Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers - Softcover

Rorty, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521358779 ISBN 13: 9780521358774

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1991

Synopsis

Richard Rorty's collected papers, written during the 1980s and now published in two volumes, take up some of the issues which divide Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophers and contemporary French and German philosophers and offer something of a compromise - agreeing with the latter in their criticisms of traditional notions of truth and objectivity, but disagreeing with them over the political implications they draw from dropping traditional philosophical doctrines. In this volume Rorty offers a Deweyan account of objectivity as intersubjectivity, one that drops claims about universal validity and instead focuses on utility for the purposes of a community. The sense in which the natural sciences are exemplary for inquiry is explicated in terms of the moral virtues of scientific communities rather than in terms of a special scientific method. The volume concludes with reflections on the relation of social democratic politics to philosophy.

About this title

From the Back Cover

This book is about antirepresentationalism, ethnocentrism, and liberalism. This is the first volume of a collection of papers written between 1980 and 1989. The papers in this volume take up, for the most part, issues and figures within analytic philosophy. Those in the second volume deal mostly with issues arising out of the work of Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521358779
• ISBN 13: 9780521358774
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 236