PART I
Philosophy as science, as metaphor, and as politics, 9.
Heidegger, contingency, and pragmatism, 27.
Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and reification of language, 50.
Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens, 66.
PART II
Deconstruction and circumvention, 85.
Two meanings of "logocentrism": A reply to Norris, 107.
Is Derrida a transcendental philosopher? 119.
De Man and the American Cultural Left, 129.
PART III
Freud and moral reflection, 143.
Habermas and Lyotard on postmodernity, 164.
Unger, Castoriadis, and the romance of a national future, 177.
Moral identity and private autonomy: The case of Foucault, 193.
Rorty introduces himself as a practitioner of pragmatist "weak thought." (p. 6) He is not seeking to reshape all of philosophy; he says he is just someone who "assembles reminders and suggests some interesting possibilities." (p.6) In that same unheroic frame of mind, he describes Heidegger and Derrida as post-Nietzschean philosophers. As such, they do not represent a "radical rupture" (p. 2). They simply continue the conversation that emerged from the pragmatism found in Dewey and James (and Rorty). Nietzsche was pragmatist no less than the Americans, even though he did not share their social hopes. Still, he was "as good an anti-Cartesian, antirepresentationalist, and antiessentialist as Dewey." (p.2) Rorty puts all of these philosophers against a background of Darwin, whose evolutionism freed philosophy from the urge to find a "better and better fit between mind and world" as sought by Descartes and Kant. (p.3) They all converted sentences to tools from representations. Heidegger and Derrida, Rorty thinks, failed somewhat to see language correctly in this light. His essays that follow say why he criticizes them for "making a big deal out of language." (p.4) Still, he values their contribution to a pragmatist approach: "I see the best parts of Heidegger and Derrida as the parts which help us to see how things look under nonrepresentationalist, nonlogocentrist descriptions--how they look when one begins to take the relativity of thinghood to choice of description for granted, and so starts asking how to be USEFUL rather than how to be right." (p.5) (Our emphasis)
DECONSTRUCTION AND CIRCUMVENTION: (pp. 85-106) Rorty discusses what Derrida has done for and against the pragmatic project to de-foundationalize philosophy. He finds that literary critics have been led by their reading of Derrida into a mistaken quest for metaphysical completeness in terms of Derridean deconstruction. Rorty is at pains to fault this turn in literary and philosophical study as follows:
"Just when we pragmatic Wittgensteinian therapists were congratulating ourselves on having disabused the learned world of the idea that these oppositions were 'deep,'...we found all the dear old textbook 'problems of philosophy' being heralded as the hidden agenda of our favorite poems and novels....The [philosophers] want to reconstruct them and the latter want to deconstruct them, but neither is content to take them lightly, to 'de-thematize' them, to view them as just a few extra tropes." (pp. 104-5)
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