Richard Rorty in Retrospect

...As he remarked with his trademark insouciance in the Philosophical Investigations: “philosophical problems arise when language goes on a holiday...

...Thus, in deploying the “original position” in A Theory of Justice, Rawls had made a series of illicit metaphysical assumptions about what it meant to be a fully human, rational actor...

...How one answers this question is critical to assessing Rorty’s robust intellectual legacy...

...What if the same were true of philosophy...

...The economic royalists whom Franklin Roosevelt denounced still had a lot invested in America’s future...

...In view of the recent anniversary of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature—a book that has been translated into seventeen languages and is surely one of the most influential and widely read philosophy books of the twentieth century—I would like to reappraise its central arguments before I evaluate Rorty’s contribution to social democratic thought...

...Undoubtedly, this disillusionment helps account for his intellectual attraction to the meliorist temperament of pragmatism as well as his aversion to utopian political paradigms...

...whereas for Rorty, truth could only be local...

...realism vs...

...Here, one could almost hear Rorty’s readers muttering under their breaths: “E per se muove...

...Although Rorty was a self-proclaimed “liberal ironist,” and his French counterparts embraced an apocalyptical anarchism, during the 1980s the two factions were able to forge a temporary marriage of convenience in their battles against the reigning epistemological orthodoxy...

...It’s an obligation of us in the field to grit our teeth and discourage the people who do the things that give philosophy a bad name...

...As he observed in The Quest for Certainty: “We should regard practice as the only means . . . by which whatever is judged to be honorable, admirable, approvable can be kept in concrete experienceable existence...

...At the time he was comfortably ensconced at Princeton University, whose department was one of the bastions of analytic orthodoxy...

...As Foucault observed in one of his weaker moments, “Reason is torture...

...One of the curious aspects of the reception given Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is that it has been more highly valued by non-philosophers than philosophers...

...Rorty concludes Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by distinguishing between “systematic” and “edifying” philosophy...

...Rorty’s central argument was nothing if not iconoclastic...

...The variegated and contingent nature of social life precluded all such efforts...

...Dewey viewed the philosophical quest for Absolute Knowledge divorced from experience as sublimated theology: the search for Absolutes was carried out at the expense of the manifold richness of human experience...

...Instead of searching, à la Plato and Kant, for some ethereal, transcendental ideal of justice, they sought to root virtue in the historical practices and interconnectedness of specific human communities...

...He had come to realize that it was impossible to reconcile postmodernism’s glib philosophical anarchism with the social democratic credo he had imbibed as a youth and which, in his sixties, he belatedly sought to reactivate...

...Following the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty transposed his criticisms of philosophy to contemporary debates in political thought...

...Even a cursory glance at John Dewey’s legacy shows that pragmatism and progressivism were eminently compatible...

...Rorty’s belated return to the democratic socialist fold, after his wilderness years fighting what were by his own admission some fairly sterile epistemological wars, was of course a welcome development...

...Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science at the City University of New York Graduate Center...

...The muddy waters of historical circumstance undermined philosophy’s pretense to disseminate eternal cognitive verities...

...In addition to Wittgenstein, the intellectual heroes of Rorty’s anti-epistemological polemic were Heidegger and Dewey...

...Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature took special aim at the modern incarnations of the philosophical idea, as developed by Descartes and his successors, Locke, Hume, and Kant...

...When in Achieving Our Country Rorty revisits the CIA’s corrupting influence on the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Kennedy administration’s lies about the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, or the misdeeds of American foreign policy in Guatemala and Iran, he shrugs his shoulders as if such transgressions were simply the normal costs of doing business...

...His new book, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s, has just appeared with Princeton University Press...

...As Rorty notes in “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” “The philosopher of liberal democracy may wish to develop a theory of the human Self that comports with the institutions he or she admires...

...Yes, claimed Rorty emphatically, thereby remaining logically consistent, while flouting common sense...

...There was no getting around the far-reaching implications of Rorty’s contentions and claims...

...He feared that one of the significant unintended consequences of the “theory” vogue was a forgetting of history...

...Fittingly, Achieving Our Country was co-dedicated to the memory of Dissent founder Irving Howe...

...Better that it disqualify itself and allow literary theory to fill the cultural breach that emerged in the wake of philosophy’s disappearance...

...Not only did he undertake an all-out confrontation with the reigning philosophical establishment, the analytic guild, but he heretically launched this assault from the belly of the beast, as it were...

...One could with some justification speak of a unified working class during the Great Depression...

...Instead, they were invariably dependent on context, thereby suggesting that local practices and individual “language games” are all there is...

...Were there, then, no context-transcendent ethical insights that one might mobilize to undermine a dictatorship or to criticize governments that systematically violated their citizens’ dignity...

...But such a philosopher is not thereby justifying these institutions by reference to more fundamental premises, but the reverse: He or she is putting politics first and tailoring a philosophy to suit it...

...All other substantive philosophical concerns—morality, justice, beauty—were in essence banished to the reverie of poets on a starry night...

...There were no gray areas...

...Yet, owing to the postmodernists’ insatiable fascination with the involutions of high theory, he denounced them as members of an ineffectual, post-political “spectatorial left...

...Its goal is to make the world a more interesting place by incessantly reconceptualizing it in fresh and imaginative ways...

...There are weak and strong versions of pragmatism...

...Both thinkers had rejected the Cartesian desire for certitude as sterile and misguided...

...As a pragmatist, Dewey believed that the criterion for “truth” should be the advancement of human happiness in the here and now...

...The strength of the dollar does not matter to them, because their investment advisers can flip their money into other currencies at the touch of a button...

...In the positivists’ view, strictly speaking, such questions had nothing to do with “knowledge...

...In Rorty’s view, these were the Left’s glory years, prior to the era when the New Left succumbed to the misanthropic vogue of spelling America with a “k...

...Philosophically speaking, Rorty had more in common with so-called communitarians like Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer...

...Thomas Aquinas...

...Ultimately, in Achieving Our Country Rorty provided a superficial rendering of complex, multifaceted historical developments...

...Charles S. Peirce, for example, offered a strong version based on a semiotic theory of truth...

...There is little reason to believe that what is good for General Motors or Microsoft is good for America...

...His account seemed driven by the nostalgia of his boyhood political yearnings, which reflected the political leanings of his parents’ generation, rather than by the challenges of contemporary politics...

...For example, Rorty averred that it was nonsensical to speak of an objective world independent of human judgment, since our knowledge of reality is linguistically constituted...

...What was troubling was that Rorty’s distaste for metaphysics risked slipping into a selfdefeating epistemological skepticism...

...Instead of being a cumulative and linear process, science “advanced” by abrupt paradigm changes or epistemological breaks...

...There can be no doubt that Rorty believed everything he said...

...In an outstanding autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Rorty revealed his youthful hope that social justice and beauty could ultimately be reconciled—a hope, he admits, that was ultimately disappointed...

...Thus, whereas postmodernists might know the doctrines of Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan by rote, they were clueless about the great struggles of the American labor movement: Eugene Debs’s quixotic 1912 presidential run, the bitter fights to organize, the strikes, and the brutal repression that almost always followed...

...Nor did Rorty display much patience for the academic Left’s flirtation with a Spenglerian philosophy of history: replacing the Enlightenment doctrine of progress with a simplistic and one-sided narrative of historical decline...

...In Rorty’s view, liberal Kantians like the early Rawls and Ronald Dworkin erred in supposing one could formulate a universal, ahistorical concept of justice that would be valid for all peoples at all times...

...In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn had shown how the logic of scientific discovery was historically conditioned...

...As Rorty observes in “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” “For purposes of social theory, we can put aside such topics as an ahistorical human nature, the nature of selfhood, the motive of moral behavior, and the meaning of human life...

...Rorty’s blurring of the boundaries between philosophy and non-philosophy, as well as his more general insinuation that professional philosophy has done more harm than good, riled others, including the philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett: “Dick Rorty has failed to discourage a lot of nonsense that I wish he had discouraged...

...Austin had sought to redefine the mission of philosophy...

...Rorty suggests that Cardinal Bellarmine acknowledged the limited validity of Galileo’s doctrines: they might be valid for specific practical purposes, such as the ends of navigation, but scripture provides a more satisfactory and comprehensive understanding of the meaning of the heavens...

...Conversely, edifying philosophy, which Rorty favored, harbors no pretension to penetrate to the essence of reality...

...For years Rorty’s radical political heritage smoldered in the background...

...Here, the paradigm of human rights that has gained widespread international legitimacy since the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights comes to mind...

...It was in this work that Rorty sought to combine his philosophical interest in American pragmatism— John Dewey, a family friend whom Rorty had known as a boy, was one of his intellectual heroes—with a commitment to enlightened social reform, whose high water marks had been the Progressive Era and the New Deal...

...Rorty concluded that there was no way to square the progressive, social democratic political agenda he favored with the views of the postmodernist allies he had acquired in his battles against the American philosophical establishment...

...Rorty’s ethical relativism manifested itself in his claim that values were devoid of transcendent validity...

...that is, specific to various historical communities...

...The fact that, in the name of combating the red menace, the United States propped up political regimes that were both authoritarian and genocidal—in John Rawls’s parlance, “outlaw states”—remained curiously untroubling for him...

...And it seemed that, over time, Rorty displayed a greater affinity for such tendencies than he did for the gravitas of the philosopher’s vocation...

...In his view, the very concept of “principle” was redolent of the sins of metaphysics...

...What upset philosophers like Hempel, Dennett, and others was that Rorty’s blasé approach toward questions of truth and value harmonized with more deeply rooted anti-intellectual cultural tendencies...

...Rorty was content to march shoulder to shoulder with the communitarians up to the point where they tried to legitimate their ideals and commitments philosophically—as did Alisdair MacIntyre, for example, in After Virtue, where he suggested that a solution to the ills of Western liberalism lay in a revival of the philosophy of St...

...One of the reasons that the anti-epistemological perspective celebrated in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature caught on was that it harmonized with the poststructuralist “critique of reason” that, during the 1970s, was popular in continental philosophy and literary theory circles...

...The philosopher’s task was to produce correct—that is, accurate and faithful—“representations” of reality...

...Some of his more dogmatic skeptical claims appeared absurdly counter-intuitive...

...Rorty recognized the value of multiculturalism as part of the ever-expanding logic of democratic inclusion...

...RECONSIDERATIONS Richard Rorty in Retrospect RICHARD WOLIN Richard Rorty, who died in 2007, was one of the leading American philosophers of the twentieth century...

...Like Rorty, these latter-day Aristotelians or Hegelians were archly critical of the selflegislating, disembodied selves vaunted by the liberal Kantians...

...However, in the era of flexible response, post-Fordist capitalism, such appeals had a palpably anachronistic ring...

...Rorty’s rejection of the “truth-as-representation” paradigm built on the work of other analytic philosophers who had come to question the epistemological sanctities...

...Rorty declared that philosophy had forfeited its status as a cultural arbiter and pacesetter...

...Is the avowedly “weak” epistemological standpoint Rorty developed in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature adequate to the social democratic political goals he ultimately came to embrace...

...Thereafter, philosophy’s traditional problems—the mind-body dualism...

...In Rorty’s view, the successful practice of democracy was in no way dependent on prior philosophical formulations or discoveries...

...As a public intellectual, Rorty was averse to engaging in polemics...

...Here it is worth noting that one of his most frequently cited essays bears the title “Ethics Without Principles...

...But if one scrutinizes its fundamental thesis more closely, one understands why this is hardly surprising...

...Rorty, conversely, presents us with a notably weak version of pragmatism...

...Despite this background, Rorty’s own political interests crystallized relatively late in life, with the 1998 publication of Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in the Twentieth Century...

...Systematic philosophy is obsolete, claims Rorty...

...What one sacrificed in thematic scope—which was, as it turned out, quite considerable—presumably one would regain in hard-nosed precision...

...Still, there remained something a bit too pat and antiquarian about the nature of his “return”—as if, from the vantage point of the late 1990s, one could magically turn back the clock to the years 19321964...

...Rorty’s conclusion might as well read, “We are all literary theorists now...

...In Rorty’s view, the discipline of philosophy has very little to contribute to such Emersonian practices...

...But it was also clear that, at a certain point, he ceased to take the central problems of philosophy seriously...

...What he failed to realize is that “love of country” is cheapened if it is allowed to degenerate to the status of blind loyalty or unconditional love...

...Too often, Rorty felt that we could simply do without principle...

...Like all meaningful political allegiances, patriotism must be predicated on considerations of principle...

...Ultimately, Rorty’s aversion to principle jibed ominously with the “antiintellectualism in American life” so astutely diagnosed by the historian Richard Hofstadter...

...For the logical empiricists, there were basically two sources of truth: empirical truths, such as those bequeathed by natural science, and logical truths...

...He staked out his own position in the liberalism-communitarian controversy of the 1980s...

...Detractors felt that by rejecting so many fundamental philosophical questions and challenges as “pseudo-problems,” unworthy of serious intellectual consideration, Rorty also gave up on the practices of rigorous argumentation...

...Rorty took exception to the idea that philosophy could make good on its promise to provide us with a series of timeless and eternal truths about the nature of reality, that it might furnish universal and irrefutable insight into the nature of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good...

...Rorty hailed from a family of leftists...

...Yet, if Rorty’s contextualism was valid, on what basis might one maintain the normative superiority of his deeply cherished “postmodern bourgeois liberalism...

...It only broke through to the surface in 1998 with Achieving Our Country, Rorty’s unsentimental adieu to the misguided pieties of the academic left...

...As a youth, Rorty recalls being bounced on the knees of Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling...

...The germ of the poststructuralist standpoint was the later Heidegger’s claim, “Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought...

...Although orthodox, latter-day Cartesians and Humeans were relatively few, it was they who had bequeathed to modern philosophy a methodology and a distinct set of problems...

...Rorty’s cold war triumphalism—one of Achieving Our Country’s leitmotifs—was likewise unsatisfactory...

...Ordinary language philosophers like Wittgenstein and J.L...

...who have made us ashamed of our dear country by their defilements...[and] who have cloaked their extortion with the gospel of Christ...

...Rorty carried this frameworkbased perspective to such an extreme that at one point he insisted that, given the theological tenor of seventeenth-century cosmology, Cardinal Bellarmine was justified in rejecting Galileo’s heliocentric theory of the solar system...

...Instead, it emulates the Emersonian ideal of perpetual reinvention or redescription...

...From such negative insights and conclusions, it was only a short step to an allergy toward the practices of reasoned argumentation in general...

...The one criticism that genuinely seemed to irk him was that of glibness or being intellectually irresponsible...

...It failed to draw the necessary conclusions from the “linguistic turn” and remained ensconced in the outmoded paradigm of “representation...

...Inspired by scientific models of certainty, they had sought to keep speculation at bay by turning philosophy into a handmaiden of the natural sciences...

...Despite his later self-characterization as a “liberal ironist,” Rorty, as we have seen, hailed from a family of political radicals...

...As Rorty observes, whereas the immigrant constituency of the traditional Left embraced the “melting pot” metaphor, thus recognizing that a respect for difference must be based on an underlying set of political commonalities, the cultural left glorified “difference,” thereby inviting infighting and Balkanization...

...Thereby, it unwittingly came to embody the ills that Christopher Lasch associated with the “Culture of Narcissism...

...knowledge vs...

...It was this school that conceived philosophy primarily as “epistemology...

...But did that mean that natural entities such as planets, electrons, and trees had no real existence prior to human language...

...The portent of Rorty’s claims went even further, touching the very heart of the philosopher’s craft as articulated some 2,500 years ago by Plato and his heirs...

...The question remains: how successful were Rorty’s efforts to fuse the philosophical perspective he had forged in his breakthrough book of 1979, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature—a perspective that remained steadfastly averse to strong, context-transcendent, normative claims—with a social democratic political agenda...

...For Peirce, concepts were signs and, as such, meaningful representations of reality...

...Yet, he faulted the academic theory crowd for rechanneling class politics along the lines of cultural politics...

...Rorty contended that philosophy was a historically specific “language game” whose origins could be traced to the pre-Socratics...

...Mind was something “internal,” as suggested by Descartes’s description of it as res cogitans or “thinking substance...

...Rorty argued instead that once one gave up on philosophy as “correspondence theory,” the entire enterprise should be abandoned...

...For Wittgenstein, philosophy’s mission was not so much “objective”—to uncover the true nature of the world—as it was “therapeutic”— to clear up the misunderstandings and confusions resulting from the misuse of language...

...Rorty felt that liberal political philosophers erred in expecting philosophy to provide a series of definitive guarantees...

...Reasoning consequentially, he proposed that the world would become a more humane place if no one did...

...In Achieving Our Country Rorty sought to reestablish patriotism as a paramount political virtue for the American Left...

...In his sermons, Raushenbush would rail volubly against “the servants of Mammon...who drain their fellow men for gain...

...By claiming that novelists like Nabokov and Orwell had more to teach us about politics than titans of modern liberalism like Kant and Mill, as he did in his next major work, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty curiously ended up sharing more ground with his positivist adversaries than he may have cared to admit...

...Dewey, for his part, sought to ground pragmatism in the proven successes of the scientific method and on the bedrock of “experience...

...By ceding priority to specific contexts and local practices, Rorty deprived himself of valuable normative resources that could help validate the liberal tolerance he held dear...

...idealism...

...We treat these as irrelevant to politics as Jefferson thought questions about the Trinity and ...transubstantiation...

...For example, the positivists had contended that moral and political judgments fell beneath the threshold of philosophical rigor...

...Its aim is informal and nondogmatic: to perpetuate the “Conversation of Mankind,” rather than to uncover objective truths...

...The New Left lost its moral compass by ignoring this fact and then by disastrously flirting with “anti-anticommunism...

...He seemed undisturbed by the violations of international law these actions entailed and by the human rights abuses that were a direct consequence of American-supported dictatorships in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East...

...For Rorty, such practices might have a highly qualified, local significance, but nothing approaching the universal validity typically sought after by practicing philosophers...

...Instead, we would simply jettison them and move on to other non-philosophical, less restrictive ways of thinking about the world...

...In his view the entire paradigm of representation has collapsed...

...For today’s super-rich, such an investment would be imprudent...

...For Rorty’s discussion of this debate, which is somewhat more intricate than I can explain in the present context, see Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 228331...

...Rorty’s withering critique of the philosopher’s vocation in his 1979 opus was poorly received by his fellow philosophers...

...Instead, it stressed the primordiality of language, a tendency later canonized as the “linguistic turn...

...Instead, the only guidelines we possessed were the informal habitudes and mores that emerged from local practice...

...Rorty pointed this out eloquently in a 1997 contributions to Dissent, “Back to Class Politics,” which represented a trial run for some of the themes he developed in Achieving Our Country: This new situation [of economic inequality] is fine with the 1 percent of Americans who own 40 percent of their country’s wealth...

...Twentieth-century analytic philosophy, whose progenitors were Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap, remained wedded to the basic epistemology paradigm of “truth-as-representation...

...Ultimately Rorty argues that, because of the incommensurability of the two paradigms, scientific and theological, it is inadmissible to claim that either party, the scientist or the cardinal, was objectively right: “So the question about whether Bellarmine (and, perforce, Galileo’s defenders) was bringing in extraneous ‘unscientific’ considerations seems to be a question about whether there is some antecedent way of determining the relevance of one statement to another...

...While the American professorate, distracted by cultural politics, remained preoccupied with questions of “symbolic domination” and the “materiality of the signifier,” society as a whole was experiencing heightened economic inequality...

...In his endorsement of rights as “trumps” in A Matter of Principle, Dworkin, in Rorty’s view, had committed a similar error, presuming that one could define a set of absolute, transcendental precepts that magically inhered in persons qua persons...

...Nothing] could show that the Bellarmine-Galileo issue ‘differs in kind’ from the issue between, say, Kerensky and Lenin, or that between the Royal Academy (circa 1910) and Bloomsbury” (330-331...

...By flirting with political absolutes, Kantian liberals, like Dworkin and the early Rawls, illicitly sought to impart an element of metaphysical closure to politics...

...But how well suited Rorty’s own peculiar, antifoundationalist version of pragmatism may have been for the ends of democratic socialism might be a different matter entirely...

...I don’t think he does that enough...

...Communitarians, by contrast, often speak as though political institutions were no better than their philosophical foundations...

...In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty, whose most important publication prior to this was an edited volume from 1970 called The Linguistic Turn, proceeded from the linguistic turn, which he then radicalized...

...The other intellectual eminence subtending Rorty’s argument in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was Thomas Kuhn...

...His maternal grandfather was Walter Raushenbush, who, during the 1920s and 1930s, along with Reinhold Niebuhr, was one of the pioneers of the Social Gospel movement...

...Instead, Rorty wrote, “today philosophy has already been displaced by literary criticism in its principal cultural function—as a source of youth’s self-description and of its own difference from the past...

...By the late twentieth century, it had distinctly outlived its usefulness...

...As a result, such judgments were reduced to matters of emotional or subjective preference...

...Kuhn described this process via the distinction between “revolutionary” and “normal” science...

...He remembers serving sandwiches to John Dewey at one of his parents’ Halloween parties...

...In Rorty’s view, by neglecting philosophy’s historical determinants, philosophers had misleadingly suppressed the contingent, time-bound nature of their own enterprise...

...For many, whatever points he was able to score against the failings of philosophy-as-epistemology seemed overshadowed by a posture of radical skepticism that at times verged on relativism, even nihilism...

...Their dividends typically increase when jobs are exported from Ohio to south China, and from North Carolina to Thailand...

...Rorty reasoned...

...Hopelessness has become fashionable on the left—principled, theorized, philosophical hopelessness...

...It neither strives to get the world “right” nor to tell the truth about the way things really are...

...To] proclaim our loyalty to these distinctions is not to say that there are ‘objective’ and ‘rational’ standards for adopting them...

...An account of its obsolescence and demise was what Rorty himself tried to furnish in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which thus assumed the form of an inverted philosophical Bildungsroman...

...For Rorty, Achieving Our Country also signified a political break with his erstwhile philosophical allies, the so-called postmodernists...

...Following Wittgenstein’s precedent in Philosophical Investigations (1953), this dissident current was gradually moving away from the idea of “truth-as-representation...

...If philosophy or intellection can’t really demonstrate or prove anything about the nature of reality, what we customarily call “knowledge” is in truth arbitrary, ephemeral, and ultimately pointless...

...Although the main sources of Rorty’s antiphilosophical animus were pragmatism and the later Wittgenstein, his perspective meshed with a more sensational, histrionic critique emanating from thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, and Jacques Lacan...

...As Rorty laments: “We are told over and over again that Lacan has shown human desire to be inherently unsatisfiable, that Derrida has shown meaning to be undecidable, that Lyotard has shown commensuration between oppressed and oppressors to be impossible, and that events such as the Holocaust or the massacre of the original Americans are unrepresentable...

...Ironically, despite Rorty’s profound methodological reservations about analytic philosophy, he ended up sharing a number of the analysts’ more controversial positions...

...Rorty openly acknowledged that his iconoclasm cost him valuable friendships— for example, that of the philosopher of science and refugee from Nazi Germany, Carl Hempel, who upon reading Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity broke off relations, declaring that Rorty had betrayed the philosopher’s vocation...

...In his view, the struggle against communism was an intrinsically Good Fight...

...Rorty also believed that philosophy could not shed much light on contemporary moral and political problems...

...Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature sought to bring about a fundamental paradigm change in Western philosophy...

...They have less and less at stake in America’s future, and more and more invested in an efficient and productive global economy...

...Reality was something “external,” as suggested by his characterization of it as res extensa or “extended substance...

...Insofar as Rorty shared Rawls’s and Dworkin’s embrace of political liberalism, his objections to the Kantian standpoint were less political than epistemological...

...His parents, James Rorty and Winifred Raushenbush, were disillusioned communists with avowed Trotskyist sympathies...

...They were the eminences who set philosophy on its contemporary course by focusing on questions of epistemology—how it is that we know what we claim to know...

...To their discredit, Kant’s latter-day heirs remained ensconced in the philosophy-as-epistemology paradigm, erroneously expecting mind to furnish eternal truths...

...opinion— would cease to exist as problems...

...Kuhn’s views played an important role in convincing Rorty that the attempt to provide politics with a strong normative foundation, in the manner of Jürgen Habermas or John Rawls, was fundamentally misguided...

...We could instead rely on “local practices,” however they might be defined...

...Under the banner of multiculturalism, the academic Left reveled in all manner of identity politics, Rorty charged...