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Terrestrial Thoughts, Extraterrestrial Science

Bernard Williams, 7 February 1991

Realism with a Human Face 
by Hilary Putnam.
Harvard, 347 pp., £23.95, October 1990, 0 674 74950 2
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... 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 ...

Transcendental Criticism

David Trotter, 3 March 1988

The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections 
by Richard Poirier.
Faber, 256 pp., £14.95, March 1988, 0 571 15013 6
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... 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 ...

Untheory

Alexander Nehamas, 22 May 1986

Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction 
by Christopher Norris.
Methuen, 247 pp., £16, November 1985, 0 416 39939 8
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Philosophical Profiles 
by Richard Bernstein.
Polity, 313 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 7456 0226 6
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Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism 
edited by W.J.T. Mitchell.
Chicago, 146 pp., £12.75, November 1985, 0 226 53226 7
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... 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 ...

Experience

Christopher Peacocke, 18 December 1986

Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson 
edited by Ernest LePore.
Blackwell, 520 pp., £29.50, April 1986, 0 631 14811 6
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... 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 ...

Into the Mental Basement

Thomas Nagel: Science and Religion, 19 August 2010

Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion 
by Barbara Herrnstein Smith.
Yale, 201 pp., £25, March 2010, 978 0 300 14034 7
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... 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 ...

Fraught with Ought

Tim Crane: Wilfrid Sellars, 19 June 2008

In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars 
edited by Kevin Scharp and Robert Brandom.
Harvard, 491 pp., £29.95, May 2007, 978 0 674 02498 4
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Wilfrid Sellars: Fusing the Images 
by Jay Rosenberg.
Oxford, 320 pp., £45, September 2007, 978 0 19 921455 6
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... 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 ...

Dear Prudence

Steven Shapin: Stephen Toulmin, 14 January 2002

Return to Reason 
by Stephen Toulmin.
Harvard, 243 pp., £16.95, June 2001, 0 674 00495 7
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... 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 ...

Locke rules

Ian Hacking, 21 November 1991

Locke. Vol. I: Epistemology 
by Michael Ayers.
Routledge, 341 pp., £90, September 1991, 0 415 06406 6
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Locke. Vol. II: Ontology 
by Michael Ayers.
Routledge, 341 pp., £90, September 1991, 0 415 06407 4
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... 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 ...

How philosophers live

James Miller, 8 September 1994

A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises 
by Stanley Cavell.
Harvard, 196 pp., £20.75, July 1994, 0 674 66980 0
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... 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, ...

God without God

Stephen Mulhall: How we can ground our values?, 22 September 2005

Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics and Law 
by Gianni Vattimo, translated by William McCuaig.
Columbia, 197 pp., £16, October 2004, 0 231 13082 1
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... 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 ...

Diary

Richard Wollheim: In South Africa, 3 July 1986

... 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 ...

Gloves Off

Glen Newey: Torture, 29 January 2009

Death by a Thousand Cuts 
by Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon and Gregory Blue.
Harvard, 320 pp., £22.95, March 2008, 978 0 674 02773 2
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Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story 
by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris.
Picador, 286 pp., £8.99, January 2009, 978 0 330 45201 4
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Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law 
by Philippe Sands.
Allen Lane, 315 pp., £20, May 2008, 978 1 84614 008 2
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... 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 ...

Speaking Azza

Martin Jay: Where are you coming from?, 28 November 2002

Situatedness; Or, Why We Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From 
by David Simpson.
Duke, 290 pp., £14.50, March 2002, 0 8223 2839 9
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... 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 ...

Je m’en Foucault

Vincent Descombes, 5 March 1987

Foucault: A Critical Reader 
edited by David Hoy.
Blackwell, 246 pp., £27.50, September 1986, 0 631 14042 5
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Foucault 
by Gilles Deleuze.
Minuit, 141 pp., frs 58, February 1986, 2 7073 1086 7
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... 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, ...

On Getting the Life You Want

Adam Phillips, 20 June 2024

... What is the reward for knowing the worst?Donald Barthelme, Snow WhiteWhen Richard Rorty​ wrote, in one of his many familiar pragmatist pronouncements, that the only way you can tell if something is true is if it helps you get the life you want, it sounded either like a provocative assertion or another advertisement, masquerading as epistemology, for consumer capitalism ...

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