Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers

This volume complements two highly successful previously published volumes of Richard Rorty’s philosophical papers: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, and Essays on Heidegger and Others. The essays in the volume engage with the work of many of today’s most innovative thinkers including Robert Brandom, Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, John McDowell, Hilary Putnam, John Searle, and Charles Taylor. The collection also touches on problems in contemporary feminism raised by Annette Baier, Marilyn Frye, and Catherine MacKinnon, and considers issues connected with human rights and cultural differences. Anyone with a serious interest in contemporary philosophy and what it can do for us in the modern world will enjoy this invaluable collection.

• Main selling point is Rorty himself. His previous volumes have done tremendously well • An international figure - Rorty’s previous Cambridge books have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Chinese, Russian, Japanese • A major selling point of this new collection is that Rorty offers assessments of the views of some of the leading contemporary thinkers including: Hilary Putnam, John Searle, Charles Taylor, David Dennett, Juergen Habermas, and Jacques Derrida

Introduction; Part I. Truth and Some Philosophers: 1. Is truth a goal of inquiry?: Donald Davidson vs. Crispin Wright; 2. Hilary Putnam and the relativist menace; 3. John Searle on realism and relativism; 4. Charles Taylor on truth; 5. Daniel Dennett on intrinsicality; 6. Robert Brandom on social practices and representations; 7. The very idea of human answerability to the world: John McDowell’s Version of Empiricism; 8. Anti-sceptical weapons: Michael Williams vs. Donald Davidson; Part II. Moral Progress: Towards more Inclusive Communities: 9. Human rights, rationality, and sentimentality; 10. Rationality and cultural difference; 11. Feminism and pragmatism; 12. The end of Leninism, Havel and social hope; Part III. The Role of Philosophy in Human Progress: 13. The historiography of philosophy: four genres; 14. The contingency of philosophical problems: Michael Ayers on Locke; 15. Dewey between Hegel and Darwin; 16. Habermas, Derrida and the functions of philosophy; 17. Derrida and the philosophical tradition.

‘This volume is Rorty at his best, again and again making us see things from a new, unexpected angle, strenuously engaging with those of us who resist his startling and unsettling ‘take’ on things. Convinced or not, you come away feeling that this is what philosophy ought to be doing, steadily extending the range of imaginable thoughts.’

– Charles Taylor

‘Truth and Progress, the third volume of Richard Rorty’s philosophical papers, can be recommended not only to Rorty’s admirers and to those who regard him as a leading enemy of reason but to anyone who wants to get a sense of a significant intellectual phenomenon.’

– Thomas Nagel, Times Literary Supplement