Rorty: And His Critics (Philosophy and Their Critics)

Rating:
Summary: An excellent anthology
Review: I am not a big fan of Rorty's work, but this volume is excellent. It contains articles by top-notch philosophers (with Rorty's responses) that hits on topics ranging from truth and objectivity to epistemology and pragmatism.

I consider the most important articles as the following: Davidson, "Truth Rehabilitated," Putnam, "RR on Reality and Justification," (excellent); McDowell, "Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity," (excellent); Brandom, "Vocabularies of Pragmatism," M. Williams, "Epistemology and the Mirror of Nature," Conant, "Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell."

I highly recommend this anthology.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent anthology
Review: I am not a big fan of Rorty's work, but this volume is excellent. It contains articles by top-notch philosophers (with Rorty's responses) that hits on topics ranging from truth and objectivity to epistemology and pragmatism.

I consider the most important articles as the following: Davidson, "Truth Rehabilitated," Putnam, "RR on Reality and Justification," (excellent); McDowell, "Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity," (excellent); Brandom, "Vocabularies of Pragmatism," M. Williams, "Epistemology and the Mirror of Nature," Conant, "Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell."

I highly recommend this anthology.

Rating:
Summary: Philosophers Challenge Rortification
Review: Take the single most entertaining and engaging philosopher that the academy can today boast, add a few colleagues who have pointed (and sometimes passionate) arguments to pursue with him and serve at the hands of one of his protégés - and you have Rorty and His Critics edited by Robert B Brandom.

This book is very stimulating, enormously erudite and not a little complicated. Here Rorty is hauled over the hot coals and its his task to defend himself against (and, occasionally, to further expedite) the arguments of his interlocutors; these figures include such heavyweights as Habermas, Davidson, Dennett, and Jacques Bouveresse. They argue and debate back and forth over various things that the interlocutors have at issue with Rorty. These include the status of "truth" as against "justification before ones peers", the supposed inescapability from "reality" and, in the best piece from the book, written by Bjorn Ramberg, what a "Post-Ontological Philosophy of Mind" might be and, indeed, might lead to. In response to this latter piece Rorty seems to bend his pragmatic line just a bit closer to the realist one in what I hope might become a classic quote of his: "What is true in pragmatism is that what you talk about depends not on what is real but on what it pays you to talk about. What is true in realism is that most of what you talk about you get right." The book begins with a helpful introduction by the editor (a former graduate student supervised by Rorty with his own chapter engaging Rorty in the book as well) and a paper by Rorty which argues that justification is more useful than "truth" since at least you can recognise the former when you have it (and what you can't recognise when you have it is useless anyway).

The collection of questions as arguments put to Rorty and his responses seems, to me, to make Rorty work at his thinking. It makes him explicate and also explain his pragmatic turn of thought in response to a new set of papers and I, for one, am thankful for that. The book is hard going. Those not used to philosophical debate or microscopically logical argument where you can trap your opponent in seeming errors which undercut her thesis are going to find themselves quickly caught up in something which seems to be overpowering them. This is a book that should be read at leisure, poured over, taken in deeply and mused upon. It will require not a little effort. At the end of the process Rorty still does not think that there is a "Reality" out there for us to get right "Because there are no norms for talking about it". But I, for one, am glad that I have had the opportunity to read this book and it has made me sharpen up my own thinking too.

PoSTmodERnFoOL

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, but fairly technical for Rorty material
Review: This is by far the best book about Rorty on the market, however it is certainly at the more technical end of the spectrum. Since Rorty's own prose elsewhere is frequently accessible to a wide audience, the prospective reader of this must be forewarned that the essays by his challengers and his responses are all more technical than much that he has written recently.

On the other hand the quality is high throughout, with fewer "cheap shots" by his opponents than in other collections about him, and much material that is really first rate. Even though the book is centered on Rorty and his responses, the quality is high enough that it really is a dialogue on the issues that he has been concerned with, and which are quite central to philosophy today.

If your taste for Rorty is not just for the lighter fare and you have some background in philosophy to bring to this, then this is richly rewarding.