Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers

Richard Rorty’s collected papers, written during the 1980s and now published in two volumes, take up some of the issues which divide Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophers and contemporary French and German philosophers and offer something of a compromise - agreeing with the latter in their criticisms of traditional notions of truth and objectivity, but disagreeing with them over the political implications they draw from dropping traditional philosophical doctrines. The second volume pursues the themes of the first volume in the context of discussions of recent European philosophy focusing on the work of Heidegger and Derrida.

Acknowledgments; Introduction: Pragmatism and post-Nietzschean philosophy; Part I. Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics: Heidegger, contingency, and pragmatism; Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the reification of language; Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens; Part II. Deconstruction and Circumvention: Two meanings of ‘logocentrism’: a reply to Norris Is Derrida a transcendental philosophy?; De Man and the American Cultural Left; Part III. Freud and Moral Reflection Habermas and Lyotard on postmodernity; Unger, Castoriadis, and the romance of a national future; Moral identity and private autonomy: the case of Foucault; Index of names.