Review of "The Philosophy of Richard Rorty"

At "Notre Dame Philosophical Review", Paul Redding reviews "The Philosophy of Richard Rorty" (Open Court, 2010), ed. by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn:

Review of "The Philosophy of Richard Rorty"




Excerpt:
"And for Rorty, as for Mill, the good community is one which maximizes the chances of individuals creating unique lives, which for Rorty implies fashioning the "vocabularies" with which they shape their outlooks and behaviors. To the extent that traditional philosophy seeks a source for norms in something other than human agreement, it is to be regarded as just an extension of religion. In short, to see our ideas or language as trying to represent something essentially independent from us - seeing philosophical knowledge as ideally a "mirror of nature" - is just another instance of thinking of ourselves as responsible to something other than other human beings."

Paul Redding is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney.