Customer Reviews

Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty (Cultural Memory in the Present)

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Rorty has become a cultural phenomenon unto himself, standing (with Chomsky and a few others) as one of America's most famous intellectuals (so it's more than a bit distressing to discover here that he's convinced we're headed for nuclear annihilation! Why must major American intellectuals be Cassandra figures?) The Introduction by Mendieta is nicely written and illuminating, if a bit hagiographic (and the picture on the cover is priceless!). Whatever you think of Rorty's philosophical views (I find myself agreeing at most half the time -- and what fun is it to read someone you completely agree with?), he is incredibly clever. He's got the wit of a 18th century French moralist, reincarnated for the 20th century. This collection of selected interviews showcases his great talent for the moody one-liner, the quick rejoinder, the ever-clever repartee; one almost feels sorry for the interviewers on whom he frequently sharpens his tools. Rorty is a masterful stylist, and, while I think his most highly developed medium remains the essay, for those of us who have read so many of his essays that they start to seem formulaic, the interview makes for an interesting change of pace. This book helps give one a sense of Rorty's full philosophical voice, his thoughts about his own remarkable intellectual trajectory, and, in the end, his rather depressing vision of our future.

this is an excellent volume for Rorty researchers; I usually do not have a lot of consideration for interview volumes, when we are talking about huge thinkers, such as Rorty, but this one would clear your views on one of the paradigmatic philosophers.
What you get in this volume are almost axiomatic statements about Rortianism - it will deffinitely be a great instrument should you want to read more complicated works of Rorty's.

It's easy to find paradoxes in Richard Rorty's thinking. He's an academic philosopher who has no faith in philosophical systems, a thinker who rejects the label "relativist" but disbelieves in the idea of absolute Truth, a liberal social observer who has Utopian hopes for humanity but rejects radical social change, a moralist who believes we can discover more about ethics and the vagaries of human conduct in a Henry James novel than in a Sunday church sermon or a philosophical treatise on ethics, and an ironist who claims that we must put irony aside when confronting social issues.

With admirable cogency, this book takes on most of these paradoxes and transforms them into highly readable food for thought. Most passages, as is true of several other recent Rorty works, are accessible to an educated layman who reads little or no academic philosophy. Those who are either mystified or irritated by the arcane jargon that dominates much academic philosophy will be enlightened by Rorty's take on the subject, and by his distinction between what he calls narrative and analytic philosophy. Though analytically trained, he favors the narrative thinkers, his major influences being the American pragmatists, William James and John Dewey. He is also clearly inspired by two Continental European thinkers, Nietzsche and Heidegger, but displays mixed feelings about both of them. He claims in this book-and I think justifiably-to distill solid and inspired pragmatist thinking from the work of both men, while discarding the chaff of Nietzsche's pro-aristocratic, anti-democratic perspective and Heidegger's fascist inclinations and pronouncements. Meanwhile, readers of this book who also happen to be admirers of Jurgen Habermas will find that he and Rorty have many points in common.

This book takes form as a series of interviews conducted by various interlocutors, and headed with a helpful overview of Rorty's thinking by editor Eduardo Mendieta. Occasionally, one or another of the interviewers asks a show-off question with inflated rhetoric, but Rorty has a good-natured way of deflating the jargon and bringing both question and questioner gently down to earth. Where passages occasionally lapse into predictability, the fault lies not with Rorty, but with unimaginative or clich? questions posed by an interviewer. For instance, when asked the old chestnut about whether or not the U.S. thrust into Afghanistan was an appropriate response to 9/11, his reply is no different from the opinions of the rest of us who consider ourselves reasonably informed onlookers. He remarks that even allowing for Washington's habit of lying to the American people, it simply made good sense to go to Afghanistan and root out the terrorist bases and training camps. But more often than not, the book's questions are more provocative, and Rorty is more than equal to the task of answering them.