Abstract
Philosophy and Social Hope contains cogent accounts of Rorty’s core positions on truth, metaphysics, and ethics once hope replaces certainty. On display is his democracy-centered pragmatism’s wide range of application for promoting moral progress, the project of fostering richer and more humane lives of citizens and making communities more inclusive and just. This chapter situates the book’s chief philosophical claims within his larger project and provides an overview of his pragmatism’s emphasis on philosophy as an instrument of change, expanding the reach of our moral community, and pluralism over commensuration. It then sketches his timely efforts to address the neglect of economic injustice.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bacon, Michael. 2007. Richard Rorty: Pragmatism and political liberalism. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Curtis, William M. 2015. Defending Rorty: Pragmatism and liberal virtue. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dewey, John. 1982. Reconstruction in philosophy. In The middle works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, Vol. 12, 77–201. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dieleman, Susan, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil, eds. 2017. Pragmatism and justice. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gascoigne, Neil. 2008. Richard Rorty: Liberalism, irony and the ends of philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Llanera, Tracy. 2016. Redeeming Rorty’s public-private distinction. Contemporary Pragmatism 13(3): 319–340.
Menand, Louis. 2001. The metaphysical club: A story of ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
Mueller, Martin. 2017. From irony to robust serenity – Pragmatic politics of religion after Rorty. Contemporary Pragmatism 14(3): 334–349.
Pratt, Scott L. 2002. Native pragmatism: Rethinking the roots of American philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ramberg, Bjørn. 2008. Rorty, Davidson, and the future of metaphysics in America. In The Oxford handbook of American philosophy, ed. Cheryl Misak, 430–448. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, irony, and solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1991a. Essays on Heidegger and others: Philosophical papers, Vol. 2. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1991b. Objectivity, relativism, and truth: Philosophical papers, Vol. 1. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1994. Hoffnung Statt Erkentnis. Vienna: Passagen Verlag.
Rorty, Richard. 1998a. Achieving our country: Leftist thought in twentieth-century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1998b. Truth and progress: Philosophical papers, Vol. 3. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1999. Philosophy and social hope. New York: Penguin Books.
Rorty, Richard. 2000. Universality and truth. In Rorty and his critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom, 1–30. Malden: Blackwell.
Rorty, Richard. 2003. Religion in the public square: A reconsideration. Journal of Religious Ethics 31:141–149.
Rorty, Richard. 2006. Pragmatism as anti-authoritarianism. In A companion to pragmatism, eds. John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis, 257–266. Malden: Blackwell.
Rorty, Richard. 2010. Philosophy as a transitional genre. In The Rorty reader, eds. Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein, 473–488. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Voparil, Christopher J. 2014. Taking other human beings seriously: Rorty’s ethics of choice and responsibility. Contemporary Pragmatism 11(1): 83–102.
Voparil, Christopher J. 2016. Rorty and James on irony, moral commitment, and the ethics of belief. William James Studies 12(2): 1–27.
West, Cornel. 1989. The American evasion of philosophy: a genealogy of pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Recommended Literature for Further Reading
Curtis, William M. 2015. Defending Rorty: Pragmatism and liberal virtue. New York: Cambridge University Press. This book offers an in-depth interpretation of Rorty from the vantage of political theory and advances the argument that despite his own description as a Rawlsian political liberal, Rorty is best understood as a pragmatic virtue liberal who promotes a conception of civic virtue rooted in irony.
Dieleman, Susan. 2017. What would it mean to call Rorty a deliberative democrat? Contemporary Pragmatism 14(3): 319–333. An examination of Rorty’s political thought through the lens of deliberative democracy which concludes that Rorty can be usefully read as a virtue deliberativist if we follow him in rejecting conceptions of deliberation that rely on a social epistemology that privileges Reason.
Rondel, David. 2018. Richard Rorty on the American left in the era of Trump. Contemporary Pragmatism 15(2): 194–210. An account of Rorty’s prescient diagnosis in Achieving Our Country of conditions that contribute to the rise of a Trump-like figure that examines his program for reform of the contemporary American Left based on the distinction between “real” and “cultural” politics.
Voparil, Christopher J. 2014. Taking other human beings seriously: Rorty’s ethics of choice and responsibility. Contemporary Pragmatism 11(1): 83–102. A reading of Rorty that highlights the underlying moral concerns animating his philosophy from his earliest work, which center on a conception of ethical responsibility that foregrounds our capacity for choice and orients us toward the recognition of others as ethical agents.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Voparil, C. (2023). Philosophy and Social Hope (1999). In: Müller, M. (eds) Handbuch Richard Rorty. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16253-5_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16253-5_18
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer VS, Wiesbaden
Print ISBN: 978-3-658-16252-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-658-16253-5
eBook Packages: Social Science and Law (German Language)