Rorty - Philosophy and Social Hope

The pieces in this book were originally published in the following places (copyright Richard Rorty unless otherwise marked):

Introduction: Relativism: Finding and Making: Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty and Kolokowski, Jozef Niznik and John T. Sanders, eds. (Praeger, 1996). Copyright Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Science, 1996. Reprinted by permission.

1. Trotsky and the Wild Orchids: Wild Orchids and Trotsky: Messages from American Universities, Mark Edmundson, ed. (New York: Viking, 1993). Copyright Viking, 1993. Reprinted by permission.

2. Truth without Correspondence to Reality: First appearance in English; a German translation appeared in my Hoffnung statt Erkentniss (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1994); a French translation appeared in my Lespoir au lieu de savoir (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995).

3. A World without Substances or Essences: First appearance in English; a German translation appeared in my Hoffnung statt Erkentniss (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1994); a French translation appeared in my Lespoir au lieu de savoir (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995).

4. Ethics without Principles: First appearance in English; a German translation appeared in my Hoffnung statt Erkentniss (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1994); a French translation appeared in my Lespoir au lieu de savoir (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995).

5. The Banality of Pragmatism and the Poetry of Justice: Pragmatism in Law and Society, Michael Brint and William Weaver, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 8997. First published in Southern California Law Review. Copyright Southern California Law Review, 1990. Reprinted by permission.

6. Pragmatism and Law: A Response to David Luban: Cardozo Law Review, vol. XXVIII, no. 1. Copyright 1996, Yeshiva University. Reprinted by permission.

7. Education as Socialization and as Individualization: originally published as Education without Dogma, Dissent (Spring 1989), pp. 198204. Copyright Dissent, 1989. Reprinted by permission.

8. The Humanistic Intellectual: Eleven Theses: ACLS Occasional Papers (November 1989), no. 10, pp. 912. Reprinted by permission.

9. The Pragmatists Progress: Umberto Eco on Interpretation: Interpretation and Overinterpretation, Stefan Collini, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 89108. Copyright Cambridge University Press, 1992. Reprinted by permission.

10. Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility and Romance: The Cambridge Companion to William James, Ruth Anna Putnam, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 84102. Copyright Cambridge University Press, 1997. Reprinted by permission.

11. Religion as Conversation-stopper: Common Knowledge (Spring 1994), vol. III, no. 1, pp. 16. Copyright Common Knowledge, 1994. Reprinted by permission.

12. Thomas Kuhn, Rocks and the Laws of Physics: Common Knowledge (Spring 1997), vol. VI, no. 1. Copyright Common Knowledge, 1997. Reprinted by permission.

13. On Heideggers Nazism: Originally published as Another Possible World in the London Review of Books (8 February 1990), p. 21. Copyright London Review of Books, 1990. Reprinted by permission.

14. Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes: First appeared as Endlich sieht man Freudenthal in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 February 1998. Copyright FAZ, 1998. Reprinted by permission.

15. A Spectre is Haunting the Intellectuals: Derrida on Marx: European Journal of Philosophy (December 1995), vol. III, no. 3, pp. 28998. Copyright European Journal of Philosophy, 1995. Reprinted by permission.

16. Love and Money: Common Knowledge (Spring 1992), vol. I, no. 1, pp. 1216. Copyright Common Knowledge, 1992. Reprinted by permission.

17. Globalization, the Politics of Identity and Social Hope: originally published as Global Utopias, History and Philosophy in Cultural Pluralism, Identity and Globalization, Luiz Soares, ed. (Rio de Janiero: UNESCO/ISSC/EDUCAM, 1996), pp. 45769.

18. Looking Backwards from the Year 2096: originally published as Fraternity Reigns in The New Times Magazine, 28 September 1996, pp. 1558.

19. The Unpatriotic Academy: The New York Times, 13 February 1994, section 4, p. 15 (op-ed page). Copyright The New York Times, 1994. Reprinted by permission.

20. Back to Class Politics: Dissent (Winter 1997), pp. 314. Copyright Dissent, 1997. Reprinted by permission.

Most of what I have written in the last decade consists of attempts to tie in my social hopes hopes for a global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society with my antagonism towards Platonism. These attempts have been encouraged by the thought that the same hopes, and the same antagonism, lay behind many of the writings of my principal philosophical hero, John Dewey.

Platonism in the sense in which I use the term does not denote the (very complex, shifting, dubiously consistent) thoughts of the genius who wrote the Dialogues. Instead, it refers to a set of philosophical distinctions (appearancereality, mattermind, madefound, sensibleintellectual, etc.): what Dewey called a brood and nest of dualisms. These dualisms dominate the history of Western philosophy, and can be traced back to one or another passage in Platos writings. Dewey thought, as I do, that the vocabulary which centres around these traditional distinctions has become an obstacle to our social hopes.