Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers

Fabulous book! My philosophy loving partner hasn't put it down. (It was in great shape, too!)

Rorty's Introduction is excellent, but short. The chapters are organized into three sections. The first eight articles deal with some fairly technical philosophical disputes, though often beginning and ending with more general comments. The next four address respectively human rights, cultural diversity, feminism, and the end of Leninism. These provide the most new material for a reader familiar with Rorty's other books. The last five are a rather strange mix, providing some interesting thoughts on history and on Derrida, while carrying Rorty's dubious dichotomy of "private" and "public" (developed in previous works) to what seem to this reader ever absurder and more tangled conclusions.Readers familiar with Rorty's work will find more wonderful examples of it in this volume. New ideas can be found throughout, and some old ideas are here better developed. Some bad old ideas (such as some found in the final chapter of "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity," criticized by Norman Geras in "Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind; The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty,") seem to have been dropped or developed into good ideas. And Rorty is unlikely to create many new opponents with this book, though he'll probably keep many of his old ones.But old-hands at learning from Rorty may find the first section of this book a somewhat tiresome, if admirable and patient, reply to the same moral weakness in eight slightly different varieties. And newcomers may not find this book a good introduction to Rorty's thinking. For that purpose I am always inclined to recommend "Consequences of Pragmatism," even though Rorty has changed his mind on many points in it - or perhaps partly for that very reason: it is easier to begin with the earlier Rorty and follow his progress chronologically.I don't think that Rorty has yet written for a really popular audience, except perhaps in his new political book "Achieving Our Country," and in some magazine articles too short to make important points in. I do think Rorty is far easier for many readers to understand than are Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and various postmodernist writers, and easier also than Wittgenstein, Davidson or even Dewey. And I do not see that anything is sacrificed to achieve this clarity. I imagine I have spent more pleasurable time with books by Rorty than with those by any other author with the exception of Nietzsche. I might recommend this book as an introduction, not to Rorty, but to Davidson, who is frequently discussed in it.Rorty sees his job largely as cleaning up the rough but radical work of more creative thinkers than he, cleaning up and popularizing. Rorty thinks that he belongs to (in Kuhnian terms) normal, as opposed to radical, philosophy, that he carries out projects devised by the REAL geniuses, and otherwise marks time until the next genius (namely Derrida) begins to be understood. I am not so sure.Although I accept (at least as a rough outline) Kuhn's notion of paradigm shifts -

It is actually quite difficult to teach me anything, and this book will appeal mainly to those who seek examples of how often modern philosophy tries to avoid using the wrong word for anything that I might consider significant. Often in this book, Richard Rorty is able to comment on reactions that other philosophers had to things that he had previously written. On the topic of truth, each philosopher must be attempting to state things that the others had assumed but wouldn't say themselves, and I suspect this mainly because page 1 already has something to say about advanced thinkers, "like believers in universal human rights, know what is really going on." It is quite a future we have been having since this book came out in 1998, with games involving secret particles causing America to complain that thousands of specially designed high-strength aluminum tubes present a danger to civilization in recent months. These tubes might be a sign of "Iraqi interest in acquiring nuclear arms." [Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller in NEW YORK TIMES, 09/08/2002 or so].In the chapter of this book, "The End of Leninism," Rorty attempts to see the need our future, which somehow is here already, has for some rhetoric. "But unless some new metanarrative eventually replaces the Marxist one, we shall have to characterize the source of human misery in such untheoretical and banal ways as `greed,' `selfishness,' and `hatred.'" (p. 235). I'm amazed at how quickly the economic thinking of our time adopted the assumption that sustainable human life would be part of a system in which each life might be required to be economically responsible for paying whatever cost would be associated with providing whatever power and water might be necessary to sustain its existence. Even aluminum tubes might play some part in economic self-sufficiency, but people who do their thinking for the governments on this planet seem unlikely to think so."The End of Leninism" is the chapter of this book in which Rorty discusses a comic frame suggested by Kenneth Burke in the book ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORY in 1936. Rorty, in assuming intentional acts by those "butchers who have presided over the slaughter-benches of history ~ people like Hadrian and Attila, Napoleon and Stalin, Hitler and Mao" (p. 241) fails to demonstrate how the politics of Chairman Mao is particularly apt for such a vivid appreciation of how we now make much ado over deaths which political subordinates chose not to make a big deal of, but which are now seen as highly political. Even Stalin and Hitler might be ironically considered worse now than when they actually had the power to do what they are now merely condemned for. Rorty seems puzzled by Burke's simple statement, "Comedy requires the maximum of forensic complexity." (p. 241, ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORY, p. 42). If people couldn't complain about these things now, down to the smallest detail, they would not seem so funny. What Burke means by complexity might b

"Truth and Progress" is divided into three sections, the first part a sequence of essays on analytic philosophers, the second two consisting of essays on various topics, often addressed to the academic Left. It isn't too much to say that all of these essays might very well be thought of as scoldings of these two groups. I don't have much familiarity with analytic philosophy, however, so I won't say anything about that section, other than to say that if you ARE an analytic philosopher, you probably aren't going to like what Rorty says, but you probably knew that already. On then to the second two parts. These sections are identical in some respects, for in them Rorty berates academic Leftism. This is not as banal as it might appear, for what is motivating Rorty is this question: "What is behind the regret we [he means intellectuals] feel when we are forced to conclude that bourgeois democratic welfare states are the best we can hope for?" ("The End of Leninism" 231). What he means is, the role of the "intellectual" in the West seems to have come to an end after the events of 1989, because afterwards the idea of Revolution, on Lenin's model, has become laughable. So the intellectual, who has always thought to have done better in that sort of regime than in a democratic one, has lost a cherished fantasy--a fantasy that is not just a leftist one, but one shared, one supposes, by virtually anyone who has ever had a brain, because a great sustaining thought for most of these people is the idea that at some point, history will redeem them. But that fantasy is over, Rorty says, and so what his question means is, "what now?" It is for this reason, more than any other, that I think Rorty's book is worth buying, for what he is trying to think about is the very idea of the worth of "intellectual life" at all. I for one think that this question is extremely serious, and not likely to disappear anytime soon. If you would like to read the opening cannon shots of what might be a long (or possibly, extremely short) debate, read this book.

As a non-philosopher but interested in philosophy and history i found this book very interesting, refreshingly clear and well-written. His ideas of language as not representative of anything but itself, and the unfruitfulness of considering truth as the approximation of language with 'reality' i found very helpful and pragmatic, cutting across centuries of philosophical debate that did not seem to get any grip on the world. I have no idea how new all of this is but it does fit in with modern thinking in philosophy of science. Although i could not always quite follow the line of argument in his more technical pieces (which are more for his fellow-philosophers, i suppose), what he writes is certainly also meant for a broader public. Thought-provoking and sometimes, at first sight, outrageous, but consistently engaging and challenging.