Download or read book Rorty Liberal Democracy and Religious Certainty written by Neil Gascoigne and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-24 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book asks whether there any limits to the sorts of religious considerations that can be raised in public debates, and if there are, by whom they are to be identified. Its starting point is the work of Richard Rorty, whose pragmatic pluralism leads him to argue for a politically motivated anticlericalism rather than an epistemologically driven atheism. Rather than defend Rorty’s position directly, Gascoigne argues for an epistemological stance he calls ‘Pragmatist Fideism’. The starting point for this exercise in what Rorty calls ‘Cultural Politics’ is an acknowledgement that one must appeal to both secularists and those with religious commitments. In recent years ‘reformed’ epistemologists have aimed to establish a parity of epistemic esteem between religious and perceptual beliefs by exploiting an analogy in respect of their mutual vulnerability to sceptical challenges. Through an examination of this analogy, and in light of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, this book argues that understood correctly the ‘parity’ argument in fact lends epistemological support to the argument that religious considerations should not be raised in public debate. The political price paid—paying the price of politics—is worth it: the religious thinker is provided with a good reason for maintaining that their practices and beliefs are not undermined by other forms of religious life.
Download or read book Defending Rorty written by William M. Curtis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-14 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberal democracy needs a clear-eyed, robust defense to deal with the increasingly complex challenges it faces in the twenty-first century. Unfortunately much of contemporary liberal theory has rejected this endeavor for fear of appearing culturally hegemonic. Instead, liberal theorists have sought to gut liberalism of its ethical substance in order to render it more tolerant of non-liberal ways of life. This theoretical effort is misguided, however, because successful liberal democracy is an ethically demanding political regime that requires its citizenry to display certain virtues and habits of mind. Against the grain of contemporary theory, philosopher Richard Rorty blends American pragmatism and romanticism to produce a comprehensive vision of liberal modernity that features a virtue-based conception of liberal democracy. In doing so, Rorty defends his pragmatic liberalism against a host of notable interlocutors, including Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, Hilary Putnam, Richard J. Bernstein, and Jean Bethke Elshtain.
Download or read book Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism written by J. Judd Owen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-07 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acknowledgments1. If Liberalism is a Faith, What Becomes of the Separation of Church and State?2. Pragmatism, Liberalism, and the Quarrel between Science and Religion3. Rorty's Repudiation of Epistemology4. Rortian Irony and the "De-divinization" of Liberalism5. Religion and Rawls's Freestanding Liberalism6. Stanley Fish and the Demise of the Separation of Church and State7. Fish, Locke, and Religious Neutrality8. Reason, Indifference, and the Aim of Religious FreedomAppendix: A Reply to Stanley FishNotesBibliographyIndex Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Download or read book Richard Rorty Liberalism and Cosmopolitanism written by David E McClean and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Rorty was one of the most controversial and influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. McClean re-evaluates Rorty’s work in the light of his liberal cosmopolitan outlook, showing how it can be applied to a range of social and political issues.
Download or read book Rorty and the Religious written by Jacob L. Goodson and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2012-08-14 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prior to his death in 2007, the self-described secular philosopher Richard Rorty began to modify his previous position concerning religion. Moving from "atheism" to "anti-clericalism," Rorty challenges the metaphysical assumptions that lend justification to abuses of power in the name of religion. Instead of dismissing and ignoring Rorty's challenge, the essays in this volume seek to enter into meaningful conversation with Rorty's thought and engage his criticisms in a constructive and serious way. In so doing, one finds promising nuggets within Rorty's thought for addressing particular questions within Christianity. The essays in this volume offer charitable yet fully confessional engagements with an impressive secular thinker.
Download or read book Defending Rorty written by William Curtis and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberal democracy needs a clear-eyed, robust defense to deal with the increasingly complex challenges it faces in the twenty-first century. Unfortunately much of contemporary liberal theory has rejected this endeavor for fear of appearing culturally hegemonic. Instead, liberal theorists have sought to gut liberalism of its ethical substance in order to render it more tolerant of non-liberal ways of life. This theoretical effort is misguided, however, because successful liberal democracy is an ethically demanding political regime that requires its citizenry to display certain virtues and habits of mind. Against the grain of contemporary theory, philosopher Richard Rorty blends American pragmatism and romanticism to produce a comprehensive vision of liberal modernity that features a virtue-based conception of liberal democracy. In doing so, Rorty defends his pragmatic liberalism against a host of notable interlocutors, including Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, Hilary Putnam, Richard J. Bernstein, and Jean Bethke Elshtain.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Rorty written by David Rondel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-04 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a comprehensive introduction to one of the most interesting and controversial philosophers of recent times.
Download or read book Reconstructing Pragmatism written by Chris Voparil and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The figure of Richard Rorty stands in complex relation to the tradition of American pragmatism. On the one hand, his intellectual creativity, lively prose, and bridge-building fueled the contemporary resurgence of pragmatism. On the other, his polemical claims and selective interpretations function as a negative, fixed pole against which thinkers of all stripes define themselves. Virtually all pragmatists on the contemporary scene, whether classical or "new," Deweyan, Jamesian, or Peircean, use Rorty as a foil to justify their positions. The resulting internecine quarrels and divisions threaten to thwart and fragment the tradition's creative potential. More caricatured than understood, the specter of Rorty is blocking the road of inquiry and future development of pragmatism. Reconstructing Pragmatism moves beyond the Rortyan impasse by providing what has been missing for decades: a constructive, non-polemical account of Rorty's relation to classical pragmatism. The first book-length treatment of Rorty's intellectual debt to the early pragmatists, it establishes his selective appropriations not as misunderstandings or distortions but as a sustained, intentional effort to reconstruct their thinking. Featuring chapters devoted to five key pragmatist thinkers - Peirce, James, Dewey, Royce, and Addams - the book draws on archival sources and the full scope of Rorty's writings to challenge prevailing misconceptions and caricatures. By illuminating the critical resources, still largely untapped, that Rorty offers for articulating classical pragmatism's ongoing relevance, the book reveals limitations in the received images of the classical pragmatists that predominate in current debates and opens up new modes of understanding pragmatism and why it matters today"--
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Religious Epistemology written by Jonathan Fuqua and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first handbook on the topic of religious epistemology introduces and discusses topics fundamental to the epistemology of religious belief.
Download or read book Spiritual Empires in Europe and India written by Perry Myers and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-30 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comparative analysis of cosmopolitan (esoteric) religious movements, such as Theosophy, Groupe Independent des Études Ésotériques, Anthroposophy, and Monism, in England, France, Germany, and India during the late nineteenth-century to the interwar years. Despite their diversity, these factions manifested a set of common features—anti-materialism, embrace of Darwinian evolution, and a belief in universal spirituality—that coalesced in a transnational field of analogous cosmopolitan spiritual affinities. Yet, in each of their geopolitical locations these groups developed vastly different interpretations and applications of their common spiritual tenets. This book explores how such religious innovation intersected with the social (labor and economic renewal), cultural (education and religious innovation) and political (Empire and anti-colonial) dynamics in these vastly different national domains. Ultimately, it illustrates how an innovative religious discourse converged with the secular world and became applied to envision a new social order—to spiritually re-engineer the world.
Download or read book Contingency Irony and Solidarity written by Richard Rorty and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989-02-24 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this 1989 book Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable on a private level, although it cannot advance the social or political goals of liberalism. In fact Rorty believes that it is literature not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense of human solidarity. A truly liberal culture, acutely aware of its own historical contingency, would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers. The book has a characteristically wide range of reference from philosophy through social theory to literary criticism. It confirms Rorty's status as a uniquely subtle theorist, whose writing will prove absorbing to academic and nonacademic readers alike.
Download or read book Rorty and Beyond written by Randall Auxier and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-12-19 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For better or worse, Rorty has shaped the trajectory of academic philosophy. A decade after his passing, his legacy is ever present, especially in context of the growth of the far right, the struggle over the meaning of justice and equity, and the ecological crises we face. Edited by Randall Auxier, Eli Kramer, and Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński, Rorty and Beyond brings together leading international philosophers from the United States and Europe to reevaluate Rorty’s legacy and explore what lies beyond his life and work. This collection covers a diverse territory, exploring Rorty’s legacy regarding theories of truth, accounts of nature and naturalism, the historical situation of professional philosophy, the private and public aspects of religion, the place of literature in cultural politics, and points beyond Rorty, such as what we may hope for after his critical attack on certainty and ultimacy. Scholars, specialists, and those new to Rorty will all find insight, useful criticism, and edification in this volume.
Download or read book The Pursuit of Certainty written by Wendy James and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-12-16 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the world population faces movement, mixing and displacement on a larger scale than ever before, the result has not been a collapse of boundaries but an increase in the rise of new forms of ethnic, cultural and religious identity. Those based in the highly developed countries can extend global influence through wealth and sophisticated technology. The Pursuit of Certainty presents original case studies which explore the effect anthropology's inherited tradition of tolerance and cross-cultural understanding has on the new pursuits of truth. Several chapters focus on the rise of new certainties while others examine notions of diversity providing a critical perspective on the new religious movements and current popular orthodoxies relating to society and culture.
Download or read book Pragmatism as Anti Authoritarianism written by Richard Rorty and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last book by the eminent American philosopher and public intellectual Richard Rorty, providing the definitive statement of his mature philosophical and political views. Richard RortyÕs Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism is a last statement by one of AmericaÕs foremost philosophers. Here Rorty offers his culminating thoughts on the influential version of pragmatism he began to articulate decades ago in his groundbreaking Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Marking a new stage in the evolution of his thought, RortyÕs final masterwork identifies anti-authoritarianism as the principal impulse and virtue of pragmatism. Anti-authoritarianism, on this view, means acknowledging that our cultural inheritance is always open to revision because no authority exists to ascertain the truth, once and for all. If we cannot rely on the unshakable certainties of God or nature, then all we have left to go onÑand argue withÑare the opinions and ideas of our fellow humans. The test of these ideas, Rorty suggests, is relatively simple: Do they work? Do they produce the peace, freedom, and happiness we desire? To achieve this enlightened pragmatism is not easy, though. Pragmatism demands trust. Pragmatism demands that we think and care about what others think and care about, which further requires that we account for othersÕ doubts of and objections to our own beliefs. After all, our own beliefs are as contestable as anyone elseÕs. A supple mind who draws on theorists from John Stuart Mill to Annette Baier, Rorty nonetheless is always an apostle of the concrete. No book offers a more accessible account of RortyÕs utopia of pragmatism, just as no philosopher has more eloquently challenged the hidebound traditions arrayed against the goals of social justice.
Download or read book The Ironist and the Romantic written by Áine Mahon and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the time of his death in 2007, Richard Rorty was widely acclaimed as one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers. Stanley Cavell, who has been a leading intellectual figure from the 1960s to the present, has been just as philosophically influential as Rorty though perhaps not as politically divisive. Both philosophers have developed from analytic to post-analytical thought, both move between philosophy, literature and cultural politics, and both re-establish American philosophical traditions in a new and nuanced key. The Ironist and the Romantic: Reading Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell finds the sound of Rorty's cheerful pragmatism strikingly at odds with the anxious romanticism of Cavell. Beginning from this tonal discord, and moving through comprehensive comparative analysis on the topics of scepticism, American philosophy, literature, writing style and politics, this book presents the work of its central figures in a novel and mutually illuminating perspective. Áine Mahon's unique and original comparative reading will be of interest not only to those working on Rorty and Cavell but to anyone concerned with the current state of American philosophy.
Download or read book Contingency and Normativity The Challenges of Richard Rorty written by Rosa Maria Calcaterra and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contingentism depicts normativity as one of our human effective possibilities rather than as a metaphysical bottleneck which we should necessary fulfill. The book is a critical survey of Richard McKay Rorty’s “neo-pragmatism”, in the light of various theoretical arguments as well as of his own resourceful attempts to renew philosophy from within its practice.
Download or read book Scepticism written by Neil Gascoigne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of scepticism is assumed by many to be the history of failed responses to a problem first raised by Descartes. While the thought of the ancient sceptics is acknowledged, their principle concern with how to live a good life is regarded as bearing little, if any, relation to the work of contemporary epistemologists. In "Scepticism" Neil Gascoigne engages with the work of canonical philosophers from Descartes, Hume and Kant through to Moore, Austin, and Wittgenstein to show how themes that first emerged in the Hellenistic period are inextricably bound up with the historical development of scepticism. Foremost amongst these is the view that scepticism relates not to the possibility of empirical knowledge but to the possibility of epistemological theory. This challenge to epistemology itself is explored and two contemporary trends are considered: the turn against foundationalist epistemology and towards more naturalistic conceptions of inquiry, and the resistance to this on the part of non-naturalistically inclined philosophers. In contextualizing the debate in this way Gascoigne equips students with a better appreciation of the methodological importance of sceptical reasoning, an analytic understanding of the structure of sceptical arguments, and an awareness of the significance of scepticism to the nature of philosophical inquiry.
