Rorty and His Critics

Thirteen of the most distinguished living philosophers – including Donald Davidson, Jürgen Habermas, Hilary Putnam, John McDowell, Jacques Bouveresse, and Daniel Dennett – assess Richard Rorty′s arguments for revising our philosophical conceptions of truth, reality, objectivity, and justification. These essays, together with Rorty′s substantial replies to each, and other new material by him, offer by far the most thorough and thoughtful discussion of the work of the thinker who has been called ′the most interesting philosopher alive.′

Notes on Contributors. Introduction. 1. Rorty: "Universality and Truth". 2. Habermas: Richard Rorty′s Pragmatic Turn". 3. Rorty: "Response to Habermas". 4. Davidson: "Truth Rehabilitated". 5. Rorty: "Response to Davidson". 6. Putnam: "Richard Rorty on Reality and Justification". 7. Rorty: "Response to Putnam". 8. Dennett: "The Case for Rorts". 9. Rorty: "Response to Dennett". 10. McDowell: "Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity". 11. Rorty: "Response to McDowell". 12. Bouveresse: "Reading Rorty: Pragmatism and its Consequences". 13. Rorty: "Response to Bouveresse". 14. Brandom: "Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism". 15. Rorty: "Response to Brandom". 16. Williams "Epistemology and the Mirror of Nature". 17. Rorty: "Response to Williams". 18. Allen "What Was Epistemology?". 19. Rorty: "Response to Allen". 20. Bilgrami: "Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry?: Rorty and Davidson on Truth". 21. Rorty: "Response to Bilgrami". 22. Conant: "Freedom, Cruelty and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell". 23. Rorty: "Response to Conant". 24. Ramberg: "Post–ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson". 25. Rorty: "Response to Ramberg". Richard Rorty: Selected Publications. Index.

Robert B. Brandom is Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. His 1977 Princeton PhD thesis on pragmatism and the philosophy of language was supervised by Richard Rorty. He is author of Making it Explicit (1994), an extension of his thesis.

"More famously than any philosopher writing within the Anglo–American dispensation since William James and John Dewey, Richard Rorty has transported his inherited intellectual preoccupations from, in Kant′s distinction, school philosophy to world philosophy. To assess this progress, the present volume brings together a formidable selection of the most interesting and influential philosophers now at issue in the analytical sphere of philosophy, to each of whom Rorty responds resourcefully and forcefully. The result is that remarkable thing, a book that does superbly everything it promises." Stanley Cavell, Harvard University