Richard Rorty (1931 2007) remains one of the contemporary world
s most influential thinkers. He has been a major figure in
philosophy ever since the publication of his first important paper,
Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories in 1965, but it was the
release of his seminal Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)
that caused the literature on his work to expand exponentially, a
process which has accelerated since his death in 2007; scores of
new articles and books about Rorty appear every year, and even his
biography has proved to be an academic bestseller. Rorty s enduring
appeal has a number of sources. One is the scope and urgency of his
views, for he was never shy about presenting his call for the
abandonment of objective truth against the grand backdrop of the
cultural progress of the West. Another is that his views were
highly controversial, and yet could not be easily dismissed, since
Rorty was able to claim with some plausibility that he was simply
drawing out the consequences of positions developed by his more
conventionally respectable peers. And another is that Rorty applied
his views to a wide range of topical concerns outside of academic
philosophy. For these and many other reasons, philosophers to this
day line up to refute him, students read Rorty before the
philosophers he discusses, and non-philosophy academics produce a
continuous stream of articles applying his views to their own
interests.
The daunting quantity (and variable quality) of literature
available on Rorty makes it difficult to discriminate the useful
from the tendentious, superficial, and otiose. That is why this new
title in the highly regarded Routledge series, Critical Assessments
of Leading Philosophers, is so urgently needed. Edited by James
Tartaglia, the author of Rorty and the Mirror of Nature (Routledge,
2007), one of the most popular and straightforward books available
on Rorty, this new Routledge Major Work is a four-volume collection
of the best scholarship from the 1960s to the present day; the
collected materials have been carefully selected from a wide range
of academic journals, edited collections, and research monographs,
many of which are hard to obtain in their original source.
The first of the four volumes ( Mind, Language, and Truth )
covers Rorty s eliminative materialism in the philosophy of mind,
his Davidsonian rejection of conceptual schemes in the philosophy
of language, and his rejection of objective truth. Volume II (
Metaphilosophy and Pragmatism ), meanwhile, assembles the best
assessments of his pessimistic metaphilosophy, and his distinctive
conception of pragmatism. The third volume ( Philosophers ) brings
together the key scholarly work on Rorty s highly original but
endlessly disputed interpretations of other philosophers, while the
final volume in the collection (Volume IV: Themes ) explores Rorty
s views as applied to a diverse range of topics, from feminism to
environmentalism and bioethics.
The tightly focused organization of this collection will allow
scholars quickly and easily to access both established and
up-to-date assessments of Rorty s central positions, and will also
make for irresistible browsing. With comprehensive introductions to
each volume, providing essential background information and
relating the various articles to each other, Richard Rorty is
destined to be an indispensable resource for research and
study.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!