Book Description

The present book is devoted to "European connections of Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism". Rorty can be connected to numerous controversies, polemics and discussions with European philosophy and within its framework, from Plato to Kant to Hegel to Habermas to Derrida. Rorty gets into European discussions with American freshness and intellectual breadth and therefore he was listened to carefully and read with great interest. His connections with European philosophical tradition are manifold, complicated and diversified; with a part of it he remains in a serious, deep controversy (Plato, Kant), with another part of it he remains in a cheerful agreement (young Hegel from Phenomenology, Nietzsche, the early Heidegger, the late Wittgenstein). It is also the case with his connections with contemporary European philosophy - apart from favorites (Derrida, Habermas) there are those he dislikes (the late Heidegger, Foucault). Rorty as a philosopher of the unprecedented erudition, in his philosophizing takes a stance towards the whole philosophy which, from our perspective of more than twenty five hundred years and Greek origins of philosophical conceptuality is European first and foremost. We refer here to a polemical context of Rorty’s writing; it gives us the possibility of showing him from the perspective of others and in comparison with others. The present book never had monographic intentions, it does not want to tell a complete story of its philosophical protagonist in the manner of a German Bildungsroman that presents its hero from the perspective of passing time, nor does it want to present the whole of Rorty’s work from a unifying viewpoint or to present particular stages of Rorty’s development (particular books), starting with the "early" Rorty, with the "medium" one to the "late" Rorty, if the first would be supposed to be Rorty until Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the second - Rorty from this book, and the latest - Rorty from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity onwards. The book presented here intentionally is not a monograph, hence its poetics and architecture are different. Rorty is a philosopher who is still writing, and we intended to provide his past writings with a new dimension, presenting recontextualizations and redescriptions of them in the light of what he is thinking at the moment. We have assumed here the following principle: the work consists of chapters followed by "philosophical excursuses". The former are focused on Rorty’s philosophy, the latter show his philosophy in struggles with other contemporary and past philosophers, providing a more general philosophical background. Philosophers from "excursuses" as well as Rorty’s polemics with them throw as much light to his philosophy as chapters themselves. But they show it in a slightly different, wider perspective, necessary in my view for a more general and culturally significant understanding of importance of his philosophy. Thus, heroes of the excursuses presented here are Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas and Zygmunt Bauman, as well as such great past philosophical figures as G.W.F. Hegel and Plato. Why these philosophers rather than others? First of all, due to their importance to the development of Rorty’s philosophy - by means of defining its position with reference to their philosophical settlements or by means of philosophical tensions born between them. Two factors were decisive: the role played in Rorty’s philosophy as he can see it and the role played in it as we can see it. It is rather excursuses that provide most contextual material to Rorty’s work, it is them that trace in detail his European connections. The picture that emerges from them is fascinating due to Rorty’s versatility because it is something totally different that is at stake in Rorty’s struggles for fame and immortality with Derrida (as I am trying to outline the debate here), something else it at stake in his political discussions with Lyotard, and something still else in "merely philosophical", as he calls them, debates with Habermas. Without these contextual pieces I might be afraid that the book would be dry and devoid of the cultural surrounding of postmodernity in which Rorty’s work has been written. If Rorty’s philosophy takes its life juice from controversies with European philosophy, it is hard to imagine for me to cut them off in the present work; and they are essential in my view to show the significance of Rorty’s neopragmatism, they are in tune, I hope, with the Rortyan way of practising philosophy. CONTENTS Acknowledgments (5); Introduction (7); Chapter I. Philosophy of recontextualization, recontextualization of philosophy. General remarks (37); Philosophical Excursus I. Seriousness, play, and fame (on Rorty’s Derrida) (59); Chapter II. The question of self-creation (86); Philosophical Excursus II Rorty and Lyotard, or about conversation and tragedy (104); Chapter III Anti-Platonism of Rorty’s thought (133); Philosophical Excursus III Hegel’s presence in Rorty (159); Chapter IV Rorty and literature, or about the priority of the "wisdom of the novel” to the "wisdom of philosophy" (185); Philosophical Excursus IV The picture of an ironist who is unwilling to be a liberal, and of a liberal who is unwilling to be an ironist (Foucault and Habermas) (211); Chapter V Philosophy and politics, or about a romantic and a pragmatist (238); Philosophical Excursus V Rorty, Bauman, contingency, and solidarity (257); Bibliography (289).