Rorty's thought depicts a mode of political theorizing that aims to move beyond “the entire cultural tradition which made truth a central virtue” of which political theorists have only begun to take full stock. Hope replaces transcendental knowledge, a lightly sketched possible future takes the place of appeals to an independent reality, stories supplant rational arguments, and abstract notions of humanity and rights are abandoned for felt, emotional identifications with particular communities. His work offers a large-scale program for self-criticism and reform of western societies by modifying their “self-image” to make them more responsive to suffering and injustice, both at home and abroad. Keywords: epistemology; foundationalism; postmodernism; pragmatism; rationalism; social democracy
Research Interests: Sociology and Philosophy
Research Interests:
Chapter 1 Acknowledgements Chapter 2 List of Abbreviations Chapter 3 Introduction: Reading Rorty Chapter 4 Chapter 1. Pragmatism and Personal Vision Chapter 5 Chapter 2. The Mirror and the Lever Chapter 6 Chapter 3. The Politics of the... more
Chapter 1 Acknowledgements Chapter 2 List of Abbreviations Chapter 3 Introduction: Reading Rorty Chapter 4 Chapter 1. Pragmatism and Personal Vision Chapter 5 Chapter 2. The Mirror and the Lever Chapter 6 Chapter 3. The Politics of the Novel Chapter 7 Chapter 4. The Limits of Sympathy Chapter 8 Chapter 5. Reflections on Public and Private Chapter 9 Chapter 6. American as the Greatest Poem Chapter 10 Conclusion. Rorty and Thesis Eleven
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
To engage constructively with aspects of his writing sometimes given short shrift, in this paper I contend that Rorty can be fruitfully approached as a political theorist concerned with promulgating a new picture of the political world.... more
To engage constructively with aspects of his writing sometimes given short shrift, in this paper I contend that Rorty can be fruitfully approached as a political theorist concerned with promulgating a new picture of the political world. Situating his recent thought as a political intervention aimed at revitalizing a moribund left allows us to take seriously his antirepresentationalist claims and evaluate his thought in terms of its political effects rather than accuracy of representation. By reading Rorty’s notion of ‘metaphorical redescription’ through Sheldon Wolin’s conception of political theory as a kind of ‘vision’, I highlight the value of imaginatively constructing new perspectives on our world as a prelude to changing it. Yet even as it authorizes the creative power of imaginative language, Rorty’s antirepresentationalism limits the critical potential of his project by severing his redescriptions from political reality. Where Rorty seeks to alter our vocabularies, the great...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Rorty’s explicit engagement with moral and political issues in the early 1990s has received significant commentary. More recent scholarship has begun to elucidate moral and political concerns at work in Rorty’s philosophical stances as... more
Rorty’s explicit engagement with moral and political issues in the early 1990s has received significant commentary. More recent scholarship has begun to elucidate moral and political concerns at work in Rorty’s philosophical stances as well. The specific topic of Rorty’s ethics has been relatively neglected, at least until the recent book by William Curtis. Curtis argues Rorty is «above all else, a political and moral philosopher» who can be read as «a proponent of a liberal virtue ethics». While broadly in keeping with and sympathetic to Curtis’s reading, my account differs in emphasizing a specific concern with ethical responsibility that runs from Rorty’s earliest published work to his last writings, focused directly on those we exclude from our communities, as his distinctive contribution.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This paper highlights commonalities in the thought of James and Rorty around a melioristic ethics of belief that foregrounds a distinctly pragmatic interrelation of choice, commitment, and responsibility. Its aim is to develop the... more
This paper highlights commonalities in the thought of James and Rorty around a melioristic ethics of belief that foregrounds a distinctly pragmatic interrelation of choice, commitment, and responsibility. Its aim is to develop the combination of epistemic modesty and willingness to listen and learn from others with an account of ethical responsiveness as a signal contribution of their pragmatism. Reading them as philosophers of agency and commitment brings into view shared ethical and epistemological assumptions that have received little attention. Despite differences in perspective, the pluralistic, " unfinished " universe heralded by James and the contingent, linguistically-mediated landscape open to endless redescription embraced by Rorty, both authorize a space of freedom that rejects determinism and the philosophically necessary and demands active choice and self-created commitment. Both reject an ethics that appeals to fixed principles; yet they nonetheless combine their fallibilism and pluralism with an account of commitment and responsibility.
Research Interests:
The existing body of scholarship on Rorty’s relation to Dewey devotes relatively little attention to the shared commitments that animate their respective projects and what they hold in common philosophically. This article aims to shift... more
The existing body of scholarship on Rorty’s relation to Dewey devotes relatively little attention to the shared commitments that animate their respective projects and what they hold in common philosophically. This article aims to shift the discourse from assaying Rorty’s faithfulness to Dewey to clarifying and critically examining the differences that make a difference between their respective projects of philosophical reconstruction and democratic meliorism, in the hope of learning from mutually corrective insights and moving pragmatism beyond stale impasses. Highlighting the continuity between Rorty’s early work and later Philosophy as Cultural Politics in a commitment to a Deweyan notion of philosophy as an instrument of social change, I argue that their differences are most fruitfully understood against the backdrop of their shared attentiveness to cultural context, the sociopolitical character of philosophical inquiry, pressing issues of the day, and the need for philosophers to transcend professionalized debates.
Research Interests:
This essay gives an account of the underlying moral dimension of Rorty’s thought, turning to his earliest published essays rather than reading his later work back into his epistemological critiques. To make taking other human beings... more
This essay gives an account of the underlying moral dimension of Rorty’s thought, turning to his earliest published essays rather than reading his later work back into his epistemological critiques. To make taking other human beings seriously the highest priority of in the social practice of justification means subordinating the normative to the moral. Bringing this neglected moral dimension into view sheds new light on positions deemed inadequate by analytic philosophers, Deweyan, and “new” pragmatists alike concerning Rorty’s views on truth as the goal of inquiry, the possibility of rational criticism, and warranted answerability.
Research Interests:
This paper examines Rorty’s notion of philosophy as cultural politics. Highlighting its explicitly Deweyan origins, I trace this idea to Rorty’s call in the 1970s for philosophers to be more involved in the cause of enlarging human... more
This paper examines Rorty’s notion of philosophy as cultural politics. Highlighting its explicitly Deweyan origins, I trace this idea to Rorty’s call in the 1970s for philosophers to be more involved in the cause of enlarging human freedom and read it as bringing philosophy into his project of expanding the conversation beyond the West to include excluded voices through literature and narrative. After underscoring Rorty’s important contributions, I argue that rather than merely assimilating non-Western voices to “our” conversation, cultural politics may demand that privileged philosophers start joining the conversations of others.
Research Interests:
A key intellectual figure of the late twentieth century and primary force behind the resurgence of American pragmatism, Richard Rorty gained notoriety for his sweeping critique of the western philosophical tradition in Philosophy and the... more
A key intellectual figure of the late twentieth century and primary force behind the resurgence of American pragmatism, Richard Rorty gained notoriety for his sweeping critique of the western philosophical tradition in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. As he developed the consequences of his pragmatic philosophy over the next three decades in works like Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Truth and Progress, Achieving Our Country, Philosophy and Social Hope, and Philosophy as Cultural Politics, a deep set of democratic commitments and a vision for realizing them emerged. Rorty's thought depicts a mode of political theorizing that aims to move beyond “the entire cultural tradition which made truth a central virtue” of which political theorists have only begun to take full stock. Hope replaces transcendental knowledge, a lightly sketched possible future takes the place of appeals to an independent reality, stories supplant rational arguments, and abstract notions of humanity and rights are abandoned for felt, emotional identifications with particular communities. His work offers a large-scale program for self-criticism and reform of western societies by modifying their “self-image” to make them more responsive to suffering and injustice, both at home and abroad.
Research Interests:
La concepción “política” de la justicia de John Rawls es una de las nociones más influyentes que respeta la diversidad irreducible e irreconciliable de doctrinas morales, filosóficas, y religiosas que caracterizan una cultura democrática... more
La concepción “política” de la justicia de John Rawls es una de las nociones más influyentes que respeta la diversidad irreducible e irreconciliable de doctrinas morales, filosóficas, y religiosas que caracterizan una cultura democrática pluralista. Si bien sabemos de las publicaciones póstumas recientes de su comprensión profunda de la importancia definitiva de la religión, esta concepción aparece disminuir una dimensión fundamental de las luchas más importantes por la justicia social, como la de Martin Luther King, Jr. y el movimiento para los derechos civiles. Este artículo examina los escritos recientes de Richard Rorty por su potencial para aliviar esta tensión entre la religión y la justicia social, y sostiene que por medio de su distinción entre apelaciones a una autoridad trascendental dentro del discurso democrático – lo que llamo “la religión como un tapón de la conversación” – y las obras de las parroquias locales y las comunidades espirituales, Rorty nos ofrece una manera de entender al papel de la religión en una cultura democrática que alista su servicio en la causa de la justicia social y que extiende a la herencia de King.
John Rawls’s “political” conception remains our most influential notion of justice designed to respect the irreducible and irreconcilable diversity of moral, philosophical, and religious doctrines characteristic of a pluralistic democratic culture. While we know from recent posthumous publications of Rawls’s deep understanding of religion’s ultimate importance, this conception seems to neuter a fundamental dimension of the most important struggles for social justice, like those embodied in Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement. This article examines recent work by Richard Rorty for its potential in thinking through this tension surrounding religion and social justice and argues that by distinguishing appeals to transcendental authority within democratic discourse – what Rorty once called “religion as a conversation-stopper” – from the work of local parishes and spiritual communities, Rorty offers a way of understanding the role of religion in a democratic culture that enlists its service in the cause of social justice that extends the legacy of King.
John Rawls’s “political” conception remains our most influential notion of justice designed to respect the irreducible and irreconcilable diversity of moral, philosophical, and religious doctrines characteristic of a pluralistic democratic culture. While we know from recent posthumous publications of Rawls’s deep understanding of religion’s ultimate importance, this conception seems to neuter a fundamental dimension of the most important struggles for social justice, like those embodied in Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement. This article examines recent work by Richard Rorty for its potential in thinking through this tension surrounding religion and social justice and argues that by distinguishing appeals to transcendental authority within democratic discourse – what Rorty once called “religion as a conversation-stopper” – from the work of local parishes and spiritual communities, Rorty offers a way of understanding the role of religion in a democratic culture that enlists its service in the cause of social justice that extends the legacy of King.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Review Article
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
On Philosophy and Philosophers is a volume of unpublished philosophical papers by Richard Rorty, a central figure in late-twentieth-century intellectual debates and a primary force behind the resurgence of American pragmatism. The first... more
On Philosophy and Philosophers is a volume of unpublished philosophical papers by Richard Rorty, a central figure in late-twentieth-century intellectual debates and a primary force behind the resurgence of American pragmatism. The first collection of new work to appear since his death in 2007, these previously unseen papers advance novel views on metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, philosophical semantics and the social role of philosophy, critically engaging canonical and contemporary figures from Plato and Kant to Kripke and Brandom. This book's diverse offerings, which include technical essays written for specialists and popular lectures, refine our understanding of Rorty's perspective and demonstrate the ongoing relevance of the iconoclastic American philosopher's ground-breaking thought. An introduction by the editors highlights the papers' original insights and contributions to contemporary debates.