Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers

Philosophical Papers

by Richard Rorty, Stephen Leach (Editor), James Tartaglia (Editor)

This volume presents a selection of the philosophical essays which Richard Rorty wrote during the first decade of his career, and complements four previous volumes of his papers published by Cambridge University Press. In this long neglected body of work, which many leading philosophers still consider to be his best, Rorty develops his views on the nature and scope of philosophy in a manner which supplements and elucidates his definitive statement on these matters in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. He also develops his groundbreaking version of eliminative materialism, a label first coined to describe his position, and sets out original views on various central topics in the philosophy of language, concerning private language, indeterminacy, and verificationalism. A substantial introduction examines Rorty's philosophical development from 1961 to 1972. The volume completes our understanding of Rorty's intellectual trajectory and offers lucid statements of positions which retain their relevance to current debates.

Genres: Philosophy

330 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 2014

About the author

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The centerpiece of Rorty's critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Rorty's principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a world external to the mind. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. Ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time.

Reviews

[Chant]

Hot, damn. That was a fine read.

[T. Tokunaga]

【Mind, Language and Metaphilosophy / Richard Rorty / 2013, UP Cambridge】

One of the reasons why I got into analytic philosophy was that I wanted to know the thoughts belonging to realism in philosophical discourses, because I'm still immersed in a dreamy tendency of my own. I'm stealthily a romantic, and that's also why I'm pursuing my MA in English at a very research-oriented university.

For such a reader, Rorty is a puzzling figure because his later career is fuzzy - in the sense one can barely say what his focus was. Meanwhile, in this earlier essays' collection by Rorty, you would actually see his fuzziness probably comes from the fuzziness of reality itself.

His diagnosis for the disagreement of analytics and metaphysicians is one of the examples.

--Beneath the surface, we find the same activity being conducted - namely, uncovering the antimonies and paradoxes which common sense, or science, or both together, seem to present, and proposals for their resolution. (p. 140., Do analysts and metaphysicians disagree?)

Simply put, a deep-cut-punkish question. It's not the commercial punk but rather the now-obscure punk acts from around 1977, which shows how simple things are with a blatant remark.

--Insistence on the "identity" of the mental and the physical would seem an unnecessary rhetorical flourish. (p. 171. Incorrigibility as the mark of the mental)

--How much like the way in which "tree" denotes treets does the relation between "pain" and pains have to be? (p. 178., Wittgenstein, privileged access, and incommunicability)

[Nat Baldino]

Read for the metaphilosophy.

Made me respect Rorty more, while I have major quarrels w his take on postmodernism & his misunderstanding of pragmatism, but mostly with how pretentious he is

I did enjoy what he had to say here, however, tho i still think he is circling the drain of his own methodologies, which is paradoxical for metaphilosophy.

[Felipe Rudd]

Puedo entender por qué la gente tiene un desprecio hacia Rorty, pero en lo personal me pareció divertido de leer. En su tercer paper llama a Descartes el "niño malcriado" de la metafísica.
Sería bueno que la gente se de la oportunidad de leerlo, en lugar de juzgarlo por lo que otros dicen.