Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty

by Richard Rorty, Eduardo Mendieta (Editor)

This volume collects a number of important and revealing interviews with Richard Rorty, spanning more than two decades of his public intellectual commentary, engagement, and criticism. In colloquial language, Rorty discusses the relevance and nonrelevance of philosophy to American political and public life. The collection also provides a candid set of insights into Rorty's political beliefs and his commitment to the labor and union traditions in this country. Finally, the interviews reveal Rorty to be a deeply engaged social thinker and observer.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Essays

250 pages, Paperback

First published November 29, 2005

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, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty's principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. 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. Characterizations and illustrations of a post-epistemological intellectual culture, present in both PMN (part III) and CP (xxxvii-xliv), are more richly developed in later works, such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, hereafter CIS), in the popular essays and articles collected in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), and in the four volumes of philosophical papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991, hereafter ORT); Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991, hereafter EHO); Truth and Progress (1998, hereafter TP); and Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007, hereafter PCP). In these writings, 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

[m · Rating 4 out of 5]

This commendable collection of interviews saves Rortians from having to search the internet for Rortiana. This is a good book, but there much much more such stuff available on the internet.

Someday I'm going to organize & post below the hyperlinks I've collected to free, publicly-available Rorty interviews. But until that day arrives, I'm just going to dump those links below, because even if you read one such interview (not included in Take Care of Freedom) you'll be happy for having spent time in his company, listening (once again) to more versions of his "up from representationalism" stories, which I never tire of hearing.

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/50156...
https://progressive.org/magazine/last...
www.jstor.org/stable/20865667
www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...
https://www.pdcnet.org/philnow/conten...
https://www.pdcnet.org/symposium/cont...
http://www.secure.pdcnet.org/harvardr...

https://www.pdcnet.org/8525737F00588A...

https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campusp...

NYT profile:


Oct 30, 2021
May 15, 2008

[Brent Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rorty is such a clear and forceful voice - you don't need a collection of interviews to get him. But this collection of interviews further conveys his thoughts, opinions, and values in a fun way. Somewhat redundant and loosely configured, but a great read.

[Elizabeth]

I picked this up because Brian Eno refers to him in his diary book. It was a little too dense for my mood and it went back to the library barely scanned.